Monday, December 31, 2012

Robert Scheer: The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For

Robert Scheer: The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For: If the Bloomberg news service, the stock market idolizer owned by the mayor, had been anything more than an enabler this past decade of Wall Street excess, nay criminality, it's possible we would not be experiencing the current crisis. If this leading financial news outlet had performed the minimum of journalistic due diligence on unregulated credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and the other swindles marketed with an abandon informed by deep deceit and the financial industry's pervasive corruption, the world economy may not now be in such terrible shape.

Newspapers can act as I-O police themselves of  information, however under weak I-O regulations they form Iv-B and V-Bi disconnects. Often they might become Iv to support the ads from Iv agents, then they compete to keep these ads and can become deceptive with the truth. The same can happen with Iv media pundits and blogs.

The Growing Power of the Meme - Businessweek


The Growing Power of the Meme - Businessweek

Viral Spiral, a year-old London company, employs a team of researchers to scour YouTube, blogs, and other dark corners of the Web around the clock, looking to sign a video’s creator before his work takes off. “We represent over a thousand videos,” says Chief Executive Officer Damian Collier, a British theater, television, and music producer who has also worked in law and finance.

Look for Iv-B videos that will grow explosively, exponentially, virally, like a contagion, etc. To do this they need to get to them faster than anyone else in a competitive Iv-B race. Innovative videos like mutations might grow virally as B, also Iv counter innovations that mock or refer to a B innovation might also grow virally. For example a new B event might grow virally in the news as funny and then be spoofed as Iv in a counter innovation, as counter humor or satire such as on Saturday Night Live. 

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation - Washington's Blog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/05/twenty-five-rules-of-disinformation.html

Some of these are similar enough to the previous post and won't be repeated.

1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. 

In Iv-B there is no advantage to be gained by exposing evil in competitors because it only helps other competitors. For example R victims of crime usually don't want to testify even though it would prevent Oy criminals hurting others.

3. Create rumor mongers. 

Rumors change on the margin as Iv-B, as competitors they often assume that everyone else is also being deceptive.

5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. 

Using false descriptions of people is related to Iv-B bluffing, in a competition those who don't do this lose in a Gresham's Law dynamic without I-O policing. 

8. Invoke authority. 

This can be bluffing where the source are hidden or deceptive.

9. Play Dumb.

Also deceptive, R prey might act dumb to make Oy predators overconfident so they can escape.

11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions.

Not actual positions, they are more like where R prey might have worked out where they can hide safely when attacked.

12. Enigmas have no solution.

Complexity is Iv-B, often not solvable because the facts are hidden or deceptive. Often V-Bi people give up, also with V-B interactions the V team breaks down under the deceptions and harrying by B arguing.

13. Alice in Wonderland Logic.

In Iv-B everything can be deceptive, people reason tactically on the margin even if the whole makes no average sense.

15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions.

In Iv-B there is no normal center where facts are fitted to, instead they move to other deceptive booms and busts. For example if it is tactically beneficial to suggest something bad in the long term then they would often do this.

16. Vanishing evidence and witnesses.

Like R prey vanishing or Oy predators hiding, this is the safest tactic against Y-Ro teams.

18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. 

Using energy as a tactic to create more chaos in competitors so they might reach a tipping point and collapse.

22. Manufacture a new truth. 

This is a kind of Iv-B innovation, instead V-Bi tends to resist new ideas as errors to the old normal version.

23. Create bigger distractions.

Oy predators might use distractions to disorientate their prey, for example attack when other large animals take R's attention. Also Oy predators might attack a Ro herd trying to distract a buffalo into leaving the herd where they can overwhelm it.

24. Silence critics. 

Disinformation can work better when those trying to make information more transparent and normal are silenced.

The 15 Rules of Web Disruption | The Big Picture

The 15 Rules of Web Disruption | The Big Picture

1.  Start a partisan divide-and-conquer fight or otherwise push emotional buttons to sew discord and ensure that cooperation is thwarted. 

Iv-B divides V-Bi teams to conquer them, thwarting cooperation with competition. Discord is chaotic.

