Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
#149 "There was a time when I was intensely optimistic about the
public
square online. It is hard to be optimistic today.
"
Yes, we have come a long way from John Perry Barlow's Manifesto and
cyberutopian hopes and dreams...The Commons has become a brawl, both
bot and bully.

Yet, I remain cautiously optimistic....in a New York kind of way :)
  

    
This is the 'formal' ending of our conversation with Roger McNamee.
However, as long is activity the conversation continues :)

Roger, thank you so much for your time, your generous spirit and
interaction. This was a great conversation. Your inputs and
responsiveness to questions and issues was fantastic. You made us
think and you made us talk. All anyone can ask for any more. LOL. 

To all the 'readers' and WELLpern who jumped in, thank you so much.
You really helped drive the content. I hope this was good for ya'll
too.

We titled this Brain Hacking for Dummies....and I think we hit that
one fair and square. Now I am left with two questions. Am I the
Dummie or the one who's brain is being hacked/or/both? 

A little of both, and I'm good with that :)

This is one for the books. I am sure a lot of chatter will occur as
well.  ;)
  

    
Takeaway #2....if you (we) are not thinking for (y)(ourself(ves),
then you are either Weird or Wired. (Anagrammers, feel free to play
with those letters, I'll give you 'drew id' for free.)

Let the hacking begin 
  

    
Roger writes:

"I have no interest in telling people how to live or what products
to
use."

I didn't say you did. I think "2.1 billion Truman Shows" illustrates
a kind of contempt for the people you say you want to protect. 

"My focus is on two things: protecting the innocent (e.g.,
children) from technology that harms their emotion development and
protecting democracy from interference.  I do not believe that tech
companies should have the right to undermine public health and
democracy in the pursuit of profits."

Protecting "the innocent (e.g. children)" is *the standard line of
moral panic engineers*. See, e.g., SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, by
Fredric Wertham. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Wertham>

I can't believe you guys just echo the same old tropes.
  

    
"2.1 billion Truman shows" is about the medium, not about the people.
  

    
Except it's not "about the medium." It's about what Roger thinks the
medium represents to 2.1 billion users. Roger is under the
impression that people only want to read what comforts them in a
good Truman Show life. That's not impossible, but he hasn't shown it
to be so. Plenty of people use FB and other social media to engage
with differing opinions. As I've shown in the work I've done, the
research on this issue is equivocal *at best* when it comes to
supporting Roger's bald assertion that this is 2.1 billion Truman
Shows. That's at best--considering everything on the assumption that
Roger's on to something. But if you are more in tune with the
research, you find that the "filter bubble" hypothesis is widely
asserted yet rarely supported by empirical research. Keep in mind
that this is, essentially, a rehash of a decades-old argument about
the internet itself. (Just as "walled gardens" is a watered-down
version of what the term used to mean.) There seems to be no
evidence that Roger or anyone has made any effort to distinguish the
current moral panic from any previous one.
  

    
Here's an example of weird thinking:

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-fix-facebook-make-users-pay-for
-it/2018/02/20/a22d04d6-165f-11e8-b681-2d4d462a1921_story.html?utm_term=.1ce6b
942f766>

Making users pay for Facebook will somehow help users? Because
instead of getting access to the features of Facebook for free
they'll have to pay for them?

Try making this argument about The New York Times. Hey, Times
people, quit carrying ads and just fund yourself through
subscriptions! What do you think happens? An outcome that benefits
both the Times and its users?
  

    
The day FB makes me pay for their service is the day I cancel access.
  

    

You're not just supposed to eat your greens--you should eat them only if you
get them by paying for them.
  

    
Meh. I don't really give FB or any of these sites that much of my
attention or my response. They rarely resonate with my 'realities'.

There is one aspect of where I see how folks can get all panicky, or
want to be digital pundits...and get all 'yenta' about it. Too much
drama for me. Don't like it in real space, don't like it in Virtual.
And I don't think civilization is coming to an end as a result of
either approach.

Air, food and water, that's the matter that matters. The benefits I
derive from Social Media are simply that, they are mine...

