Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
More grist for our mill:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news?utm_
term=.wfQnD5gGr#.gfN60gOql

{“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has
happened, regardless of whether or not it did?" technologist Aviv
Ovadya warns.}

{“I think about it from the sense of the enlightenment — which was
all about the search for truth,” the employee told BuzzFeed News. “I
think what you’re seeing now is an attack on the enlightenment — and
enlightenment documents like the Constitution — by adversaries
trying to create a post-truth society. And that’s a direct threat to
the foundations of our current civilization."}  (A federal employee
speaking in the same article)

And, back on point:

Still, Ovadya and others warn that the next few years could be
rocky. Despite some pledges for reform, he feels the platforms are
still governed by the wrong, sensationalist incentives, where
clickbait and lower-quality content is rewarded with more attention.
"That's a hard nut to crack in general, and when you combine it with
a system like Facebook, which is a content accelerator, it becomes
very dangerous."
  

    
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43170859

"Is the battle against online propaganda already being lost as AI
puts powerful new weapons in the hands of the fake news merchants?"

..."Dmitri Alperovitch is the Russian-born US cyber-security
entrepreneur who founded Crowdstrike, the company which first
identified Russian involvement in the hacking of America's
Democratic Party. But he tells us that North Korea has spent 15
years building cyber-warfare capabilities, including "breaking into
financial institutions and stealing hundreds of millions of
dollars," and hacking Sony Pictures after it made a jokey film about
the regime."

..."Cyber-warfare techniques and artificial intelligence have
advanced a long way in recent years. Linking the two fields could
bring new threats to our security that we cannot imagine today."

Not exactly comfortable words.
  

    
<75> Yes, speed is an important constraint.

At your suggestion, I've been reading Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants"
and it's interesting to think about the trade-off between speed and
availability. Tim characterizes the radio show "Amos 'N Andy" as the
first to really generate a large, simultaneous listening audience. The
speed (for a live broadcast) was the speed of light. But it was only
available *live*.

But, I would say that, as recording technology matured, delayed
broadcasts became possible, which effectively reduced speed in favor of
increased availability.
  

    
That's an interesting point Craig...

Now, with all the Clouds and Terrabytes of storage capacities, I
think the strategy for a lot of us is to store everything for later
viewing...
When I am sifting data for needles and diamonds my immediate thought
is save, toss or save for later, or for the really special
stuff...read now and curate and pass it on.

Whole different approach to learning results....you kind of get into
a pattern recognition and then just go with the flow....

I like long reads, and still have a long attention span, so I will
often just stop and smell all the roses....but, I do catch myself
just zipping along a lot, rarely doing anything but sorting.

My real and most favorite treat is to still read a book, actually
holding it and slowly turning the pages, while the story populates
all these marvelous images and worlds inside my mind....

And, then, I finish it and binge something on Netflix or
Amazon....sign of the times.
  

    
We always had some disreputable journalism, tabloids and rags and
scandal sheets.    And then we had outfits like the New York Times
and the Washington Post  who took pride in their journalistic
integrity and that were generally considered to be highly reliable.
They occasionally made mistakes, but admitted them fully and openly.

What is new is that in the minds of many, and with the help of
opportunistic politicians, there is now doubt about the
trustworthiness of the people we used to trust. *I* still trust the
New York Times and the Washington Post, but many on the right
consider them to be highly biased and unreliable. 

Where's our source of truth? How do we get back that trust?
  

    <hidden>
  

    <scribbled by tcn Mon 26 Feb 18 02:09>
  

    
Post #81 is "hidden"...long rant and ramble and so as not to get in
Roger's flow in responding to all these great comments and
questions. Click on it if you wish.

#82 is 'scribbled' because it reposted and showed #81...bad robot!
  

    
And, then, there are sites like Politifact, with their Truth-O-Meter

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/

We tolerate a President who knowingly lies every day. Is it any
wonder that Facebook gets gamed by liars and evil players? 

Part of me just wants to put on Leonard Cohan's Everybody Knows and
move out of the country...and then I hear Sugar Magnolia and see
Tony Bennett receive another award, at 90 years old, and say, having
traveled all over the world, that America is still the best country
there is on the planet in complete sincerity and with that marvelous
smile, and I unpack.

These erosions of truth, trust and integrity have to be withstood -
personally and institutionally. 

Roger, still any hope for Facebook, or should we all just pack it up?
  

    
Politifact's fact checking is sometimes over-literal.
  

    
(if you hide a post in an inkwell topic, non-WELL people can't read
it)
  

    
Thanks Betsy, did not know that....still going to keep it hidden
tho.
  

    
Power of the Stacks:

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/26/560136311/how-5-tech-giants-have-become-more-li
ke-governments-than-companies

"So Facebook is now - so Facebook's news feed is sort of one of the
most popular places for getting news in the world. It's you know -
combined, more people read it than, you know, all the major
newspapers in the country, the TV networks. It's extremely
influential.