2.  Pretend it’s hopeless because we’ll be squashed if we try. 

Iv-B survives best by running away from problems because they don't work as a V-Bi team. It's like R gazelles running while Ro buffalo would stand their ground.

3.  Demand complete, fool-proof and guaranteed solutions to the problems being discussed.

With Iv-B deception the information is usually not available for this. There are no real solutions except by moderating them with the I-O police.

 4. Suggest extreme, over-the-top, counter-productive solutions which will hurt more than help, or which are wholly disproportionate to what is being discussed. 

Iv-B is innovative and has no normal center, solutions often then cause booms and busts. They are tactical in nature rather than having a long term stable strategy.

5.  Pretend that alternative media – such as blogs written by the top experts in their fields, without any middleman – are untrustworthy or are motivated solely by money

Many Iv-B blogs are as shown in the book Confessions of a Media Manipulator quotes in some others posts on this blog. 

6.  Coordinate with a couple of others to “shout down” reasonable comments.

Reasonable normal comments are V-Bi team based, Iv-B commenters might use speed creating chaos to sow chaos and deception on the margin.

7.  Use an army of sock puppets

These are Iv-B deceptive hiding their real identities. 

8. Censor social media, so that the hardest-hitting information is buried

Burying information is an Iv-B tactic, implicit is winning by bluffing and deception.

9. ...the inevitable result - nuclear accidentsfinancial crisesterrorist attacks or other disasters – were “unforeseeable” and that “no could have known”.

In Iv-B there is so much deception, as in poker, that V-Bi cannot prevent some chaotic collapses and crises.

10. ... any allegations of criminal activity as being a “conspiracy theory”

Iv-B people often don't know what is really going on in highly deceptive situation, hidden criminal roots and branches can be hard to prove without V-Bi transparency.

11. Become incredulous and indignant. 

Use high energy indignation especially if deceptive, talking quickly as short time Iv-B. Focusing on the margin of side issues rather than the average rightness of a story with some errors on the normal curve.

12. Use a straw man. 

This is like in nature where Oy-R animals might use camouflage and imitating other kinds of animals to survive.

13. Hit and Run.

Oy predators like hyena tend to hit but run if facing Ro team resistance. Iv agents also hit and run as salesmen in the I-O market, this is efficient if well policed by I-O.

14. Question motives.

Suggesting a hidden agenda is like expecting other poker players to be bluffing.

15. Associate opponent charges with old news.

Iv-B stories change quickly with high energy, for them the margin is most important rather than the average facts of a story which might be older. With tactical changes in Iv-B older facts might be irrelevant.

What to Do with Political Lies - Politics - The Atlantic


What to Do with Political Lies - Politics - The Atlantic
Fact-checking was a great development in accountability journalism -- but perhaps it's time for a new approach. It's no longer enough to outsource the fact-checking to the fact-checkers in a news environment where every story lives an independent life on the social Web and there's no guarantee the reader of any given report will ever see a bundled version of the news or the relevant fact-checking column, which could have been published months earlier. One-off fact-checking is no match for the repeated lie.

Fact checking is V-Bi as part of team based transparent journalism, stories living an independent life are like Iv-B loners making money through deception. This Iv-B iterative journalism changes on the margin, the idea is that eventually it will mutate into accurate information but often people are misled reading it before then. Bundling the news is a team based activity, parts of stories cooperate together giving a normal account by seeing outliers as errors.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times | Wired Science | Wired.com

Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times | Wired Science | Wired.com

Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.

Similar to stories in earlier newspapers compared to modern blogs. The race is on to get viewers and donations, often deceptively from Iv to B or vice versa. The predictions are usually chaotic, claims that tipping points and collapses are approaching. These stories mutate and collapse if they don't get people's interest or they might grow virally like a chaotic contagion. When the I-O police don't look for fraud and deception then this Iv-B media can detach from the more standard and normalized V-Bi stories.

There is a war coming: Cory Doctorow on the future regulation of general...

