Image: Mushroom and Rooster, flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons.

In the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, linked at TechCrunch, Michael Hirschorn argues that the internet in general, and increasingly social media in particular (for example, Sarah Palin’s sly use of Twitter), have warped the pursuit of truth in political debates.

 

[F]actual counterrorism is a tricky enterprise in this era of asymmetric information warfare. The urge to shape the data to suit the message, to outfit one’s argument with a set of misappropriated, cynically edited, or simply fabricated facts that can be fed into a self-sustaining partisan loop, will no doubt prove irresistible to many.–Michael Hirschorn

You could accuse him of naiveté, I suppose. After all, haven’t political deceptions been around since at least the Trojan Horse, not to mention the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of rhetoric, Machiavelli’s statecraft and the ‘noble lies’ and propaganda campaigns of modern wars?

But Hirschorn recognises this himself. What has changed, he suggests, is the ubiquity of the internet, the variety and precision of its opportunities for manipulation and fabrication, its popular presence and perhaps the shortened attention span that it encourages, reducing the likelihood of patient analysis.

Perhaps, also, the appearance of things ‘published’ on the internet can give an impression of authority. When traditional gatekeepers governed publication (which of course had its own distorting downside), the dignity and prestige of publication was not so freely available. This speculation must be qualified since there are many savvy commentators attuned to the legitimacy or otherwise of ‘facts’ paraded on websites (Hirschorn gives the example of the St Petersburg Times Politifact).

But the attachment of many forms of digital media to popularity as an index of worth is a real concern. As Hirschorn notes, right-wing ‘Digg Patriots’ employed so-called ‘bury brigades’ that were able to vote down and bury left-leaning stories and facts it found unpalatable. In other words, the deficiencies of the idea of a marketplace of ideas where truth wins out is no less evident in new media than it is and was in traditional media.

George Orwell’s 1984 imagined (and in fact observed in his own time) people being employed to carefully fabricate ‘facts’ to prop up an authoritarian state. What he did not anticipate was what Hirschorn calls ‘the speed with which properly packaged (dis)information can spread and how hard it is for fact and reason to catch up’.

I assume here what was attributed to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and quoted by Hirschorn, that ‘we may each be entitled to our own set of opinions, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts’. This pits me against the postmodernists and evangelical relativists and sceptics, I suppose.

But I certainly recognise the importance of ideology, of perspective and context, of the need for diverse and vigorous debate and of the tentative and contested nature of facts (see E.H. Carr’s classic What is History?).

I just don’t believe that everything is subjective, that everything is a matter of mere opinion.

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Carlo Nicora, licensed under Creative Commons.

Redu and The Huffington Post have reported that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will donate US$100 million over 5 years to improve the public education system in Newark, New Jersey.

Long considered a basket case, and emblematic of how the American educational system often lets its African-American students down, Newark’s schools can certainly use a helping hand.

Battling poverty and high crime rates, less than half of Newark’s public school students graduate or meet statewide literacy and numeracy standards.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Zuckerberg suggested that he wanted to take Bill Gates’ philanthropic path–just a little earlier. The donation to Newark will create charter schools, like those that have played such a part in Harlem’s renaissance. The scheme will cooperate with Teach for America and give greater power to Newark Mayor Cory Booker (Dem) to reform schools.

If Zuckerberg’s donation is unlikely to create much controversy (beyond the cynic’s claim that he is trying to distract attention from some continuing bad press for social media), it is another story with former Facebook President Sean Parker’s donation of US$100,000 to support the legalisation of marijuana in California. Now part of Napster, which he co-founded, Parker supports the campaign in favour of Proposition 19, which would legalise the cultivation of marijuana for personal use. The usual arguments about hemp production and the medical uses of pot have been wheeled out to support the proposition.

Whatever the result of the November vote, Parker’s ‘off your face’ philanthropy is radically different from Zuckerberg’s apple-pie generosity.

 

In the world of Twitter and YouTube, 15 minutes seems like an eternity.

I came across a video of a witness to a robbery that has gone viral and been mixed as a music video.

It reminded me of other ordinary celebrities, such as the Australian dogman and the Chk Chk Boom woman (she’s had enough airtime, so no link on this here).

Much of this would be no surprise to postmodernists who have long taken delight in inside jokes about what is real and what is not.

The mockumentary, which has been around a long time (think even of Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast, Woody Allen’s Zelig, and Spinal Tap), has recently been given a twist by Joaquin Phoenix in the ironically entitled film I’m Still Here.

