|
"Why are you reposting conspiracies" "CNN is bad!!" "Yeah but you're reading an unhinged conspiracy spreading website" "NYT is bad" "Yeah but this website is spreading lies" "THE LYING MEDIA" etc. These people are pretty far gone.
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 08:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 02:36 |
|
|
I wouldn't say they are "gone", but rather that this thread shows that the differences between the two groups of posters are essentially irreconcilable. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 10:14
|
|
|
I object to the notion that there are "two groups of posters" which are essentially irreconcilable. That is incredibly reductive and tbh some asinine "forums war" nonsense. To offer a counterexample for analysis, please consider https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/news They're a great everyday news resource in my experience. But I am happy to explore their biases and credibility as a media outlet. Perhaps that could be a somewhat neutral outlet we might apply the OP and following materials toward? Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Jan 1, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 11:11
|
|
|
Thorn Wishes Talon posted:I wouldn't say they are "gone", but rather that this thread shows that the differences between the two groups of posters are essentially irreconcilable. Its a slightly more novel type of chud and conspiracy theorist, some of them go outside and function in society. I'm looking at this thread for pointers on how to deal/argue with them and it doesn't look like there's much hope (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 11:29
|
|
|
fool of sound posted:Its more that there are usually more specific problems than "profit motive exists" or "media sources are owned by wealthy people". Those are reductionist and not really useful for diagnosing specific problems with reporting. See this is what I don't get. Why is it reductionist to look at stuff like the profit motive and the fact that most papers are owned by the incredibly wealthy? It may not diagnose any specific problems with reporting (though I would disagree here) but it certainly helps to understand the framework, inherent biases, perhaps the motive behind the reporting in question when you consider something like, "is this rich guy trying to sell me a bad bill of goods?". Maybe I'm begging for another probe by not reading the insanely tedious last 40 pages but I do not see the issue with pointing out that the profit motive exists and may lead to Media Analysis & Criticism based on the fact that the profit motive exists. Also seriously why is this thread stickied, I keep asking but I can't seem to get a reason. Pharohman777 posted:So what point were they trying to make? What point are you trying to make? Cow Bell fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 1, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 16:39
|
|
|
Pharohman777 posted:You really are just going to make an absolute statement like this without extensive evidence? It doesn't tell me anything. Gonna run a python script to do some content analysis for hawkish language for ya clowns brb
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 17:29
|
|
|
Cow Bell posted:See this is what I don't get. Why is it reductionist to look at stuff like the profit motive and the fact that most papers are owned by the incredibly wealthy? It may not diagnose any specific problems with reporting (though I would disagree here) but it certainly helps to understand the framework, inherent biases, perhaps the motive behind the reporting in question when you consider something like, "is this rich guy trying to sell me a bad bill of goods?". Maybe I'm begging for another probe by not reading the insanely tedious last 40 pages but I do not see the issue with pointing out that the profit motive exists and may lead to Media Analysis & Criticism based on the fact that the profit motive exists. We live in a capitalist society, so observations like "the profit motive exists" aren't exactly novel. And since they apply to the entire media industry (including sites such as the Grayzone) it's not especially useful in the analysis of individual media outlets, only in the media industry as a whole. Even Max Blumenthal makes a living off being paid for his reporting, and even Max Blumenthal needs to pay for plane tickets and staff salaries. But theorycrafting about which members of a capitalist society are completely beholden to the need for profit and which ones are heroic ideological crusaders who don't give a gently caress about money? That's just wild speculation in service of greater ideological goals. It's pure fanboyism, not fit for any serious debate. On top of that, the single-minded focus on funding tends to be reductionist, and dismissive of the many other factors that go into things. For example, it's been repeatedly asserted in this thread that the mainstream media supports wars because they're war profiteers. As a result, instead of discussing the cultural and social factors behind literally centuries of American jingoism and war-lust, and looking at the influences that led to the rises and falls of this tide of warhawkery over the generations, we're just ignoring history and evidence in favor of blindly repeating the same old Marxism 101 arguments.
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 20:07
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:We live in a capitalist society, so observations like "the profit motive exists" aren't exactly novel. And since they apply to the entire media industry (including sites such as the Grayzone) it's not especially useful in the analysis of individual media outlets, only in the media industry as a whole. Wouldn't the fact that it's such an obvious observation make it inherently extremely useful in the analysis of media? 1 + 1 = 2 isn't a ground-breaking and astonishing piece of news but it is still the foundation of mathematics. e: As you say, we live in a capitalist society so things will very often come down to a class-based analysis. Whether you are tired of hearing it or not is irrelevant. Yinlock fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 1, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 20:50
|
|
|
Yinlock posted:Wouldn't the fact that it's such an obvious observation make it inherently extremely useful in the analysis of media? 1 + 1 = 2 isn't a ground-breaking and astonishing piece of news but it is still the foundation of mathematics. I think most people would be rather irritated if you patronizingly insisted on explaining basic addition and then generally handwaved all else as being mere details of the former without further examination when they were actually asking about polynomials. Everyone, including non-leftists, are familiar with the idea of "people wanting money".