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qInGXZjmXv8?fs=1" width="480"></iframe>

This can become a V-B interaction, V media companies team up to make copyright where information such as programs, songs, books, movies, etc are GB privately owned. There is also G public property like this, for example open source software or books out of copyright.

So a V computer like this confronts an underground B that works on deception and secrecy, they might share files on peer to peer and scatter if there is an attack by V on this sharing. With V-B the result is unstable, often B though weaker can win by being deceptive and hidden. For example B home buyers used liar loans to get money from V Wall Street, V thought they were ripping off the B home buyers. 

Akin's Remark was Stupid and Untrue -- Now He Must Put the Nation's Future First - The Rush Limbaugh Show


Akin's Remark was Stupid and Untrue -- Now He Must Put the Nation's Future First - The Rush Limbaugh Show

RUSH: Snerdley is yelling at me: "Are you gonna get rid of Akin now?"  Before I give my two cents on all this, folks, let me first say I have two natural tendencies.  One is to avoid the pack, to avoid the conventional wisdom. When everybody seems to be uttering, voicing, doing the same thing, that's when I put on the brakes and say, "Do I want to join this mob?"  And I also have, as you well know, a tendency to want to support conservatives who come under fire.  It doesn't happen enough.  You know, the Democrats circle the wagons around their people.  We circle the firing squad.  It's what we do. 

This is an Iv Republican tactic, to be innovative and sometimes deceptive while confronting the Bi mob of Democrats in the I-O media market. Sometimes this Iv tactic becomes V where people form a team against Bi Democrats like a war of attrition in the media according to resources.

"The Media Cold War" by Anne-Marie Slaughter | Project Syndicate

"The Media Cold War" by Anne-Marie Slaughter | Project Syndicate


The sociologist Philip N. Howard recently used the term “new cold war” to describe “battles between broadcast media outlets and social-media upstarts, which have very different approaches to news production, ownership, and censorship.” Because broadcasting requires significant funding, it is more centralized – and thus much more susceptible to state control. Social media, by contrast, transforms anyone with a mobile phone into a potential roving monitor of government deeds or misdeeds, and are hard to shut down without shutting down the entire Internet. Surveying struggles between broadcast and social media in Russia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, Howard concludes that, notwithstanding their different media cultures, all three governments strongly back state-controlled broadcasting.
CommentsThese intra-media struggles are interesting and important. The way that information circulates does reflect, as Howard argues, a conception of how a society/polity should be organized

Broadcast media is usually V-Bi while state owned might be Y-Ro giving a normal and transparent interpretation of the news, it is more stagnant than innovative. Iv-B news is more like iterative journalism where changes are made at the margin with updates, it is highly innovative, unstable, and mutates into many varieties such as online social media. Some social media is also V-Bi, for example facebook is transparent where people are encouraged to use their real names, normal behavior is encouraged while deviant posts might be censored or deleted. People with mobile phone reporting the news are usually Iv-B loners or Oy-R in Roy countries, the facts depend on the margin according to these people's honesty. The system can be prone to manipulation such as in the book Confessions of a Media Manipulator.  

PressThink: Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat

PressThink: Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat


“The press moving as a pack confirms its own take on things,” Gourevitch said. (That’s as well as I have heard anyone put it.) There are many names for this take. It’s called pack journalism. Conventional wisdom. The herd mentality. The script. The frame. Master narrative. It’s the story you agree to accept because it tells you and everybody else what you (and everybody else) are doing on the bus.

Cheesy package tour. That was Gourevitch’s first impression about traveling with the campaigns. You sign up. You get on the bus. It hits all the major sights. Crowds of people get off at each one. Then they get back on. The campaigns tell you what the schedule is. The campaigns tell you where the pick up will be. The campaigns feed you, get you to the airport, take you from the airport.

“Right there they have you,” Gourevitch told our crowd of about 50 journalism students and faculty. “Outside the bubble you cannot go because then you’re dirty again and have to be checked by the Secret Service.” Under these conditions, he said, “no spontaneous reporting is possible.”

You cannot jump into the crowd with an audio recorder and find out why those people were chanting what they were chanting before they were shown away by security guards. Accepting this limitation—a big one—becomes part of the bubble.

