Conversational Vigilance
Posted on:: August 19th, 2004
The free speech crowd ought to extend its concern for preserving the right of individuals to speak their minds. We ought to be just as zealous protecting our right to speak together.
We ought to promote the ability of people to talk with others, across all our divides.
We ought to fight the degradation of conversation by commercial forces.
Someone wake up Mario Savio, print up some buttons, and set up tables at UC Berkeley. Free the Conversations! Free the Conversations!
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Reminds me vaguely of an exchange in Doonesbury:
“We’re talking obscene amounts of money!”
“Obscene? Or merely indecent?”
And what, exactly, is your (well-reasoned) problem with this? It is the nature of the blogosphere to enable emergent transparency. If Blogger A begins to talk about their experience with a product, and Bloggers C, D, and E have experiences that run counter to that of A, the world will hear about it in a big hurry. The fact that Blogger A is a paid shill is sort of irrelevant, as s/he will stir a hornets’ nest of negative news if indeed negative news is closer to the common experience.
I contrast this with paid shills on talk shows on television, since TV is not a medium that creates pervasive proximity through which emergent transparency is enabled.
Transparency should be, IMO, a property of the posting, not of the overall process. So, if I’m saying nice things about X because X is paying me, but I’m pretending otherwise, then I’m degrading the conversation just as surely as if I were talking to you about how great Bowflex is without telling you that I’m a Bowflex salesperson. The fact that others may tell you that Bowflex sucks doesn’t make my passive lying to you any better.
Put differently, the world is better if people don’t take money to pretend to hold certain opinions in public.
The fact that it’s a bigger problem on TV doesn’t seem to me to be relevant.
Wake up, David!
That Berkeley died long ago, well before Mario Savio did — in fact, well before 1984.
The Reagan-run Board of Regents began the extreme makeover in the “troublesome” 60s. But by the time Reagan became president, the face of both the university and the city made ‘Ye Ole Berkeley seem like a Camelot fading into the mist.
Mario Savio, BTW, was a briliant, passionate, genuine-voice orator, capable of leading protestors into battle with smiles on their faces and joy in their hearts, believing that this may be “a good day to die.”
Ahhh… now I understand your problem. When you say, “transparency should be, IMO, a property of the posting, not of the overall process,” you are ignoring the meaning of “the medium is the message.” The posting as content, (yeah, yeah, I know – the user is the content) and particularly the transparency of that content, is largely irrelevant if transparency is an emergent property (i.e. message, in McLuhan’s language) of the medium.
Or, put in other terms, the change of ground (blogosphere vs. television) provides completely different meanings, even for the same figure of paid shill.
Mark, I mean something really simple: People shouldn’t say things they don’t mean because they’re paid to. The world would be better if bloggers weren’t secretly paid to mouth words.
Even if the system is perfectly transparent and all shills are exposed, and all shilled falsehoods evoke multiple postings that tell the truth, shilling still damages the ecosystem, so to speak.
I don’t understand your last paragraph. Yes, I agree that shilling is different on blogs than on TV because blogs are different than TV. But what do you mean by “the same figure of paid shill”? TV shillers are different than blog shillers. They’re not the same people and they’re doing different things in a different “medium.” So, what do you mean by “same”? I’m confused.
in the complexity of emerging rationing of health care services, issues of conflict between individuals, institutions, and the institutions that oversee all, we are witnessing a fragmentation of information and a gradual distribution of responsibitity of actions to the non authentic place of big brother. Persons make descisions to create language and logic. In this context, we as citizens, communicate and metacommunicate, but often do not realize the motivations for our actions. As we dehumanize the human experinence of suffering at the end of life, we begin to see the applied application of Milgram’s experiments.
The media has dictated the pace at which we achieve our ignorence pertaining to our rights and to our numbing of authentic emotions. Its as if the only right that remains is the right to remain ignorant.
This is the emotion that i feel after a recent death of a patient. The idea of glogging was introduced to the patients daughter who wrote everything down at the bedside, creating a sample size of one. The data of actions and behaviors are based on the individuals perspective. What patterns observed should be shared with others within the community to test ideas and hypothesis towards finding systemic problems within the institution that need to be corrected.
What if a pattern of medicare rationing that is unsymetric amongst social, or demographic groups is discovered? What does it mean? is there a type of segragation? How do we test our society and institutions to make sure we are protecting the core of our constitutions without delegating rights to a collective ignorance?