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2022 20:53
|
|
|
Harry Potter on Ice posted:Gonna run a python script to do some content analysis for hawkish language for ya clowns brb I looked around for 10 minutes and didn’t find it, but I believe the authority figure of this thread has specifically shot down the idea of sentiment analysis and similar, so I’d suggest you not waste your time and spare yourself the condescending tone indicating the matter was covered in an “effortpost” 38 pages ago. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 00:04
|
|
|
Pharohman777 posted:You really are just going to make an absolute statement like this without extensive evidence? It doesn't tell me anything. You might be interested in "A Test of the News," in which Walter Lippmann read through the entirety of the New York Times' coverage of the Russian Civil War, comparing their coverage to the recorded history. A Test of the News posted:The analysis shows how seriously misled was the Times by its reliance upon the official purveyors of information. It indicates that statements of fact emanating from governments and the circles around governments as well as from the leaders of political movements cannot be taken as judgments of fact by an independent press. They indicate opinion, they are controlled by special purpose, and they are not trustworthy news. [...] The analysis shows that even more misleading than the official statement purporting to be a statement of fact, is the semi-official and semi-authoritative but anonymous statement. [...] The analysis shows further that at critical periods the time honored tradition of protecting news against editorials breaks down. The Russian policy of the editors of the Times profoundly and crassly influenced their news columns. The office handling of the news, both as to emphasis and captions, was unmistakeably controlled by other than a professional standard. So obvious is this fact, so blatant is the intrusion of an editorial bias, that it will require serious reform before the code which has been violated can be restored. That sounds to me like the exact Curveball/Judith Miller/Cheney pipeline accurately diagnosed in 1920, no?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 02:14
|
|
|
Why is this thread stickied?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 03:39
|
|
|
B B posted:Why is this thread stickied?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 03:45
|
|
|
I think it's most likely stuck because it was a new thing getting interest and no one ever cared enough to un-stick it. But sticking it does send certain kinds of messages. I think I understand why this is a concern for many posters, especially when we apply the lessons learned from this thread to the thread itself and our posts as mediums. But could you elaborate more on why this is such an important question? What sticking a thread seems to convey to you?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 04:05
|
|
|
HookedOnChthonics posted:You might be interested in "A Test of the News," in which Walter Lippmann read through the entirety of the New York Times' coverage of the Russian Civil War, comparing their coverage to the recorded history. Thanks for taking my question seriously.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 04:36
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:We live in a capitalist society, so observations like "the profit motive exists" aren't exactly novel. And since they apply to the entire media industry (including sites such as the Grayzone) it's not especially useful in the analysis of individual media outlets, only in the media industry as a whole. If multiple pieces of media are pushing the same angle on a story, but they have a lot of overlap in profit motive for example, one should be wary of treating these stories as having arrived at that angle independently: The ownership, sources, readership, advertisers and so on might very well have funneled them all into the same framing. Basically, articles written within essentially the same environments can not be used to support the truthfulness of each other. That goes for everything from American establishment coverage of American warmongering to various "alternative news sites" that cultivate a competing but similarly uniform environment. Note that this uniform environment is on a topic by topic basis. Doesn't really matter if the newspapers/sites disagree on a topic if that topic is entirely irrelevant to the specific article.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 07:13
|
|
|
HookedOnChthonics posted:You might be interested in "A Test of the News," in which Walter Lippmann read through the entirety of the New York Times' coverage of the Russian Civil War, comparing their coverage to the recorded history. I'm just gonna quote from the introduction of the book here: quote:The first question, naturally, is what constitutes the test of accuracy? A definitive account of the Russian Revolution does not exist. In all probability it will never exist in this generation. After a hundred years there is no undisputed history of the French Revolution, and scholars are still debating the causes and the meaning of the revolt of the Gracchi, the fall of Rome, and even of the American Revolution and the American Civil War. A final history of the Russian Revolution may never be written, and even a tolerably settled account is not conceivable for a long time. It would be foot- less therefore to propose an absolute measurement of news gathered amid such excitement and confusion. It would be equally vain to accept the account of one set of witnesses in preference to any other set. I think that's a take a lot of us should keep in mind, honestly! It very much agrees with what I've been saying all along. And it's a line of thinking that he continued in his later book, the famed Public Opinion, in which he concluded that "news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished". Before anyone gets too excited, though, he didn't mean that the news was bad or that news organizations were bad. In his telling, the whole idea of trying to