This can happen with Bi journalists in a war of attrition against V Republicans in an election, spontaneity is Iv-B and restricted by the process, Bi journalists might write a normalized story and the V politicians do the same. It can also happen in reverse with V journalists writing about Bi politicians, each is normalized and trying to wear down the other. V tends to be more in a bubble because they get surrounded by Iv, in this case Secret Service lobbyists and campaign workers. This bubble is often intended to deceive those outside, the Secret Service needs to deceive potential attackers, the lobbyists need to keep the facts secret because they are competing for business, and the campaign workers try to obfuscate problems with the V politicians. They are then surrounded by Iv deception which can disconnect them from seeing what is happening, the Iv  spokesmen might then work in the Io journalistic market to deceive if they can without doing anything illegal. The Bi journalists tend to work together as a team to counter this deception by discussing it between them, it works the same as an I-O market. 

Rise of the celebrity economist - Salon.com

Rise of the celebrity economist - Salon.com

As economists’ profile has risen, the media attention toward them has changed. A recent Times profile on economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, “Economics of Family Life, as Taught by a Power Couple,” illustrates the media’s growing tendency to treat select economists as celebrities. “Mr. Wolfers,” we learn, “looks like a nerdy surfer and tends to pull his chin-length blond hair into a ponytail,” while “Ms. Stevenson has an irresistible laugh and a stylish taste in clothes and shoes.” For this Business Section article, Rich gushes over the couple’s fondness for interior design in prose more reminiscent of Monocle than the New York Times, cooing over the couple’s “glass-top Noguchi coffee table” and “white Jonathan Adler casting couch covered in a sheepskin throw from Costco.”

Economists tend to separate into Iv-B and V-Bi, when disconnected they can alternate advice based on their colors. For example V-Bi tends towards a probabilistic approach and emphasis on propping up the chaotically damaged parts of the economy. Intervention is not supposed to be dangerous because the effects are random and diffused. They tend to form a team with a normal or orthodox view with those on the normal curve fringe being more heretical. The Iv-B economists are more like the freshwater type, they see the dangers of chaos such as deterministic government intervention causing problems. By alternating between them they can create a zombie economy where businesses infected with Iv-B contagion are propped up rather than cleaned, then new Iv-B businesses are kept from growing in their place.

Friday, December 28, 2012

Ai Wei Wei's Interview With the Chinese Digital Thought Police

Ai Wei Wei's Interview With the Chinese Digital Thought Police - Brian Fung - The Atlantic

The process has three steps - receive task, search for topic, post comments to guide public opinion. Receiving a task mainly involves ensuring you open your email box every day. Usually after an event has happened, or even before the news has come out, we'll receive an email telling us what the event is, then instructions on which direction to guide the netizens' thoughts, to blur their focus, or to fan their enthusiasm for certain ideas. After we've found the relevant articles or news on a website, according to the overall direction given by our superiors we start to write articles, post or reply to comments. This requires a lot of skill. You can't write in a very official manner, you must conceal your identity, write articles in many dif­ferent styles, sometimes even have a dialogue with yourself, argue, debate. In sum, you want to create illusions to attract the attention and comments of netizens.

In a Roy society like China this can be either an R activity as with the days of communism or Oy as it becomes a Y-Oy state. Similar surveillance happens in the US with the NSA as Iv though manipulating the news is less common now. It was happening much more in the cold war where Iv-Oy intelligence agencies and FBI might watch for secretive R communists as well as B left wing extremists. 

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Confessions of a media manipulator


The media is in the evil position of needing to go negative and play tricks with your psyche in order to drive you to share their material online. For instance, in studies where subjects are shown negative video footage (war, an airplane crash, an execution, a natural disaster), they become more aroused, can better recall what happened, pay more attention, and engage more cognitive resources to consume the media than nonnegative footage.5 That’s the kind of stuff that will make you hit “share this.” They push your buttons so you’ll press theirs.
Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation. Online games and apps operate on the same principles and exploit the same impulses: be consuming without frustrating, manipulative without revealing the strings.
For those who know what levers provoke people to share, media manipulation becomes simply a matter of packaging and presentation. All it takes is the right frame, the right angle, and millions of readers will willingly send your idea or image or ad to their friends, family, and coworkers on your behalf.

