RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/07/social-media-the-damage-is-done/

Hi, my name’s John, and I’m an addict. Facebook is my main drug of choice, but I also dabble in a bit of Instagram and Twitter. Every now and then, when I need a real pick-me-up, I’ll turn to Snapchat.

Dramatic introductions aside, these algorithmically optimized systems of content distribution are excellent at two things: engaging the user and retaining the user. Notice that I chose the word user, not customer. That is how we are viewed by the tech-savvy alchemists. Billions of users, all hooked on a virtual high.

Isn’t it odd that only two groups — drug dealers and social media dealers — refer to their target audience as “users”? When one examines the algorithmic architecture of these platforms, a troubling pictures emerges: Facebook and the like are designed to keep us in a user state of mind: First, engage. Second, retain. Third, continue to drip-feed the addiction with notifications and reminders.

Is this an exaggeration? If you think so, go ahead and delete your social media accounts. See how long you can survive without Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. I recently told a friend of mine that I am no longer on Instagram. He looked at me like I had just told him I was thinking of relocating to Yemen. Utter bewilderment.

For those who chose to never ‘sign up,’ kudos to you. Chances are you have saved yourself days – no, weeks – of valuable lost time. According to a 2018 report published by the Global Web Index, the average person in the Western world spends 2.5 hours a day on social networking and messaging platforms. To put this figure in perspective, look at it this way: That’s 17.5 hours a week, or 70 hours a month. The average Westerner wastes close to three days every month on social media.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274283/fake-news-begins-fake-language-michael-cutler

Human beings think with words.  We express our thoughts with words. 

What truly differentiates humans from all other creatures is our ability to use language and preserve our thoughts in writing, thereby enabling us to pass down our knowledge from one generation to the next.  This is why the study of history is so important, but it is not only history that is passed from generation to generation but knowledge in general.  

We often say that “There is no need to reinvent the wheel.”  Consider that if not for written language, each generation would, in effect, be forced to reinvent the wheel and all other forms of technology.

The study of history can help keep us from making the same tragic mistakes, but only if history is accurately written.

As George Orwell sagely observed, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The words that we use have real impact.

In 1974 an important psychological experiment was conducted that illustrated how altering words can not only have a significant impact on how the test subjects perceived the severity of a car crash but even ultimately impact how they remember the accident creating false memories.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274246/twice-many-americans-have-confidence-police-media-daniel-greenfield

You might think that doesn’t mean much.

I have more confidence in your average schizophrenic homeless man screaming at ghosts than I do in the media. And you probably think I’m being too generous.

But the pattern here is that conservative institutions still tend to inspire more confidence than lefty ones.

Just three institutions — the military (73%), small business (68%) and the police (53%) — have garnered majority levels of confidence in all polls Gallup has conducted on each measure over the past two decades. The military has been the top-ranked institution or tied for the top-ranked institution each year since 1986.

Though 38% of Americans say they have confidence in the U.S. presidency, it is exceeded by the percentage of people who have very little or no confidence in this branch of government (44%), giving this institution a net-negative score.

Slightly more than a third of Americans also express confidence in the Supreme Court (38%), organized religion (36%) and the medical system (36%), while slightly less than a third have confidence in banks (30%), public schools (29%) and organized labor (29%).

Fewer than one in four Americans have confidence in the criminal justice system (24%), newspapers (23%) and big business (23%).

Americans have the least confidence in television news (18%) and Congress (11%). 

I wonder why.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/big-media-

Big Brother, in the person of President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was not persuaded by the findings of the Mueller investigation: “If there wasn’t active collusion proven, then I think what we have here is a case of passive collusion”. To put it another way, if President Trump is not guilty of being a Kremlin agent, in any technical, literal or actual sense, then he is still guilty. Former Director Clapper—along with former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director Comey—helped generate the Great Kremlin Conspiracy in the first place. Is there, then, a possibility that James Clapper might have a particular agenda in his strange response to the Mueller Report? Are we, perhaps, on the verge of uncovering one of the great scandals in American history, in which the intelligence agencies of the United States conspired to affect the course and consequences of a presidential election? Do not expect a media outfit such as CNN to take up the story—after all, James Clapper gave his reaction to the Mueller Report in his present capacity as CNN’s “National Security Analyst”. Big Media, regrettably, is no less invested in the Great Kremlin Conspiracy (2015–19) than Big Brother.   

Today, news and truth are like passing strangers. It was not supposed to be like this. The Walter Lippmann–John Dewey debate of the mid-twentieth century revolved around the question of whether the ordinary person could ever be expected to interpret meaningfully what was happening in the wider world. Dewey, in an optimistic liberal vein, believed it possible to educate Joe and Jane Citizen with the necessary wherewithal to be informed and insightful enough to make sense of the world for themselves. In contrast, Lippmann believed we were reliant on journalists and editors choosing objectivity over ideology and putting even-handedness before their own interests. That remains, however unlikely, freedom’s best hope.

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) was a sceptical—though not cynical—analysis of the problems of ordinary people exercising genuine democratic oversight of their governing class. The supposed purpose of the press and news media, as the Fourth Estate, was to make our political elite genuinely responsive to public opinion. This process, asserted Lippmann, was handicapped by the disjointedness and changeability of the untutored opinions of the public. There were, therefore, two interconnected problems that needed addressing for the health of a modern democracy. First, whatever the assertions of news agencies, facts invariably require interpretation (meaning anything from contextualisation to prioritisation or omission). Second, the modern world has become “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting” for the private citizen, bound by the limits of “subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental images”, to pursue meaningful interpretation without expert assistance. The role of the press and the news media, thus, was the “manufacture of public opinion”, an expression that in 1922 did not attract the opprobrium attached to it since the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s treatise on the mainstream media.