figure out which news articles were right and which ones were wrong was Part Of The Problem. He meant that it is literally impossible for journalists to report completely accurate information, and that the general populace shouldn't consider themselves well-informed on an issue and prepared to make judgements on it just because they read some articles. He went on to declare that direct democracy was essentially impossible, and that instead of pretending that it's possible for journalists to convey information to the masses and let the voters decide things, we should just hand control of society over to a bunch of technocratic specialists instead. quote:There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. quote:The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision. The trouble lies deeper than the press, and so does the remedy. It lies in social organization based on a system of analysis and record, and in all the corollaries of that principle; in the abandonment of the theory of the omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis. If at the centers of management there is a running audit, which makes work intelligible to those who do it, and those who superintend it, issues when they arise are not the mere collisions of the blind. Then, too, the news is uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that is also a check upon the press. That is the radical way. For the troubles of the press, like the troubles of representative government, be it territorial or functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist, cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one. quote:IN real life no one acts on the theory that he can have a public opinion on every public question, though this fact is often concealed where a person thinks there is no public question because he has no public opinion. But in the theory of our politics we continue to think more literally than Lord Bryce intended, that "the action of Opinion is continuous," [Footnote: Modern Democracies, Vol. I, p. 159.] even though "its action… deals with broad principles only." [Footnote: Id., footnote, p. 158.] And then because we try to think of ourselves having continuous opinions, without being altogether certain what a broad principle is, we quite naturally greet with an anguished yawn an argument that seems to involve the reading of more government reports, more statistics, more curves and more graphs. For all these are in the first instance just as confusing as partisan rhetoric, and much less entertaining. He spent the last few chapters sketching out a vision of a world in which society is essentially run via debate club, where the two sides of an issue go into court and argue their cases in front of a neutral mediator who has the relevant government departments and statistics agencies on speed-dial, but I honestly didn't find it that interesting. When it comes to detailed positions on events, though, let's not forget that Walter Lippman wasn't a disinterested observer free of biases either. He was a founding editor at The New Republic, a magazine founded by an investment banker and his old-money heiress wife. He supported American intervention in WWI, including actively working with the Committee of Public Information, the government's pro-war propaganda agency. He was close with one of Wilson's advisers, and after the war he spent some time directly involved in helping craft Wilson's post-war foreign policy. And that's just what he'd done up to the point where he wrote that book.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 07:55
|
|
|
raminasi posted:Can you provide any good examples of this model being applied to anything? I’m finding it hard to understand how the questions might be answered without seeing someone else do it first. Well it's been a few days so since no one else wants discussion on this, I'll offer my thoughts on how to apply the model. Let's first define the medium: I'll put forth that with the evolution of modern communications technologies, we are working through a series of mediums and "sub" mediums - not unlike the way our commuter infrastructure consists of everything from privately-owned, express-lane highways to miles of unpaved country dirt roads in the middle of nowhere; this leads to a scenario of both granular and broad answers to the questions of the model. We'll apply these questions to "The Internet" at large first as a medium. Keep in mind, of course, that these are my postulations on the nature of the medium - I'm not telling you these are true, I am not telling you what to think, these are just the answers I've come up with in my application of the model. Your experiences and interpretations are worth just as much as mine, truly! quote:What does the medium enhance? There's a hell of a lot of things that the internet has enhanced - ability to deliver target messages through data analysis and the application of algorithms meant to keep the media consumer engaged, the ability to disseminate, validate, and refute information in near-real-time, the ability to communicate in real-time, it creates a broad sense of global community (McLuhan and his sons that would go on to continue his work refer to this, even in the pre-internet age of TV and printed news as the dominant form of media as "The Global Village"), it enhances a media provider or mediator's ability to issue corrections and update relevant stories in real-time, enables direct citizen journalism, and so many other "fluff" poo poo (muh vidya, teledildonics, virtual/augmented reality) that's not related to the topic at hand, but are also perfectly serviceable examples of the medium enhancing already existing tools, ideas, or technologies. Police departments are able to sift through social media timelines to determine if a suspect in a murder was where they said they were, racism and hate speech can be driven out of the public space (gamergate redditors migrating to voat, flat-earth youtubers migrating to rokfin, or in our own little microcosm of this phenomenon here, chud goons migrating to that lovely offsite I won't mention because I literally can't remember