Iv-B journalism needs to be deterministic, to push buttons and create chaos that spreads like a contagion across social media. The strings are like roots and branches and need to be hidden to work best. 

Confessions of a Media Manipulator


A subscription model—whether it’s music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed. Since articles don’t have to spread on their own, but rather as part of the unit (the whole newspaper or album or collection), publishers do not need to exploit valence to drive single-use buyers.
With Ochs’s move, reputation began to matter more than notoriety. Reporters started social clubs, where they critiqued one another’s work. Some began talk of unionizing. Mainly they began to see journalism as a profession, and from this they developed rules and codes of conduct. The professionalization of journalism meant applying new ideas to how stories were found, written, and presented. For the first time, it created a sense of obligation, not just to the paper and circulation, but also to the audience.
Just as Bennett had his imitators, so did Ochs. In fact, the press has imitated the principles he built into the New York Times since he took it over. Even now, when someone buys a paper at a newsstand, they don’t survey the headlines and buy the most sensational. They buy the paper they trust—the same goes for what radio stations they listen to and television news they watch. This is the subscription model, the brand model, invented by Ochs, internalized. It is selling on subscription and not by the story.

This is a V-Bi newspaper, people subscribe for long periods rather than the short time high energy option of one off Iv-B paper buys or going to web sites. More important is the average quality of news, people don't tend rush in to subscribe because of one story or unsubscribe on the margin either. It inspired Bi journalism being unionized as a reaction to V newspaper ownership leading to left wing consumer oriented journalism. Reputation becomes an average quality based on transparency and feeling the reporter is part of a team with the reader. Trust is the model rather than Iv-B deception and hype.

Confessions of a media manipulator


Iv-B and Oy-R journalism sells with strong energy and fast time, creating urgency and a need to buy or read quickly. It uses deceptive and bluff, it can be predatory like an Oy thief getting the R reader's money. It can also be R based telling the story of R victims of predators and criminals, this can cause stories to go viral and grow exponentially. 

So here we are in 2012, on our fancy MacBooks and wireless Internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.
From today:*
Naked Lady Gaga Talks Drugs and Celibacy

Hugh Hefner: I Am Not a Sex Slave Rapist in a Palace of Poop

The Top Nine Videos of Babies Farting and/or Laughing with Kittens

How Justin Bieber Caught a Contagious Syphilis Rumor

WATCH: Heartbroken Diddy Offers to Expose Himself to Chelsea Handler

Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life

Penguin Shits on Senate Floor

Now compare those to some of these classic headlines from 1898 to 1903:
WAR WILL BE DECLARED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES

AN ORGY OF GRAY-HAIRED MEN, CALLOW YOUTHS, GAMBLERS, ROUGHS, AND PAINTED WOMEN—GENERAL DRUNKENNESS—FIGHTS AT INTERVALS—IT WAS VICE’S CARNIVAL.

COULDN’T SELL HIS EAR, OLD MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF

OWL FRIGHTENS WOMAN TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL

BULLDOG TRIES TO KILL YOUNG GIRL HE HATES

CAT GAVE TENANTS NIGHTLY “CREEPS”

As magician Ricky Jay once put it, “People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago.” Only today the headlines aren’t being yelled on busy street corners but on noisy news aggregators and social networks.

An Oral History of Newsweek Magazine - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

An Oral History of Newsweek Magazine - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

 At its best, Newsweek has always been about “the team game”: a bygone form of group journalism that’s less concerned with big-name bylines than with big, cooperative storytelling; a collective endeavor that aspires to serve the readers, not the egos of the journalists they’re paying to read.

This is V-Bi journalism where people work as a team, news is then normalized and transparent with errors on the normal curve. Iterative journalism is Iv-B.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Iterative journalism

http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/159184553X

Iterative journalism is Iv-B where information is changed deterministically, this can lead to innovations in the media such as with blogging but also deceptions and information growing like a viral contagion.

