Saturday, December 29, 2012
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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