the name of it right now) quote:What does the medium make obsolete? This is a softball. "Print news media." According to Pew research, daily circulation of US newspapers is lower now than it was since they started tracking it in 1940. This doesn't mean that media entities or conglomerates that have a reputation as a longstanding print media provider are in trouble, rather that they have been forced to adapt - the New York Times and Washington Post now have to compete with Yahoo! and Buzzfeed; one might even make the argument that NYT and Buzzfeed are now on the same level playing field specifically because of the enhancements in the first question. quote:What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? The invention of the automobile and an interconnected road and highway network obsolesced "the village" - growing up in a town, living most of your life there, settling down, and dying there. The internet returned that sense of village to us - no longer is Mom a week away by USPS - an email or text message can get to her immediately. The COVID pandemic has taught a lot of us that while it's not a 1:1 experience, we can construct a reasonable facsimile of a family dinner together with members of any given family scattered far and wide to the four winds. quote:What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes? Remember when before the Hunter Biden laptop story ended up being mostly confirmed, and Twitter made it impossible for its users to share it by tweet or by direct message?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2022 17:08
|
|
|
Following on to this (I'm trying to keep things in digestible chunks!), let's keep the metaphor of travel infrastructure and the internet in mind. As in the case of travel infrastructure, the various "sub-mediums" of The Internet as a medium are akin to the travel lanes of and types of roadways available to the commuter. Different lanes are prioritized for different traffic (in the US, the far-left lane being dedicated to civilian traffic passing maneuvers and sustained travel by emergency-designated vehicles, the right-most lane being the enter/exit lane, those little crossover spots that emergency vehicles can use to reroute as resources need to be invoked/allocated by the state), different roadways have different sets of rules and access from 25mph speed limits to exclusive use of a particular roadway to bypass public infrastructure all enforced in various ways both institutional (fines, remedial driving lessons and license suspension) and social (honking, flipping the bird, flashing lights behind someone doing something stupid/wrong) in nature. Often, what you're transporting dictates what roads you would use, and how you use them: got a baggie of weed in the car? You're almost certainly going to take that into account when you choose to go highway, main roads, or back roads to a social gathering, and will also likely impact the way you drive on those roads - taking behaviors to minimize potential interactions with law enforcement officials and highly policed areas when planning your route and executing it. So let's look closer at the lane we're occupying: the web forum (there's probably a fun argument to rabbit hole into here on whether I'm excluding usenet or not, but I think most of what can apply to a web 1.0 forum is, in a modern sense, nothing more than a refined form of the old usenet bulletin board model). quote:What does the medium enhance? The idea of a shared space for communication with recurring voices naturally fosters a sense of community. Users contribute, debate, argue, sympathize, help each other out how they can, and sometimes even read each others' posts (not sure what kind of sick gently caress gets off on reading posts, but, here we are  ). Thus with the community established, a forum enhances that community's ability to self-regulate by introducing a set of tools that distinguished, trusted community members can use to mediate discussion: like having a bouncer at the door of a bar, just having a moderator active in a thread can ward off a lot of, for lack of a more academic term, "low level nonsense" like brigading or threadshitting; threats and actions on probations and bans on controversial topics if they get out of hand and for unacceptable behavior, and ultimately exile from the community are all tools provided that enhance the community's ability to self-regulate and self-police. These trusted users can highlight various discussions, viewpoints, or issues as well - looking at just the front page of D&D, a vast majority of threads have not been created by mods or IKs, the ones that have are rules threads, recurring megathreads, threads containing information that's critical to the wellbeing of the community or its members, and...this thread. quote:What does the medium make obsolete? I struggle a little with this one - I don't really think the answer differs from the overall big picture of the internet as the medium - while still in use today, the emergence of web forums did put a hurt in usenet, but there are still plenty of applications for usenet out there today (just like NYT puts out a print edition every day despite it selling like poo poo). quote:What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? Really kind of the same deal here. Instead of reading some dude's thoughts about media criticism on his geocities page, this is a communicative back and forth medium where I can be queried and questioned directly and in (relative) real time. quote:What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes? I would agree with Discendo Vox on this and this alone - this thread is a fantastic example of mismanagement of the medium and the tools allotted to the mediators. It's a perfect example, in my mind, of the tools available to mediators taking the medium to its extreme.
I'm sure there are more abuses of mediation tools I could come up with if I tried really hard and thought of it, but I'd rather not turn an effort post into a full-blown grudgepost so I'll stop myself there. So, apply the model yourselves, and then ask yourself: why is this thread stickied?
