Some cool news: The Make Me Smart with Kai and Molly podcast (MMS) quoted me in episode "91: How do you get out of your echo chamber?". Is you want to go straight to where Molly reads my quote, click here.
The frustrating part of the said news: my quote was not put in the right context. I won't say the quote was read out of context, just not in the context in which I said it. And honestly, the incorrect context lies in my court.
I consider myself a fan of the MMS podcast. On my list of podcasts in the order that I download them, I have MMS at number 6. Previously I had it at 4 and 5 at different times. I now have two other podcasts that make my podcast listing more efficient earlier on my list. I don't write this essay to trash or criticize MMS, especially since I play a part in fogging up the context. I simply want to clarify the context of my quote and to prop up the theme of the podcast: "Because none of us is as smart as all of us."
MMS didn't quote me as an expert, a specialist, or anything like that. They quoted me as a participant in a Facebook forum named after MMS but started by a fan, not as an official group of the podcast. Since then, it has become loosely (or somewhat closely) affiliated with the podcast. I find the group provides a welcome respite from the general social media, news, and blogosphere.
I say the above as the resident cranky moderate. Socially, I'm a pluralist Leftist. Economically, I have a penchant for Left-leaning economics on the basis of fairness. I also acknowledge that sometimes financial intermediary schemes like insurance, universal healthcare, pensions, social security, disability insurance, welfare, and other schemes can feel unfair to the privilieged with inherent advantage (healthy, high income, high assets, etc), but their loss is worth it for the massive lifting of burden for those under duress, even when the burdened can never be rid of their duress.
However, I do not see capitalism as something inherently wrong nor created with some long-term design to mold the future. At most, I see the current results of capitalism and social control as results reached by short-term politicking, Machiavillainian maneuvering, realpoliticking, and the common human fragility of social group dynamics that have remained with us since before we became human and before we established civilization. The evils that humans have stratified in society have come from our wiring for dominance hierarchy, not some higher level of thought that crafts society much further than today, tomorrow, or beyond the interests of gaining and maintaining power in our current state of society.
The evils of dominance hierarchy no longer surprises me, even as the atrocities from it disgust me and motivate me to fight it. If you've followed the Lextopia long enough, you have become familiar with my surprise at our ability to overcome our urges for powermongering in our dominance hierarchy. It surprises me, I don't understand how some of us humans have reached the point where we aim for such empathic goals rather than settle for becoming part of the dominance hierarchy. I like to think I am someone who believes in real justice while I push for more fairness and empathy in our society and world. Yet I still have yet to understand how I and others have reached this point of aiming for justice.
So I'm that kind of Leftist moderate in a forum that the vocal members of the group seem to have a division between right-leaning Libertarians and capitalism is inherently evil Leftists. Mind you, one of the themes of MMS is a questioning whether capitalism is inherently immoral or amoral, or whether it can also encourage moral behavior. Lately in my stubborn moderation, I may have created my own little media bubble in the forum.
A few of the big discussions in the group and on MMS itself have been discussions that we have all probably engaged in since 2016:
- Our media bubbles
- The role that social media, especially Facebook, has played in elections
- What can we do to defend against the media bubbles and become better educated, independent thinking media consumers and civic participants
MMS, it's "parent" network, Marketplace (a part of American Public Media), and elsewhere in the media, intelligentsia, and hopefully the watercooler spheres have done a fair amount of discussion about whether Facebook is a technology company or a media company.
For a good while, I fell on the side of Facebook is a technology company. I generally thought of Facebook as a social media website. We signed onto Facebook via a web browser. If we signed into Facebook by an app on our phones, our service provider, for the most part, treated it like any other app or web browser without any more or less privileges than any other app. Even the aspects of the Facebook app that accessed parts of our phones that we didn't expect and things like that, I consider that a separate conversation from the technology vs media company debate.
The way I saw Facebook in regards to this question: Facebook doesn't generate the content, so it doesn't have any editorial say in creating content. Facebook might show some editorial judgment when it comes to deeming whether content is pornographic or some other level of inappropriateness, up to a point. I hadn't seen Facebook judge what content could be or not be shown based on any political or subject-matter bias other than appropriateness to a "general audience". Yes, the Facebook algorithms made for an annoying determination of what would show on our timelines based on the supposed habits of ourselves, our friends, and friends of friends (if we didn't adjust some settings manually). Even then, though, our behavior determines the results of those algorithms, not Facebook direct influence.
Throughout my education that I can remember in the '90s, both high school and college, and also through autodidactic reading of my own, I learned that we need to watch, listen, and read our media with our criticial facilities. We need to know
- The bias of the author and the content provider
- Our own biases and susceptibility to bias
- The layout of biases in the world's patchwork of biases
- How to filter through all these biases to determine truth, whether we like the truth or not
Since this whole discussion about the power that social media has over the population, I've wondered about how much teaching critical reading has degraded in our society. I also had to remind myself that I came from the Northeast coast of the United States. I grew up in a fairly upper middle class town in the ex-urbs of Boston that had its fair share of abolitionist meetings and socialist gatherings in the mid-1800's. As early as 5th grade, I had history teachers explaining to my classes that history books and primary resources were mostly written by old white men. I've had a fairly privileged education. I had to acknowledge that maybe this lack of critical reading skills had less to do with our time in history and more that our national educational standards have a pretty low bar (coming from geographical bias).