And right now there's very little fact-checking that Facebook does,
which is, you know, what led to this proliferation of fake news and
these kind of echo chambers that people have. The solution to that
could be that Facebook decides it's going to partner with
fact-checking companies, and perhaps it might do fact-checking
itself. And Facebook would sort of be in some way the arbiter for
what's right and wrong on Facebook. That may help with the fake news
problem. I think it's unclear at this point.

But the kind of upshot of that is, on the other hand, you get
Facebook kind of acting as something like the ministry of
information for kind of every country in which it operates, where,
you know, it might be able to decide, like, this is true, and this
is not true. How it'll make those decisions and who it'll employ to
make those decisions I think is a big question. And, like, suddenly
it's going to have this power, and it's going to come about perhaps
as a solution to another problem that it itself caused."
  

    
I work in the "News" industry - on the tech side, but passionate
about content. Been speaking with colleagues about the need for a
central clearing house for "TRUTH" why should we believe the New
York Times, or the Economist, or the AP or Al Jazeera, much less
TASS or the Internet Research agency. Imagine a team of the worlds
best journalists and researchers ensconced in a high tech mountain
hide-a-way communicating on a frequency shifting satellite channel
(thank you Hedy Lamar) certifying News Reports!
I start by not believing any secondary source on Facebook. If my
sister says she just finished doing something, I'll believe that
(but was that really my sister ... hmmm ... 

Also I just have to point out out typically inarticulate Farhad
Manjoo comes off in that piece with Ms. Gross.
Count all the "Right. So..." (alt. "Yeah. So..." and "kind of"'s - I
could neither listen nor read through it.
And I enjoy is NYTimes column ...
  

    
I had the same reaction David...thought he was stoned or an idiot...

Medium.com Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most
insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the
smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you
can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.

Medium is just one of several new platforms doing just what you
suggest...they are asking columnists, bloggers, etc to move there
and publish their material onsite.
  

    
The war of the "bad bot" which account for 20% of all Internet
traffic. Yikes!

http://fortune.com/2018/02/26/russian-bots-twitter-facebook-trump-memo/?xid=gn
_editorspicks&google_editors_picks=true
  

    
I have recently been checking into Medium a bit more.
  

    
Isn't Medium is a vanity press? Do they exert editorial control
beyond choosing what to feature in their emails?
  

    
I have not looked very far in except to notice a lot of linked
articles.
  

    
Aeon is a little more thought provoking. A sample:
<https://aeon.co/essays/are-you-sleepwalking-now-what-we-know-about-mind-wander
ing?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2db87b97dd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_
22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-2db87b97dd-69418789>
  

    
And I'm still thinking about Roger's comment in <34> about FB's
personalization leading to "2.1 billion Truman Shows" reinforcing
personal biases. "When you combine personalization with smartphones,
you have a package that leads to a more dangerous addiction than TV
created."

Add to this Chuck's observation from <50> that we necessarily
operate within a kind of "tribal epistemology" and I start to wonder
if we can use our understanding of addiction to produce more
beneficial online behaviors.

Can a 'search for foundational truths' itself become more addictive
than the quick hits from 'designer news?'

<http://www.truman-show.com/images/film-still-escaping.jpg>
  

    
Better to take a class on Aristotle and Nichomachaen Ethics and
Eudaimonia.

"Foundational Ethics" - I assume you mean Western Civilization's
ethics Craig...

Yup, re Truman Show....it's a lot like Groundhog Day meets a Glitch
in the Matrix

I am coming to believe that Bots, Bad Actors and Fake News are just
simply going to be part of the Mix from now on....requiring new
literacies and vigilance on our parts. 

Sources, Trust, Networks, Social Capital, are all going to be
primary going forward, no matter whether it is FB, Twitter,
LinkedIn...it's just the way it is.
  

    
I actually meant 'truths.' While 'ethics' are pretty darn important,
they tend to rely on foundational truths, which ideally are not so
subject to cultural bias.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that 'truth' (knowledge,
belief, understanding) is the result of a process. We aren't just
looking for some alternative sources to trust. We need an ever
improving process of evaluation or 'critical thinking' (as Howard
mentioned in <20>).
  

    
Absolutely; emotional intelligence, empathic and empathetic
listening - Wise Mind
  

    
Question for Ted and for Roger: doesn't it give you pause to realize
that you are echoing every complaint that's ever been made about any
new mass medium (or mass-media product)? What you don't seem to be
doing, for all the talk of "critical thinking," is thinking about
your hypothesis skeptically and looking for falsification rather
than for verification. (I'll note, by the way, that your effort too
frame Facebook and other platforms as "walled gardens" is a
subversion of how the term was used in the 1990s, when there was, at
least initially, no way to get content outside of Compuserve or
Prodigy or AOL.) For all the harms that are caused by combining
Facebook with smartphones, has anyone here considered turning
notifications off for the social-media apps? Because, you know, you
can do that. (I do it myself.)

I've written a couple of pieces that take a more historical view of
the anxiety about social media (and search engines). They're here
<https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171128/23565738694/everything-thats-wrong-
with-social-media-big-internet-companies-part-1.shtml> and here <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180128/11001839096/everything-thats-wrong-
with-social-media-big-internet-companies-part-2.shtml>.