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2022 20:54
|
|
|
It's stickied because discussing sources and how to analyze them is a metatopic that is relevant to every other thread in dnd. I'm not interested in discussing the threads validity or position further and I'm just going to ban everyone who does so. If you want to discuss other models or modes of criticism thats fine. Despite your claims, and the claims of your buddies, however, that's largely not what you've done. You've instead focused on my choice to ask DisVox for an effort post for the OP: I chose him because he repeatedly expressed interest in this topic and others didn't. Neither he nor I have claimed that the OP is the last word in criticism, it just provides a useful basis for doing so. That's what OPs are for. Alternatively, you've cast aspersions on the topic with sophomoric bullshit masquerading as analysis. It's no secret that all sources, mainstream or otherwise, suffer from biases, flawed processes, and conflicts of interest, yet the most common argument in this thread is yet another person arrogantly proclaiming this to be the case and that is all that needs to be said on the subject. It's not. It's the 1+1 of media critique. Perform. loving. Analysis. Or. Leave. This. Thread. fool of sound fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jan 4, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2022 00:08
|
|
|
Pharohman777 posted:So what point were they trying to make? I mean, any poster can scroll through the NYT archive with a search term and spreading the dates back a few months before the official wikipedia start of war date and find those chucklefucks saying "Hell yeah" to the concept of violence. It's there, let me blow through all my free articles in one go: Most recently, we have an article bemoaning Biden's pull out while making clear to it's readership that there will still be, always will be, continued operations in the region. In this 2002 article they parrot out the WMD and Chemical weapons claims that were disputed at the time, while softening the circumstances around the reasons for going to war with Iraq. It attempts to say "try diplomacy first" after detailing why there is no diplomatic long term solution. Sure they issued a mea culpa in 2004 after our troops were already there, I guess that's nice. Here's a fun think piece on if war good before operation Desert Shield and the Gulf War pontificating on who can declare war in our prosperous modern era of the 1990s. Post Vietnam in the 1970s the NYT put out an article assuring people "Oh it's cool, we'll just put troops in S Korea, we won that. Also liberals ~don't really~ wanna reduce troop numbers" In the 1950s they liked to publish articles directly authored by military generals like Dwight Eisenhower and John Dulles code:So in conclusion, I have analized media by selecting a survey of articles with date ranges and topic headlines. From this cited and sourced list I have found the NYT to be broadly pro-war in a mealy mouthed way. It's embarrassing really, because plenty of articles from that publication were authored by extremely biased pro-war talking heads of the time, but they don't speak with nationalistic jingoistic gusto, it's always been some backpeddling conservative slanted lib poo poo since the dawn of ink. At no point do they ever actually call for the end of wars or engagements or whatever, and even when we as a nation pull out of a theater the NYT is all "it's ok tho, we got bases fuckin everywhere". If you would like a publisher's perspective on the NYT, here is an article from the New York Post dunking on their nerdy nazi loving newspaper-cousin. The NYT is not a land of contrasts. Thank for reading. Fuckin lmao rofl look at why this pharohscrub got permabanned. Analyze that source.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2022 16:20
|
|
|
Pharohman777 posted:Nah, its pretty valid. Sad to see him gone, this guy was super good at media literacy: Pharohman777 posted:Don't know why my tastes in weird and taboo erotic fiction and fanfic on other sites are a huge criminal scandal. Its fictional, it doesn't reflect my tastes in reality, just as playing call of duty doesn't mean someone wants to be a soldier and kill others.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2022 19:01
|
|
|
Popping in to say there's some discussion of this thread's place happening in QCS. If you like the thread, be sure to make your voice heard. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3989859. You can also PM me if you'd prefer not to post there.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2022 02:56
|
|
|
Koos Group posted:Popping in to say there's some discussion of this thread's place happening in QCS. If you like the thread, be sure to make your voice heard. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3989859. You can also PM me if you'd prefer not to post there. Agreed. Thread needs to take a nap. Too many talking about other posters, which is quite boring insofar defacto. Let’s stay on topic without the bad faith.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2022 21:58
|
|
|
fool of sound posted:Everyone, including non-leftists, are familiar with the idea of "people wanting money". Perhaps I am misunderstanding you because the idea that a class or economic critique of media boils down to "people wanting money" is wild to me.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2022 01:48
|
|
|
bad guy posted:Perhaps I am misunderstanding you because the idea that a class or economic critique of media boils down to "people wanting money" is wild to me. It's the one weird trick to critique of any kind!