Mike, I see your points, they are valid and make sense. And at
another time or venue I might want to play ping pong and bat that
all around with you. But not today and not in this conversation.
Just another rabbit hole I don't wish to go down. Which sums up most
of my feeling about the NET. Too many rabbit holes...where did all
the carrots go? ;) 
  

    
People get what seems to comfort us whether it's what we want other
stuff or not.
  

    
Well one of the problems with Facebook is that *facebook* thinks
people want to see things they already agree with. How would I tell
facebook that I want to see news from reputable sites across the
political spectrum? The only thing I can control is what posts I
click on. There's no "show me intelligent conservative analysis"
button.
  

    
Here's how Roger, who likes his metaphor, put the Truman Show bit
earlier in this discussion: 
"Facebook has 2.1 billion Truman Shows ... each
person lives in a bubble tuned to their emotions ... and FB pushes
emotional buttons as needed.  Once it identifies an issue that
provokes your emotions, it works to get you into groups of
like-minded people.  Such filter bubbles intensify pre-existing
beliefs, making them more rigid and extreme.  In many cases, FB
helps people get to a state where they are resistant to ideas that
conflict with the pre-existing ones, even if the new ideas are
demonstrably true."

I don't know who here reads my Facebook page, but I have a large,
broad feed that has a lot of followers and subscribers. Nobody reads
my feed to be comforted, as far as I can tell. And I don't log on to
Facebook to be comforted. What's happened, it seems to me, is that
the critics of Facebook begin with the assumption that everybody who
approaches a social-media platform begins at some low level on
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and never rises above that level. But
there's no reason to believe that's universally true, or even true
of most people. I found it telling how often tcn used the
(unchallenged) words "sheeple" and "sheep" in reference to Facebook.

Obligatory link: <https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html>
  

    
By the way, the idea that people resist information that challenges
their paradigms is not exactly new. It predates social media. But
Roger thinks people (who apparently don't ever turn off or mute any
smartphone notifications) are passive consumers of whatever the apps
on their smartphones send. (Except, it must be said, for the
enlightened critics who know better.)
  

    
Citing yourself as a counterexample doesn't falsify Roger's point.
Yes, it's possible to break through the bubble Facebook creates for
you. If you're more knowledgeable and more aggressive than most
users are.
  

    

I use Facebook for a great variety of purposes, incliuding political
discussions. I welcome argument, even as I reserve the right to delete
violent or otherwise unproductive content. "I am here to learn," I often
post.
  

    
I hope we all are....I certainly learned a lot :)
  

    

"Citing yourself as a counterexample doesn't falsify Roger's point."

That's why I didn't cite myself as a counterexample for the purpose
of falsification of Roger's point.

I will note, however, that Roger speaks of "2.1 billion Truman Shows." He's
done so twice here. Now, unless I'm mistaken, he means the number 2.1 to
represent the entire population of Facebook users. So it seems reasonable
to conclude that Roger means to be understood as making what logicians call
a "universal generalization." The thing about universal generalizations is
that they are, in fact, subject to refutation by a single counter-example.
(For example, the generalization that "all sheep are white" is refuted by
the observation that "there is one black sheep.") So, if I wanted to, I
certainly could cite my singular experience as a refutation of Roger's
universal generalization. But, again, that's not my intention.

If you assume that I think only of myself, maybe you infer that this is
the only point I might be making. But let's suppose, for the sake of
argument, that I'm assuming instead that there are lots of people who
use Facebook and other platforms as I do--to find challenging and
informative points of view and factual information rather than to find
affirmations of self or confirmations of my existing paradigms. Because I do
not fancy myself unique, it seems possible that there is, at least, a
significant minority of Facebook users who don't create "information
cocoons" (Cass Sunstein's term) or "filter bubbles" (Eli Pariser's term).

If you've followed my reasoning so far, and if you provisionally agree that
my hypothesis about nonconforming users is reasonable, then it's not too
difficult to draw a further inference: that the problem of "information
cocoons" or "filter bubbles" is not inherent in social-media platforms
or in the incentives created by social-media advertising or in the addictive
components of our smart handheld devices. If it were, then it would
presumably have this effect even on most assertive, independently
thinking, strong-minded individuals. Only a few six-sigma-degree
individualists would escape! But the evidence that this is, in fact,
the case, has not been presented here. What's happening instead is
that people who are dismayed by the outcome of the Brexit referendum or
the U.S. election are trying to find a single-bullet theory to explain 
why things didn't work out they way they'd expected. And social media are
new, and they *definitely have been used by mischievous actors who want to
skew political processes*, so it follows that the problem is rooted in 
technology generally or in social media or in smartphones in particular.

