Dear Media, Look in the Mirror

There’s a lot of REALLY great points raised in this article here, by a Georgian journalist and media scholar, but unfortunately I disagree with most of the author’s conclusions. She claims that noise (ie everything from clickbait to fake news – all the bullshit online, basically) is the new censorship, because it’s drowning out the signal, ie all that is truthful.

Let me clarify. Noise is a major problem, but it’s still not the new censorship. The old censorship is very much still censorship (just ask Chinese people, or North Koreans, or indeed any citizen of a nation propping up the Global Press Freedom Index, or indeed a few near the top too.)

And new forms of censorship are the new censorship – ‘cancelling’ people for holding different opinions, ‘deplatforming’, boycotting, and so on.

This article blames Big Tech for the logarithmic rise in noise online. But to my mind, journalism has only itself to blame for the endless acceleration of the noise-to-signal ratio. In the democratised field of modern tech-enabled communication, journalism could and should have thrived as the pure signal offering. Instead, it allowed itself to become (even more) partisan, skewed, and untrustworthy than it already was.

The general public are not as stupid as journalists (who aren’t as smart as they think) think they are. They have learned how to ‘read between the lines’ of stories which often make little coherent sense, and glean what the missing data points are.

This has eroded trust in their former gatekeeping role.We’re now in a ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario. The public remember every instance when the media got it wrong, or deliberately misrepresented factuality, or presented partisan viewpoint as objective reportage. So when the media, as it does, presents legitimate and reliable work for public consumption, many people simply no longer trust it.

And so they turn to the charlatans’ parade of liars, cynics, clickbait peddlars, conspiracy theorists and ideologues online instead, thereby amplifying those noises and drowning out what little truth there is.

It’s a shitshow, no bones about it. But it’s disingenuous to put the entire blame at the door of Big Tech, much as I loathe them. Journalism needs to take a long look in the mirror to find the cause of its own woes. And I don’t mean the British redtop.

Confessing to the Blab Droid

I like John Campbell’s work. It’s always interesting.

The abstract for his last book starts like this: “A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. “Can you help me?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” “Who in the world do you love most?” People pour their hearts out in response. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship?”

Campbell thinks not. He has a philosophical reason, and it’s very plausible.

Blabdroid, Belgeselci robot | Roboloko
Bless me, blab droid, for I have sinned…

But I got stuck at this intro. WHY do people pour their hearts out to the blab droid? Do we, as the Catholic church discerned, have an inate desire to confess? Or are we all such egotists that we can’t help talking about ourselves? And like social media, the blab droid raises an ethical question. What happens to the answers it receives? What happens to the DATA? If you tell the blab droid/confessor your secrets, where do your secrets go? Who gets to access them, and what will they do with them?

Forget the droid, and its fascinating ability to expose the universality of both human egotism and loneliness. Social media is the real blab droid, and it doesn’t even need to ask us questions in little girl voices to make us confess. But the same issues apply. Where does the data go? What happens between me posting this on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg banking his next billion? Shouldn’t we know?

Mythopolitics in South Asia

The University of Oslo has a number of fascinating research projects and this latest one is of particular interest to anyone intrigued by religious futurism.

The Mythopolitics project is looking to recruit a doctoral researcher to examine if and how, 2014 onwards, there have been significant effects on popular public opinion and the political culture of India due to shifts in the construct of Hindu identity and Hindu nationalism. The popular media platforms could range from traditional to social media, for example: Bombay cinema, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook.

Applications before January 15th 2021 are invited from candidates with a Master’s degree in visual studies/art history, film studies, culture studies, visual/cultural anthropology or allied disciplines.

More info here, if that’s you.