Then I saw a retweet of this article: "How Duterte Used Facebook to Fuel the Philippine Drug War". Take the time to read this article, which illustrates pretty clearly how Duterte, his supporters, and his campaign manipulated Facebook to distribute authoritarian thinking in the Philippines. I bet the same thing occurred in Myanmar and their complacency about the Rohingya genocide that occurred in 2017. This article will show you how people can manipulate Facebook and other social media vehicles into dangerous propaganda machines.
The way that critical media consumption by individuals can be short circuited comes down how Facebook has provided data-free use of its app and internal browser to people using wireless Internet outside of the United States. Some mobile services providers in the United States provide similar services for music apps, video apps, Youtube, Netflix, etc. etc. I believe. I don't remember seeing these kind of deals advertised in the United States over the last year or so. I remember, however, these types of deals being offered for awhile, especially when 4G first became popular.
Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal to some. Free entertainment through social media, free music, free movies, and the such for people have an account or subscription to some service that provides an app automatically downloaded on your phone at purchase time. The big problem occurs, however, when Facebook or some social media becomes the only way someone can access the World-Wide Web through the app's internal browser. No other browser will work on that phone, just the app internal browser. Facebook's internal browser doesn't allow you to manually type in a web address. It only allows you to access web sites that Facebook has a link to on a Facebook stream or that is linked to through a chain of websites that has a original link on a Facebook stream. You can't do your own manual Google search or anything unless someone links to Google on Facebook.
Per that Buzzfeed article, Duterte and his supporters abused this feature of Facebook. I'm sure the same goes for the Myanmar genocides and other governments and movements based on controlling the information in our brains. I have to wonder how much of this feature plays into the 2016 POTUS Election in the United States. Did this free data use of social media contribute to the Arab Spring (I'm currently ruminating on the Arab Spring because a book that I just finished reading valorized the Arab Spring without acknowledging the backlash afterward, which makes me think the book was published before the backlash)?
About eleven weeks ago on the MMS Facebook group, someone posted this article/essay: "The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking". The article/essay does provide some good tips and references a book that I have checked out of the library and queued up for reading at some point in the near future.
They posted these tips after the Buzzfeed article about Duterte abusing Facebook, so I felt obligated to link to the Duterte article and type the following:
I would have agreed with you then I read this article last night about how Duterte pretty much used Facebook in the Philippines in a Trumpian/Putinesque along with supporters because FB pretty much is one of the only ways that Filipinx can access the Internet. Scary stuff.
Then there's Myanmar ethnic cleansing using FB to grow the cleansing.
Yes, critical reading is important, but apparently so is having multiple affordable avenues to access the Internet, enough I guess is an argument for viable competition?
Please excuse some of the unintelligibility of my typing. I had typed it up on my cell phone while at a diner waiting for dinner.
MMS likes to play voice memos from fans of the show. Imagine my surprise when about two weeks ago, one of the producers replied to the thread, asking me to record a voice memo that focused on the last paragraph. I cleaned up the language while drafting a script then recorded a voice memo. Later that night, I drafted another, longer script then re-recorded the voice memo. In the clean up, I tried to include a clause or sentence that made my intention clear that my comment had to do with political propaganda that comes through free media resources.
Which now, upon the reflection of this essay, makes clear why the MMS crew associated my comments with government censorship and government control over media. I appreciate MMS thinking that my comment had to do with government censorship and government control, but I did not make this comment within that context.
I had made this comment in the context of an economic and financial milieu that doesn't allow citizens the availibility of a media either
- Free of bias
- A variety of bias that encourages people to question their sources in a productive fashion
Instead, when the only reasonable access to media is one in which an individual citizen can't direct themselves (say through a general Google search or freedom to purchase whatever magazine or paper they want) and vulnerable to skillful manipulation by political interests, especially those with an authoritarian bent, other easy options for accessing the Internet and content must be provided. At the very least, technology companies that don't want to be media companies must
- Use algorithms that also provide opposing biases as a default
- Mobile service providers need to provide similar contracts for data-free apps to other online services of the same like and kind but with different algorithms (Twitter in comparison to Facebook, Pandora in comparison to Spotify, etc.). There needs to be a competition of data-free apps
- Provide a data-free web browser that allows the user to manually enter web addresses rather than restrict use to links from the parent app or chains of links that originate in the parent app
I take the blame on the context issues of my quote. Navigating social media on cell phones doesn't lend itself to clear expression of complex topics, even considering just potential mistypes from a digital keyboard and mistakes from just trying to rush through something. I have sent a text to my boss meant for my wife once or twice. Thankfully, I never sent anything sensitive, but these mistakes have taught me to be careful about texting and set up a manual safe guard or two so that if I send a text to the wrong person, it's a friend, not my boss. If such mistakes can happen with just texts, imagine how dangerous it can get on social media.
Nonetheless, I wanted to
- Take this opportunity to clarify the quote of me
- Promote the episode of MMS that is my premiere to a large media platform
- Thank MMS for this platform and opportunity to clarify my thoughts
- Let more people know MMS is a cool, fun, and informative podcast and that they should listen to (frankly, even just fellow Chicago residents might find the interview of Rahm Emmanuel from last year interesting)
How cool is that?
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