Process journalism, fed by controversy, rumors, and titillating scandals, is a beast that gives no quarter. Those who have never been on the other side of this equation don't realize that it is precisely in situations like a scandal, an IPO, a lawsuit, or a tragic event that the subjects of the story are least able to communicate with the press.

Like with Oy-R animals it can be a predatory prey system where victims of misrepresentation fall to those more Oy predatory in writing stories, speed is also important. People get paid a commission according to the number of hits their stories get so the more viral and exponential the growth is the more money they make. Gresham's law applies, those too honest might leave the business if the I-O police are weak on prosecuting fraud and defamation.

 Forcing someone to dispute a preposterously untrue allegation is just as much slander as making the accusation. The types of stories that scream out to be written and broken before they are fully written are precisely the types of stories that cannot be taken back. The scandals, the controversies, and the shocking announcements—the ones I have shown in this book to be so easy to fabricate or manipulate—cannot be unwritten or walked back. They spread too quickly. They stick too easily.

For R prey the safest course is usually to run and hide, using deception as camouflage. Some can try to team up as a Ro herd demanding truth in these stories, the Oy journalists then try to pick off those still vulnerable like Oy hyena attacking Ro buffalo. In the absence of strong I-O police like animals in the center of the food chain this relationship is unstable, it can lead to Ro collapse and a rout or vigilante like attacks against Oy journalists.

  Leaking or sharing information with the right blog introduces a narrative that can immediately and overwhelmingly take hold. By the time the proper facts have been established, it is too late to dislodge a now commonly held perception. In this model, the audience is viewed as nothing more than a dumb mob to be manipulated and used to create pageviews.
It's a vicious cycle. The lead bum steer of an iterative story starts a stampede. And after so many of these stampedes, the audience is conditioned to expect an endless parade of bigger and bigger scoops that no reporter could ever deliver. What spread yesterday—drove tweets of "Holy shit, did you hear?"—is hardly enough to spread the same way today. So it must be newer, faster, crazier. Now they must maintain it constantly by reporting on even more tenuous material and making crazier conclusions from it.

This is like creating a stampede in a Ro herd, then the Oy predatory journalists must keep up the pressure inducing panic with more deception to keep getting prey in the chaos. Sometimes they can hit a ceiling and collapse like Ro buffalo regrouping and then turning on Oy hyena caught by  too much bluffing and not enough strength. In the same way some Oy journalists overreach and then are attacked by Ro media and consumer groups, the I-O police can get involved like other animals in the food chain chasing away the Oy hyena. For example this can be like Ro larger buffalo acting like consumer advocates, they take the heat from the Oy journalists while exposing them maintaining some balance between chaos and randomness.


Software as beta means the risk of small glitches; the news as beta means the risk of a false reality.
The poet Hesiod once wrote that rumor and gossip are a "light weight to lift up, but heavy to carry and hard to put down." Iterative journalism is much the same. Its practices come easily, almost naturally, given the way blogs are designed and the way the web operates. It seems cheaper, but it's not. The costs have just been externalized, to the readers and the subjects of the stories, who write down millions each year in falsely damaged reputations and perceptions.

Software is also chaotic in the same way because it is highly deterministic as it runs in lines where one mistake makes it stop. An Iv-B or Oy-R economy seems efficient but this is because the damage is hidden until there is a collapse.

ITERATIVE JOURNALISM IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF A belief in the web's ability to make corrections and updates to news stories. Fans of iterative journalism acknowledge that while increased speed may lead to mistakes, it's okay because the errors can be fixed easily. They say that iterative journalism is individually weak but collectively strong, since the bloggers and readers are working together to improve each story—iteratively.

This is innately chaotic and works on the margin where each correction is a marginal change, however VB-I or Y-Ro journalism works by averaging out information with random errors, there is no margin. 