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2022 04:20
|
|
|
Nix Panicus posted:
Social Sciences, or at least Continental Soc Sci (Honestly, the yanks do things differently. Cards on the table, I'm very much of the Stuart Hall english school of cultural studies, and I dont have much of an idea of where the americans are at with that.) don't follow that model, particularly, because it tends to ignore the effect of social mediation and interpreting. The critical difference is that "noise" is a bad analogy for the alterations to message that occur once its filtered through cultural context, because in many respect the context IS the message (and perhaps so is the medium). The simplistic versions sometimes refered to as the "injection" model (as in imagine a message injected directly into your brain via speech acts), and i kinda nonsense. People always evaluate the message via a network of interpretive frameworks derived from the cultural symbolism that surrounds people.If I read a paper in lancet titled "vaccines own and make your dick larger too", I'll probably filter it through "Science is a trustworthy process, I will chose to accept this as probably true". Another person reads the same paper and thinks "Ah! Scientists all work for the lizard masters. Everything in this paper is the opposite of true!" and thus interpret it as "Vaccines DONT own, and apparently they make your dick smaller". We both got the same message, but the media and interpretive backgrounds that inform our understanding of speech flip it into completely opposite meanings. Thing is, what I'm saying is basically 1980s media theory. The dry shannon-weaver model got dumped long before that because it just isnt the whole picture. Its not representitive at all of mainstream soc sci thinking. Regardless, in a certain sense the Shannon-Weaver model isn't wrong. Its just not the whole picture. duck monster fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Jan 12, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2022 08:18
|
|
|
A recurring problem with social sciences seems to be people reading about exactly one thing, and then going charging out from the classroom wielding as a weapon to declare war on the world with.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2022 08:50
|
|
|
The third through fifth sentences in my post about Shannon & Weaver are as follows:quote:(Note that this is a model of communication. This material will have a few models; the thing about models is they're simplified representations that explain one set of relationships by sacrificing detail elsewhere. I am also simplifying these models, as many of the real ones get very complex.) I use the SW model to illustrate very basic concepts, and to make the following condensed points: 1. What you mean isn’t the same as what you say, or what your audience hears. 2. To communicate your meaning, you have to think about how the message will be received. 3. All messages are mediated. These aren't controversial, or at least shouldn't be. 1 and 2 are at least closely related to the social construction factors of message interpretation (symbols and signs, coding and decoding), which duck monster also mentions. They're the more important part for most of the issues the thread is about (though you gotta consider structural effects of the physical medium when talking social media). Later on I also say: quote:Similarly, a single theory (including, or even especially, “crit” theories that provide an overarching narrative telling you what sources are good or bad) will instead steer you toward messages that appeal to you for all the wrong reasons. There’s a reason these posts are a bunch of material pulled from different sources- a toolkit will make you much more intellectually versatile than a single mythological correct way to understand media. So, no, I explicitly don't intend for SW to be some sort of all-consuming explanation of media. It's the first part of the basic summary of an OP I already reduced massively from the originally planned materials. Part of the reason I haven't tried to cover more complex theories is that part of my target audience hasn't shown a willingness to read even the really simple stuff. Hard to give a useful explanation of ANT or Goffman when there's an audience of trolls actively ignoring what's already written.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2022 20:09
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:A recurring problem with social sciences seems to be people reading about exactly one thing, and then going charging out from the classroom wielding as a weapon to declare war on the world with. It generally tends to be really bad media reporting on this one specific thing that works in this one context which the journalist or whatever proclaims works everywhere or is a universal truth. Anthropology runs into similar issues.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2022 22:08
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Hard to give a useful explanation of ANT or Goffman when there's an audience of trolls actively ignoring what's already written. This is defeatist thinking. What good is an idea you can't defend against a hostile audience? It isn't a matter of convincing "the trolls," but rather understanding other people's counter-arguments and what underlies their thinking. Assuming you aren't convinced by those arguments, understanding the underlying thinking means you can better craft your own arguments to anticipate and address the response. You don't even need to be so open-minded that you're willing to be convinced, but you do need to imagine other people as motivated by some desire other than personal hatred of you yourself. To do anything else is just making excuses. If you just imagine everyone who disagrees with you to be a blind mindless contrarian, then you yourself have fallen for your own mindless contrarianism, and will likely have little to say that's worth listening to. That's true in general but especially true here, in this thread that is at least partially about teasing meaning from media created by people who generally do not share your personal interests. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jan 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 01:17
|
|
|
