digital babel & the meaning of the election
I’ve been having a blogussion with sen no sen about the effects of distributed media and the meaning of the US election results; here is a slightly adapted version of the discussion:
I am a recently-recovered US political news junkie (blogging of course is the new poision). Up until the US election, I thought that the problem in the US was an ignorant population manipulated by a right wing media, but after the Bush win I changed my tune a bit, and i think this cartoon (scroll down to the last one), sadly may refelct the reality.
It’s true there is powerful centralized media, but there are also lots of individual people who agree with what they are hearing. the left likes to think of this group as a bunch of duped fools, but I think that’s a major mistake, and a strange one to articulate: I think people who voted for Bush actually agree with him. Sounds funny to say that, doesn’t it, but I think the left was convinced that when enough “facts” got out about what was “really” happening, peope would wise up and turf Bush. Well, the opposite happened, and the left is reeling, trying to figure it out. What happened is that not all Americans see the same facts in the same way, eg: for the left the “fact” is there were no wmd in iraq and saddam was not a threat; for the right the “fact” is that even tho there were no wmd, saddam was a sworn enemy of the US, who, if he had had wmd & enough firepower would have used them against the US. both are probably true, yet as motivations for action they are incompatible.
i spent much time reading stories in the alt-press about this Administration scandal and that scandal, and this or that Bush outrage. but you end up weaving a reenforcing informational cocoon around yourself, and I sometimes check into foxnews.com to see what the right is thinking. it looks very different from what I normally read, but often its just as compelling. to accuse the right-wing media of spin is silly. media is spin, left or right, and they way you spin things depends on how you see them.
the long-touted canard about liberal bias in the press is probably true in some sense (though i always laugh when i see the ny times referred to as a left-wing newspaper), but it’s all a matter of perspective. similarly university campuses probably have a liberal bias compared with the general population. on campus, i’m sure there is a liberal bias in uni philosophy departments, and a conservative bias in MBA departments. Philosophy students and MBA students spend all day looking at totally different sets of data, so of course their bias will be different; and they will likely interpret even the same data differently. you evaluate your data based on set objectives, if your objectives are different (maximize wealth or maximize wisdom), then your interpretation of the data will necessarily be different.
Now, the blogosphere and the decentralization of media and info sources will tend to increase the conection among disparate like-minded people, in small networked communities; but it will also reduce the communication (i think) among communities that think differently. the left will rely on their info sources; the right theirs, and so on… its hard enough to keep up with info sources i like, without having to read info sources i don’t like to keep my understanding of the rest of the world! so we will all be looking at different sets of data, and shaping our interpretation of the world accordingly, and differently. compare this to a time when everyone in the US got their news from CBS, NBC, or ABC, all of whom could be counted on to deliver a similar message; or Canada for instance where the country was built in large part through a national discourse created by the CBC and a somewhat standardized education system.
the dispersion of media sources is not a bad thing (not at all!), compared with what we have now. our CBC and education system didn’t do much good for the displaced and decimated first nations of canada, for instance! and nbc, cbs, abc have inspired Americans to support many wars (of questionable morality in my view, but not in the view of many).
but it is a problem that we should at least be conscious of, that the risks of losing lingua franca in society as a whole is real, and while that will have many democratizing effects, it may also, I suspect, have some negative consequences-the powerful, as is their wont, will surely find ways of exploiting the resulting digital babel to their ends. that’s why they’re powerful, they’re good at exploiting things to their advantage!
again this isn’t an argument against distributed media, far far from it, but rather an outline of a challenge to progressives to find ways ensure that what comes out of the process is better that what went in.
Yeah, I’ve had similar thoughts myself. While on the whole, decentralization is a good thing, the tendency will definitely be to get news from sources that reinforce your current thinking instead of from sources that challenge it. Of course, you can try and adjust for this (and I like to think that I do), but the vast majority of people will not, and I don’t see an easy way to prevent this.
Comment by fling93 — January 13, 2005 @ 10:05 pm
hey fling, there’s a neat project in there for someone: set up a site to aggregate say top 10 stories of the day and give links and digests of 3 sources from one side and 3 sources from the other. or something…”mediacooler” or “newswap” or “ambidextrous translation” or … well let’s see if anyone takes up the challenge anytime soon!
Comment by hugh — January 14, 2005 @ 12:11 am
Not sure if that’d address it either, as readers would still have to click on stories they know they’ll disagree with, and most will not. Maybe bloggers from both sides will need to collaborate more on writing blog posts.
It’s a puzzle. Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, is working on a grassroots journalism project, and his comments section is pretty lively. I just commented on the balance issue on one of his open threads. Maybe you should join in the discussion as well!
Comment by fling93 — January 14, 2005 @ 2:33 am
well, i don’t think there is a “solution” as such…the problem with open threads is either:
a) it’s already open-minded people discussing (who are inclined to check out the other side anyway), or
b) interaction quickly descends into name-calling
my simple proposal is just to try to have a place that’s like a 2 column version of cursor.org, a left column and a right column, with stories from each side matching. just a simple strat to at least put the information in the same place. (By the way I know rt-left thing is a simplification). buyt what else can we do to ensure cross-communication, especially among bitter enemies? say between palestinians and israelis? or between nader supporters and evangelicals? between french and english in montreal! or rather between montrealers and (yuk!) Torontonians…(joke).
I’ve been looking at Gilmour’s stuff, commented too about this (i think i even posted to my sidebar!).
cheers.
Comment by hugh — January 14, 2005 @ 8:34 am
thinking out loud a bit more, this is also a realm for writers to work at: from the left perspective (where i sit), much more effort should be put into reading and understanding the right. more article that explore the thinking that underlies the right - not just the “high-level” project for a new american century stuff (that’s well enough understood by the left), but at ground-level. just typing out loud.
Comment by hugh — January 14, 2005 @ 10:42 am
January 14, 2005
understanding the right
In the interest of putting money where my keyboard is, here is my first attempt at pu […]
Pingback by dose :: understanding the right :: January :: 2005 — January 14, 2005 @ 2:11 pm
Hi Hugh, have you checked this interesting Slashdot thread yet?
Comment by sennnosen — January 14, 2005 @ 6:03 pm
I’ve been looking at Gilmour’s stuff, commented too about this (i think i even posted to my sidebar!).
Oh, ha! I wrote a comment right after yours (albeit in response to somebody else), but I didn’t realize you were mackinaw. How funny!
Yeah, I wasn’t suggesting the open thread as a solution, but as another place to discuss solutions, which I guess you already knew, heh.
Comment by fling93 — January 14, 2005 @ 6:20 pm
‘ just found this one at “Der Spiegel International” by NYT’s William Safire:
The Depressed Press
(it seems the two publications are cooperating in a new and interesting manner)
Comment by sennnosen — January 19, 2005 @ 3:30 am
teraction with those providing information outside thier sphere. For more on this idea, see here.
Filed under: writing, philosophy
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Pingback by dose :: suffering & justin hall :: January :: 2005 — January 20, 2005 @ 1:36 am
andre, thanks for the link to safire. I’ve been pondering this battle between mainstream and bloggers, and hope to write something about it soon. I don’t agree with much of what safire says … and on the other had this drive on the part of bloggers to become mainstream worries me.
Comment by hugh — January 20, 2005 @ 9:51 am
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Comment by testanchor490 — October 15, 2005 @ 8:10 pm