Now, nothing I write here should be taken as arguing that social media
aren't causing or magnifying harms. But it may well be the case, in fact,
that some large subset of human beings create "filter bubbles" for
themselves regardless of what media technologies they're using. That's
not a good thing, and it's certainly worth figuring out how to fix that
problem, but focusing on how that problem as a presumed phenomenon specific
to social media perhaps focuses on a symptom of the human condition rather
than a disease grounded in technology.

In this context, then, the question is, what's the fix? And tcn has shown
that some critics think meaningful reform, such as the platforms' adopting
transparency measures regarding political ads. That's an idea worth
exploring. There are other ideas as well. (I've experimented with the
suggestion that turning my iPhone's palette to grayscale may make my 
phone less distracting, for example. That's an idea that, I think, came
from the Time Well Spent guy. But, given that I'd turned off most push
notifications anyway, my experience was more mixed than, perhaps, some 
people's have been.)

But Roger, in his grief regarding Brexit and Trump, wants to kick the
economic legs out from under Facebook's (and, incidentally, Google's and
Bing's and Yahoo's) economic success. Algorithm-driven serving of ads is
bad for you! It creates perverse incentives! And so on. It's true that
some advertising algorithms have created perverse incentives (so that
Trump's provocative ads were seen as more "engaging" and therefore were
sold cheaper than HRC's). I think the criticism *of that algorithmic
approach* is valid. But there are other ways to design algorithmic 
ad service, and it seems to me that the companies that have been subject
to the criticisms are being responsive to them, even in the absence of
regulation.

Is advertising itself bad? Maybe it is! But that's a much larger question
than the question about what to do with Facebook. It seems worth pointing
out that journals we value (for example, I subscribe to the New York
Times, the Washington Post, and Wired, among others) simply cannot exist 
without advertising. So this puts some social-media critics in the
position of arguing that advertising is only good if it's like traditional
print advertising, which isn't targeted at you based on your interests.
In short, advertising may be seen to be good for us only when it's
inefficient and wasteful and mostly uninteresting. That's an argument
that deserves to be made, maybe, but it's not exactly an argument that
anyone can be comfortable making.

Are smartphones themselves bad? Maybe they are. Maybe we're better off
with more boring devices (make grayscale mandatory! block all
notifications!). But that seems fixable in straightforward ways. On the
user end, turn off most notifications. (Maybe turn off location tracking
too, but that's kind of handy for finding misplaced phones.) On the
advertising end, maybe the default should be no notifications unless you
opt-in for them. (I'm okay with that.)

But none of this stuff necessarily addresses the social upheaval that led
to Brexit or to Trump's election or the possible imminent departure of
Italy from the EU. For that, I think you need to address more fundamental
problems of democratic politics, such as teaching critical thinking. We
actually do know how to teach critical thinking--we've got two or three
thousand years of work on that project--but we've lacked the social will
to teach it universally. I'd like to see that change. It seems to me that
this is the only way that cranky individualist minority that's not easily
manipulated by social media, or by traditional media, can become the
majority.

 
  

    
That could cause unrest.
  

    
Thanks for that, Mike. It's very clear.
  

    
<I'd like to see that change. It seems to me that
this is the only way that cranky individualist minority that's not
easily
manipulated by social media, or by traditional media, can become the
majority.>

Pretty sure we are supposed to be the minority report.
  

    
Huge MIT Study on Fake News
(https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/largest-study-ever-fake
-news-mit-twitter/555104/)

In short, social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at
the expense of the truth, and no one—neither experts nor politicians
nor tech companies—knows how to reverse that trend. It is a
dangerous moment for any system of government premised on a common
public reality.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information
outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data
scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led
this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have
something to do with human nature.”
  

    
Well, at the simplest level, the truth often gets in the way of a
compelling story line.
  

    
LOL - almost always
  

    
Hmmmm....I thought it was usually the other way around. Its the
story line that often trumps (no pun) the truth.