Cease to Hope posted:This is defeatist thinking. What good is an idea you can't defend against a hostile audience? It isn't a matter of convincing "the trolls," but rather understanding other people's counter-arguments and what underlies their thinking. Assuming you aren't convinced by those arguments, understanding the underlying thinking means you can better craft your own arguments to anticipate and address the response. You don't even need to be so open-minded that you're willing to be convinced, but you do need to imagine other people as motivated by some desire other than personal hatred of you yourself. To do anything else is just making excuses. I did anticipate what people would say, it's why I'm able to refer to text in the OP. You literally ignore what I say and attack the idea of the thread. It's why your last two posts resulted in probations. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 02:22
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I did anticipate what people would say, it's why I'm able to refer to text in the OP. You literally ignore what I say and attack the idea of the thread. It's why your last two posts resulted in probations. This seems more like an appeal to authority than a sincere attempt at a rebuttal
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 02:32
|
|
|
Stop debating about each other and debate the topic
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 02:48
|
|
|
Lmao dude just can't help himself (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 03:45
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I did anticipate what people would say, it's why I'm able to refer to text in the OP. You literally ignore what I say and attack the idea of the thread. It's why your last two posts resulted in probations. It is applying the lessons of the OP to the OP, as well as your own posts. The underlying message you are sending is garbled; you have the opportunity to evaluate the audience you've found honestly and recalibrate. This isn't some huge "by your own logic" gotcha. I think the OP is flawed because it's using transcription/encoding/interference errors in speech or writing, which can be measured objectively, as a metaphor for meaning, which I don't think can be. (Proving that meaning can objectively exist seems like a little bit more than an SA thread can tackle!) If noise is the chief topic of discussion, the metaphor by which we understand misunderstanding, then there must be some clearer way to communicate that message that is extricable from who you are or how you speak or how you act. It must be possible to approach that perfect connection, and I wonder how you would do it with a hostile audience. Now, I obviously think the metaphor is next to useless, and does not address actual issues of misunderstanding, let alone how to navigate a world full of people with often hostile or unclear agendas. But hostile people obviously exist! And I can't tell, by your arguments or by your actions, how you propose to accommodate that. My personal thinking is that "noise" is a fundamentally wrongheaded way of thinking about it. The best metaphor I've yet encountered is Sprachspiele, that language is inherently situational mutual understanding. There is no noise, just pieces of language that are inherently fuzzy and multifaceted and situational even in an internal monologue. There is no perfect, noiseless message, just a series of interactions that we can only understand (imperfectly) through dialogue. Communicating with someone is creating an (also imperfect) model of their thinking, a model that necessarily contains their model of our thinking; these mutual understandings are constantly feeding back into each other rather than collapsing to a perfect exchange of unmediated messages. Unmediated messages don't exist, and cannot be independently verified. Nobody has a platonic ideal message that is separate from who they are and how they think and how they think other people think, so there's no baseline zero that we can measure deviance from. Now, I hardly think that this is the only way to understand communication. (Imagine how hypocritical that would be!) And I realize that an introduction is going to be limited and simplified. But ultimately yeah. I am attacking the idea of this thread. And I am doing so using the thread itself as material, because it's handy and it supports my core belief that there is no message independent of the "noise". If you cannot swing the hammer you have forged, then I am inclined to say that it is a useless tool for understanding.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 05:27
|
|
|
Cease to Hope posted:It is applying the lessons of the OP to the OP, as well as your own posts. The underlying message you are sending is garbled; you have the opportunity to evaluate the audience you've found honestly and recalibrate. It is not. The focus of the use of the SW in the OP is not the role of noise. The post describes encoding, decoding, social context, and noise, which are all sources of communication. I've explained that in the OP, and multiple times since, including seven posts ago. Cease to Hope posted:It must be possible to approach that perfect connection, and I wonder how you would do it with a hostile audience. The goal of the thread is not to render me a punching bag, or that I model being a target for a hostile audience. Cease to Hope posted:Now, I obviously think the metaphor is next to useless, and does not address actual issues of misunderstanding, let alone how to navigate a world full of people with often hostile or unclear agendas. But hostile people obviously exist! And I can't tell, by your arguments or by your actions, how you propose to accommodate that. There is no single solution to a hostile audience, and frequently there is no solution. The response to someone acting in bad faith is not to indulge them. fool of sound posted:Generally if people have decided that they are opposed to truth that is deleterious to their ideology they should probably stay out of this thread and preferably subforum. Cease to Hope posted:My personal thinking is that "noise" is a fundamentally wrongheaded way of thinking about it. The best metaphor I've yet encountered is Sprachspiele, that language is inherently situational mutual understanding. There is no noise, just pieces of language that are inherently fuzzy and multifaceted and situational even in an internal monologue. There is no perfect, noiseless message, just a series of interactions that we can