The reality is that we are instituting policies that discourage or even make it illegal to meet and discuss collectively with laws such as HIPAA. It seems that institutional sytems of surveillance place the individual at disadvantage: doctors are surveillanced and hospital actions are made public, so if the hospital finds a action of behavior that one makes unusual or “bizarre” it will report this despite and will not self report the institutional practice that emphasises rudness and unprofessionalism. Doctors are given authority by patients to advocate on their behalf; but when institutions institute policies that undermine or negate such authority, using the threat of medicare auditing, does this constitute appropriate use of such power if it is used punitively? The use of such authority can only be demonstrated as being punitive when persons meet and compare notes. A Glogg would have sampling from the enviroment of real events and actions by everyone. Its kind of using the steve mann paradigm: one goes to retail store, questions the surveillance infrastructure, and then documents the authority infrastructure and how it responds. It is easy to see how the Migram experiments work in this practice.
When anyone questions HIPAA, the systems reacts: when individual question profiling, the system reacts, when one questions an unfair action towards a patient, there is a reaction. When one states that a segment of a community should not be segregated to healthcare services, the system will of course react. We are undermining prior laws and the constitution by preventing persons from collectively via the natural rules of peer to peer information sharing. Imagine if the British Crown disallowed persons from knowing the price of tea, or the amount of taxation that persons would have to pay. We are increasingly giving up our right to know the consequences of each action of the sequence of events that we experience. If one rounds within a hospital, one will see TV’s on everywhere with nonsense on. We are allowing for the commodification for our opinion, which is a tax upon our consciousness.
So when one patients daughter gives up watching TV and actively engages in the desision making process, it upsets the automation of the institution, bringing the fruition of the conflict between the artificial intelligence of algorithms unseen, versus the active participation of humanistic intelligence, in this case a simple notebook and pen.
What is documented is the phenomena of ambush: a systemic and concerted effort to undermine the patients right to accept or refuse any treatment: the marginlization brings in also a dehumanized cruelty, neglectful of the individuals humanity.
Compassion ceases in the act of institutional compliance. Natural Law becomes neglected
stef
PS: hi Mark
also i need to add: the spammers make it difficult for serious communal discussions.
its as if spam creates mistrust and encourages isolation.
with isolation, tranparency becomes less.
By “same figure” I’m referring to “figure” in its media sense – in this case, the character of paid shill (regardless of who the person acutally is.) The “ground” or context is, in this case, the environment in which the shill does his/her shilling – blog or TV. As meaning (and effects) are governed by the relationship – or better, interaction – between figure and ground, the figure of “paid shill” creates different effects depending on the context in which the shilling happens. On TV it is far less transparent than on the blogosphere, as we both know.
I agree that people should be trustworthy, and that includes not saying things that they wouldn’t say without having been paid to say them. That being said, I also think that motherhood statements are only useful in maternity wards (and home births.) The unfortunate fact is that we live in a world in which personal motivations are too often hidden – primarily because they translate into economic gain – and therefore we have learned to mistrust. As we consider the extreme acceleration due to instantaneous communications that engender conditions of pervasive proximity, we find that these issues now go into reversal. Trust becomes currency of value, and transparency becomes relatively inexpensive to accomplish. Those who are attempting to exercise the advantages of the television age are left stymied by the new effects.
mark, you confused me just now.
can you reexplain that last post.
thanks
stef
“As we consider the extreme acceleration due to instantaneous communications that engender conditions of pervasive proximity, we find that these issues now go into reversal.”
this is confusing; i guess the theme of pervasive proximity and how things go into reversal
thanks for clarification
stef
is transparency less expensive?
i think sometimes it has its own cost. like if the manville persons came out and said, yes, asbestos is bad for you, we should be honest and fix the problem.
that does not happen because the cost of fixing the problem is so expensive, that society allows for a corporation to let things just get litigated, rather than people be human about things.
this gets into the covernment issues.
there has to be some forgiveness that persons need to participate for the sake of social contract, least things just collapse in masse.
i think if transparency brought the light on the problem 20 years earlier, as it did for cigarrette smoking, then less people would of suffered. but we do not think in those terms.
if we do not, we one day will be thinking, well, what if we worried about this or that. like the romans or the late byzantines, we are falling into the traps of dealing with the social pressures of a collapsing system 20-50 years from now.
but we never think like that, even if we try; we may discover that depite rationality, events have a logic onto themselves, like catastrophies and social disasters.
so then we look at the idea of pervasive proximity and the new idea of “real time zero” Is transparancy on this level, cognitively possible? even with the communication era?
stef
Hasn’t the Supreme Court decided that money is speech?
Would you consider this? Passing the Test? For over ten years, I have been working on a method of semantic interpretation that applies in any situation. Using this method, I believe that a software program can pass the Turing Test. The book, “How to Design a Universal Artificial Intelligence,” is currently online, in its entirety, and I am requesting your review of this work. This is it; this is real; this is a working counterpart program. http://universalartificialintelligence.com
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It is important to safely usher in the robot age. Robots are walking cam corders. There numbers will make the tracking of a person (by those with bad intentions) too easy. Everyone should consider my proposal, and consider its implications.
Wil