A recent article in the Melbourne Age highlighted that a number of Collingwood Football Club (the Magpies for those outside Australia!) players, including Dane Swan, Scott Pendlebury and Harry O’Brien, have entered the world of social media.

They have set up websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and blogs that allow fans (and maybe enemy spies?) to follow their training regimes, watch interviews and see photos. It also enables some of the players to gain exposure for media work or let people know about their work in the community.

As I said in another post, sports organisations have recognised that social media comes with risks, especially with tweets after a big loss, at 2 am. Some NRL (rugby league) clubs have banned players tweeting as has the English Cricket Board over tweets on tour (though those concerns now seem to have been dwarfed by the betting scandals alleged to involve Pakistani players).

‘Initially I think everyone was a little bit scared of it, and now it’s very much something that’s been embraced’.–Nick Hulett, Collingwood FC Media Manager

The Age also reported that Collingwood defender Harry O’Brien has become something of a celebrity in cyberspace with ‘Harry’s World’. He has won a Shorty Award for his twittering and been invited to contribute to a book by online philosopher j. sakiya Sandifer.

In the lead-up to the Grand Final, Collingwood has even used a footy blogger to preview the games, and baby boomer coach Mick Malthouse has an (infrequently updated) website.

I hope they all have some good news to tweet next Saturday afternoon! Tens of thousands might not agree with me … [And so it proved to be! Go Pies!]

In a promotional talk late last year, Kelly gave a basically optimistic account of technology. It ensured our survival, made us the dominant species, and is compatible with environmental sustainability, he said.

But what is technology? Kelly gave a number of provocative snapshots of it, some his own, some others’:

Technology is anything invented after you were born–Alan Kay

Technology is a creative force looking for the right job.

Technology is anything that doesn’t work yet–Danny Hill

Technology is anything useful invented by a mind.

Technology is basically an extension of life.

Technology … is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power.

Technology is selfish, technology is generous.

Technology is a method for generating better ideas.

According to Kelly, technology has given us survival (without it ‘the wolves would get us’), longevity, a broader diet, agriculture, cities, refrigeration, antibiotics, travel and so on. As he said, it’s given us progress, but at a cost.

Many environmentalists and Indigenous peoples might question the cost of this ‘progress’.

For Kelly, the answer to what he sees as the harm of technology is not to abandon technology, but to get better technology. As he says more broadly, the answer to a ‘bad idea’ is not to have no ideas but to have better ideas. He says that technology gives us diversity, choice and freedom.

We have the freedom to exercise, not the environmentalist’s ‘precautionary principle’,  but Kelly’s ‘proactionary principle’: to ‘engage’ with, try, assess, risk-manage, fix and ‘relocate’ problematic technologies (i.e. to find new jobs for them).

I can’t give an assessment of a book I haven’t read yet, but Kelly is a fascinating big picture thinker in the style of Jared Diamond.

I look forward to reading his book and coming face to face with the temperamental robot that is technology.

Destruction of Books at Ephesus, licensed under Creative Commons

Earlier this year, I read Harvard historian Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). It includes a cautionary tale, based on his earlier New York Review of Books article, about how librarians destroyed  many books and newspaper collections in order to ‘preserve’ them for the future. Spines were broken and newspapers destroyed as they were photographed for microfilm and chemically tested for durability. 

From 1968 to 1984, the Preservation and Microfilming Office of the Library of Congress filmed ninety-three million pages and “threw out more than ten million dollars’ worth of public property” (The Case for Books, 122, quoting Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper) 

But, as Darnton reported, the microfilms intended to be a permanent record (and to save libraries space) have proven to be unappealing to read and chained to old technology. Worse still, the microfilms have deteriorated badly. 

In class last week we were talking about the permanence of things on the internet. How what you put out there never dies (e.g. permanent URLs) and can be seen by anyone who is online. This is another kind of cautionary tale. Anyone’s misspent youth is not just brought up by family members at embarrassing birthday parties but is recorded and searchable. In this sense, the internet certainly is permanent. 

But there’s a paradox here. While the virtues and vices of online media are their dynamic and editable qualities, reliable records are often thought of in black and white terms, and on paper. The law, for instance, often insists on this. Historians, too, like to trawl through paper archives. But how effective is the archiving of websites and blogs? As Berkeley scholar Paul Duguid has argued, there are lessons here about assuming that one technology supersedes another, that later is better.