only understand (imperfectly) through dialogue. Noise is a source of error or inconsistency in the mediation of the message. It is distinct from but can interact with issues of coding and decoding of message material. The OP material is not just about noise. The post specifically describes the role of social contexts and expectations. Cease to Hope posted:Communicating with someone is creating an (also imperfect) model of their thinking, a model that necessarily contains their model of our thinking; these mutual understandings are constantly feeding back into each other rather than collapsing to a perfect exchange of unmediated messages. You are describing the role of feedback, which is common in later revisions to the model in the social sciences, often referred to sequential, or interactive models of communication. These are more complex because feedback can be constructed as simultaneous, continuous, or sequential. I don't cover these in the first post because the first part of the OP is not intended to be a complete description of all forms of communication. It is designed to explain the interactions of several basic concepts. I have stated this several times, including on this page. You are attacking something that is not within the scope of the purpose of that post, and using it to attack the idea of the thread. Again. Cease to Hope posted:Unmediated messages don't exist, and cannot be independently verified. Nobody has a platonic ideal message that is separate from who they are and how they think and how they think other people think, so there's no baseline zero that we can measure deviance from. You can in fact measure degrees of fidelity against each other. You do not need an actual example of platonic message transmission to understand or measure how sources of error from either encoding, transmission, or decoding, or to study how they occur. We can talk about specific forms and ways to look at the details, construction, practice, transmission, etc of media without believing that we will reach some ideal truth, or arrive at a set of perfect sources. That has never been what the thread has about. Cease to Hope posted:Now, I hardly think that this is the only way to understand communication. (Imagine how hypocritical that would be!) And I realize that an introduction is going to be limited and simplified. But ultimately yeah. I am attacking the idea of this thread. And I am doing so using the thread itself as material, because it's handy and it supports my core belief that there is no message independent of the "noise". If you cannot swing the hammer you have forged, then I am inclined to say that it is a useless tool for understanding. fool of sound posted:Not every source on every topic has an equal number of problems and those problems aren't all equally bad. The section y'all keep quoting is heading off idiotic sophistry thay replaces proper criticism with "well all sources are bad" with the unspoken "so I should just go with stories that sound correct to my gut instinct". Stop pretending to misunderstand it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 05:58
|
|
|
It appears you were threadbanned here by fool of sound. Thread and forum bans remain in force unless reviewed and overturned by Koos Group. Please do not post in this thread further unless notified otherwise by Koos. edit: I'm assuming you composed this as I posted, so not gonna ding you for it. Cease to Hope, your threadban here remains in effect unless/until reviewed and overturned by Koos Group. Discendo Vox, I ask you consider not responding to Cease of Hope's post below. They are not allowed to continue the conversation further at the moment. \/\/\/\/\/\/ Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Jan 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 06:15
|
|
|
I am not mocking you, or engaging you in bad faith. I don't have any personal animus towards you. It's perfectly possible to engage in good faith as a hostile audience: like I said, I fundamentally disagree with the premises the OP rests upon. Focusing in on what I think is the most tenuous premise your arguments rest on: Discendo Vox posted:You can in fact measure degrees of fidelity against each other. You do not need an actual example of platonic message transmission to understand or measure how sources of error from either encoding, transmission, or decoding, or to study how they occur. We can talk about specific forms and ways to look at the details, construction, practice, transmission, etc of media without believing that we will reach some ideal truth, or arrive at a set of perfect sources. That has never been what the thread has about. I'm not worried about ideal truth, just the idea of an error-free message. Errors can be objectively measured in transcription or literal encoding of a piece of text or sound. But I don't think it's possible to know even one's own perfect, error-free message. It's an outdated idea, one that was refuted by turning it inward. All of the tools we have to attempt to separate meaning and message are themselves as entangled into the speaker's thinking and manner of speaking and manner of understanding -- as chock full of noise, to use the OP's metaphor -- as the entangled message to be interpreted. There's no error-free description of the process to separate error and message. It's a dead end, a hammer that cannot forge a hammer. How do you propose to measure the fidelity of the messages you send? What unit, what measure, what scale? What baseline do you use, and how do you know that baseline is itself without error?
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 06:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 02:36 |
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:So, no, I explicitly don't intend for SW to be some sort of all-consuming explanation of media. It's the first part of the basic summary of an OP I already reduced massively from the originally planned materials. Part of the reason I haven't tried to cover more complex theories is that part of my target audience hasn't shown a willingness to read even the really simple stuff. Hard to give a useful explanation of ANT or Goffman when there's an audience of trolls actively ignoring what's already written. It might also help with having something to point at when some of those trolls come along. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2022 16:35
|
|