Think of Wikipedia, which provides a good example of the iterative process. By 2010 the article on the Iraq War had accumulated more than twelve thousand edits. Enough to fill twelve volumes and seven thousand printed pages (someone actually did the math on this for an artistic book project). Impressive, no doubt. But that number obscures the fact that though the twelve thousand changes collectively result in a coherent, mostly accurate depiction, it is not what most people who looked at the Wikipedia entry in the last half decade saw. Most of them did not consume it as a final product. No, it was read, and relied upon, in piecemeal—while it was under construction. Thousands of other Wikipedia pages link to it; thousands more blogs used it as a reference; hundreds of thousands of people read these links and formed opinions accordingly. Each corrected mistake, each change or addition, in this light is not a triumph but a failure.

Wikipedia is changed on the margin chaotically, someone makes a change and then another alters it. Often these people are Iv-B or Oy-R anonymous, this allows innovation and counter innovation to grow exponentially. The web is then mutating with links like these chaotically, each deterministically changes the next at the margin so average V-Bi information is less common. The result is a network of roots and branches with mutated stories, viral contagions of innovative videos, etc. It grows like Iv-B weeds consuming available resources as controversies sprout then suddenly collapse for a lack of more news or innovations. There is nothing right or wrong with this system, much of it is driven by the exponential growth of computer technology which then feeds into more Iv-B innovation.


Did Fact-Checking Work In The 2012 Campaign? - Forbes

Did Fact-Checking Work In The 2012 Campaign? - Forbes

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.

Deception is chaotic by nature, like Iv-B bluffing in a poker game. It tends to either boom in success or bust like when a bluff in poker is exposed. Fact checking is more V-Bi and has a normal equilibrium, there can be an average truthfulness in news with errors around this falling on an error curve. This is the same shape as a normal curve. often Bi democrats as moderates in the US confront Iv deceptive agents as Republicans. This can be highly counter innovative as with the Willie Horton ad for George H.W. Bush:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton#The_fall_campaign

Lee Atwater pioneered many of these Iv counter innovations by using deceptive advertising and spreading false rumors. Much of this was to counter the innovative B and often also deceptive Democratic ideas leading to a chaotic Iv-B deceptive war in the media. 

The Explosion of 15th Century Printing: A Data Visualization - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - The Atlantic


The Explosion of 15th Century Printing: A Data Visualization - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - The Atlantic

Printing can grow deceptively, for example with fiction being story telling and innately untrue. It then grows like a contagion, not necessarily in a bad way. This can also be an Iv counter innovations to B innovations such as cheaper paper or availability of ink, creating new ways to mount type faces, etc. It creates newer kinds of Iv agents to sell books and newspapers, leads to viral advertising, sensationalist deceptive stories to sell more, etc. It tends to grow exponentially in this phase.  

[UPDATED] Albany Times Union apologizes for story about ignoring Realtors’ advice | JIMROMENESKO.COM


[UPDATED] Albany Times Union apologizes for story about ignoring Realtors’ advice | JIMROMENESKO.COM

Two weeks ago, Albany Times Union reporter Kristi Barlette solicited anecdotes for a quickie Real Estate section item about agents. “What advice did he or she give that you ignored?” she asked. “Why did you decide not to take their advice, and how did it turn out?”

Albany-area agents saw the responses in last Sunday’s paper — here’s one: “They want the fastest sale more than the highest price” — and were furious.
“This story was totally out of line,” says Anthony Gucciardo, who claims to be the top real estate agent in upstate New York. “I emailed my sales rep and canceled a $10,000 advertising contract.”
On Monday, Times Union publisher George Hearst III interrupted his 3-week vacation to apologize to the real estate community for what he calls a “one-sided …unfortunate article.”

Agents are usually Iv or Oy, they are looking for faster sales as high energy and short time. Deception can also became a contagion with weak I-O policing, a newspaper then can be driven to write deceptively under pressure from the competition of getting ad sales. Gresham's law also applies, those paper unwilling to compete in hyping a market lose market share to those who do. This also happens with agents, those unwilling to be deceptive can be at a disadvantage when I-O policing of fraud is weak as seen with subprime agents before the GFC.