[Fis] On disinformation

Sat Dec 5 15:41:24 CET 2020

Dear all,

We tend to think of 'surveillance capitalism' and other related trends 
as being a disruption of normality. But seen from a longer perspective, 
perhaps we are living in an unusual period (or the possibly the end of 
it) in which there has been relatively widespread social agreement about 
the nature of the world that we are living in. "Ask the priest" used to 
be the answer to questions of eschatology or social propriety (and often 
still is) but that doesn't help much in establishing who is giving the 
orders or why, and what is going on in the town over the hill. We have 
relied on newspapers for that, and, in the UK, the BBC. As a result, 
flat earthers haven't much traction recently compared with the conflict 
between Galileo and the church, and even McCarthyism was primarily about 
economic power and control, not as unhinged as the witchcraft hysteria 
that Miller (rightly) compared it to. If it is true that we have been 
living in an oasis of relative consensus, where did that consensus come 
from?

I would argue that it emerged from the inherent limitations in access to 
printing technology, and the editorial, commercial, political and social 
processes that developed to cope with that limited access. It is these 
processes that generated the authority of some ideas over others, the 
generalised trust in some media rather than others, and the ability to 
identify consistent biases in those that were trusted.

I suggest that we should recognise that disinformation, fake news, and 
plain old gossip, are the default state for human social interactions. 
It is evolved and designed social structures and institutions that 
overcome this. Our challenge is then to disentangle the way that that 
informational authority was generated in the past, and the (perhaps 
disfunctional) way that it is generated at present. My suspicion is that 
we won't get far in improving the situation unless we question the 
central role of the recommender algorithms that have taken over much of 
the work of human editors in determining what is seen heard and read, 
and by whom. To have any chance of achieving political traction in the 
face of commercial interests and personal preferences, proposals for 
change in that area will have to tell and extremely clear story about 
how we got to where we are, where we should try to go next, and how we 
could get there.

Best

Dai

On 04/12/2020 14:06, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
> Dear Terry and FIS colleagues,
>
> Thanks for the reflections--I will try to continue with rather 
> disconnected ideas.
>
> The term 'surveillance capitalism' introduced by Shoshana Zuboff 
> (indeed complemented with a parallel 'surveillance authoritarianism') 
> is  addressed to cover the new negative aspects of current 
> technological developments. However, my opinion is that these 
> phenomena are inherent in all human societies in all epochs, for there 
> is always a tension, say, between the individual "fitness" and the 
> whole social "commons", which can be set in quite many different 
> dynamic equilibrium points, basically maintained via circulating or 
> communicating info flows. It is easy to see that information, 
> disinformation, surveillance, persuasion, and coercion travel together 
> in the socialization-communication pack. Historically, every new means 
> of communication (then we land on McLuhan) alters those social 
> equilibria and somehow demands a social or cultural reaction to 
> re-establish an acceptable collective situation. The problem now, you 
> mentioned in the previous post, is the enormous concentration of 
> power, of brute info flows, around these new media--without 
> appropriate social curation at the time being. I doubt that these 
> technologies can bring the solution by themselves . Institutional, 
> social intervention would be needed...  Scholarly analysis might be 
> important, providing cues on the the influence on individual and 
> collective moods/personalities, on the possible counteracting 
> institutional alternatives and on the needed new cultural norms to 
> abide along these new forms of communication (sort of 'traffic 
> regulations'), even a personal hygiene of communication...
>
> The problems are far more serious, complex, and faster than in 
> McLuhan's time. We have to reinvent his views... But how can we 
> organize a collective, cumulative discussion? I was thinking that a 
> feasible first step, apart of what we can do directly in the list, 
> could be calling for a Special Issue in some interesting, 
> multidisciplinary Journal. Well, at the time being, Terry, Joseph, and 
> myself are promoting a sort of ad hoc group to move things--anyone 
> else would join??
>
> Best regards
> --Pedro
>
> El 01/12/2020 a las 22:54, Terrence W. DEACON escribió:
>> Dear Pedro,
>>
>> Great suggestions. I like the idea of an ongoing separate thread 
>> addressing disinformation.
>> Of course I only addressed Western disinformation and didn't even 
>> touch on highly massaged information that is often disseminated with 
>> centralized governmental control.
>> This disinforms by selective censorship and redundancy and is 
>> increasingly taking advantage of the myriad new forms of surveillance 
>> that can be used to shape the information made available to different 
>> targeted audiences.
>> And Yes McLuhan is definitely relevant.
>> I wonder how he would think about the effects of these new media.
>> How do they reshape the nature of content?
>> How they can be understood using his notions of hot and cool?
>> What is now in the rear view mirror within the new media 
>> that once was in the foreground?
>> On these matters Bob Logan might want to weigh in.
>>
>> -- 
>> Professor Terrence W. Deacon
>> University of California, Berkeley
>>
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>
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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