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Ytlaya posted:It isn't clear to me how the modern media landscape is meaningfully worse than it was in the past. I strongly agree with that point. The idea that the modern media landscape is worse than the past reminds me of Habermas' public sphere, where it seems like, if I take the definition seriously, it would be a period of bourgeois sociality that lasted for like a decade. quote:The main difference seems to be that in the past there was more of a single/universal "understanding of events/reality" that has fragmented in more recent years (largely due to the internet and social media), but I don't see how that's a bad thing when in the past this "universal understanding" just corresponded to whatever the government and wealthy media corporations' stakeholders wanted people to believe. I would read the concern as quasi-Hobbesian. That what is important not the truth or justice, but 'peace', so a concern that disagreement will lead to conflict, that will in the end result in the breakdown of civil society, thence civil war. It's rather conservative. quote:Discendo Vox mentions how "politicians do not control the media," but seems to misunderstand the mechanisms by which consensus is manufactured and media ends up staying within bounds that are acceptable to those with power/wealth. There is no need for the government to directly order the media to say certain things (though I'm sure this probably does happen sometimes). Media corporations have extremely strong incentives towards and against various behavior. They will virtually always want to behave in a way that is agreeable to at least one of the two major political parties, and they will avoid reporting that threatens the interest of their stakeholders. And this doesn't require some sort of direct malicious intent to deceive - it's easy enough for major media organizations to just end up with dominant ideological perspectives that reinforce themselves over time. I find this paragraph a bit confusing, because I am not sure exactly what you mean. I am reading you as implying that the capital is homogenous, creates the system in which media is produced, and so media will mirror the general interests of capital. I would agree with the second clause and maybe the third, but am sceptical of the first. Capital seems pretty differentiated and I would think different segments of capital have their own interests, which leads me to think that media will also reflect the differences in different segments of capital. My read on Vox's statement about politicians not controlling the media is that Vox believes, correctly, that power in liberal democratic societies is not reducible to the powers of politicians and that politicians operate under constraints. This seems true. Vox though seems to be a liberal and so probably does not recognise the way that capital restricts political possibilities. At the very least, their analysis seems a bit too fine grained at times. It focuses on the incentives of the individual reporter, rather than on the incentives of the media sphere under capitalism as a whole. But I am sympathetic to attempts to convert more structural explanations into more individualistic ones. quote:There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to. It's better for someone to occasionally have a wrong gut reaction to a misleading headline on Twitter than for someone to carefully parse the news for direct falsehoods while viewing it through the lens of a harmful ideology/worldview. I am confused at a few points here and particularly when combined with another statement of yours here: quote:The accuracy of individual points in the media ultimately isn't very important, because that usually isn't the main thing that determines peoples' overarching beliefs and actions. The problem has never really been "people are being exposed to wrong facts." At the highest level, I do not understand what your theory of ideology is and how it relates to media production, consumption, and reporting. I would think that ideology is something created by the ruling class and disseminated via false explanations, selective use of facts, slogans, the construction of social structures to inculcate certain practices, dispositions, and attitudes in people, etc. I would think that media, and particularly false media, is quite important in sustaining ideology, but is not the only element in ideological creation or promotion. Part of my confusion is that you say 'wrong facts' and I cannot tell if you mean a falsehood or a fact that is not relevant, selective, or misleading to the general situation. Since you previously mention falsehoods, I assume the former, but if the latter I would think that the wrong selection of facts is actually quite important for the reproduction of capitalist ideology. For example, capitalists focus on formal equality rather than substantial equality. Since capitalism rests on distortion, the capitalist class seems like it has a strong interest to promote media that falsely characterises the state of the world. The capitalist class also seems likely to be the most deluded about the world, since they are safely protected from experiences that might serve to contradict ideology and are deeply indoctrinated from birth in capitalist ideology. I would think that recognising those blindspots would give the worker an advantage, thus shifting through media and seeing where the capitalist is (sometimes unknowingly) misdirecting you, may be advantageous. If the former, the account Vox gives doesn't focus on falsehoods, but instead focuses on framing or spin or distortion more generally. That is, Vox doesn't seem to think that the media lies in the sense of saying that the sky is green, but instead selectively uses facts to push agendas and that our own social networks mediated via social media further this distortion. Insofar as social media was created by capital and exists only so long as it serves the interests of capital (I do not think it is relatively autonomous yet!), this seems plausible although again the Vox does not emphasise the importance of capital, there is still further distortion. quote:Any judgement of media that arrives at the conclusion that it's meaningfully worse now than it was in the past is using a bad measure of quality that doesn't translate to actual outcomes. Someone thinking that Trump is a crusader executing all the pedophiles may be a particularly extreme and amusing falsehood, but it's transparently less harmful than someone trusting the smart/serious-sounding reporting that Iraq had WMDs. The outcome of the information/reporting is the thing that matters, not "how obviously dumb it is." I think the argument you are making is that the lies about WMDs killed more people than QAnon, thus the former is worse than the later. I would agree probably agree, but would be concerned that: 1. It is still not obvious to me how ideology, media reports, and actions intersect in your analysis. Previously, you seemed to imply that statements reported by the media had no real impact on ideology. I assume you think that actions are partially the results of ideology. So do you think the media reports informed the ideology which informed the actions? Because my reading of you previously was that ideology would cause one to justify whatever media reports one received in accordance with the ideology, thus the influence the media report had on the ideology was nil, and so the influence the media reports had on action should also be nil. 2. It is not clear to me who the object of judgment is. I hardly think that the average person embracing the false WMD narrative had much impact on US policy decisions. I would also be willing to bet that had certain policy elites opposed the Iraq War, regardless of popular support it would have been unlikely to happen. So should our only focus of judgment be on those policy elites? 3. I might agree that one is worse than the other, but I am not sure I want to subordinate epistemic norms to ethical norms and even if our ethical norms should take precedent over our epistemic norms when it comes to our actions, I certainly think that we can try to understand how some things might harm us as knowers. 4. One could think that the particular harms of the WMD lie came from a particular configuration of institutional factors, but that there has been an increase in the base rate of bad media reporting, yet the same set of factors has not occurred, explaining why one caused more harm than the other. This effectively expands from (3). We can judge improper epistemic behaviour separate from other types and see why an increase in the former does not necessarily lead to an increase in harm. This would seem to strengthen, rather than weaken, our social analysis.
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Apr 30, 2021 13:42
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Josef bugman posted:Allow me to quote the first paragraph of the first post of this thread: I feel like I'm not following here. I think, previously you said you wanted to treat this evolutionarily, not revolutionarily. But we can delineate things even if we treat them as evolutionary. E.g. We can distinguish between humans and chimpanzees even they both share a common ancestor and we can distinguish between different human ancestors, albeit the boundaries between any two can be blurry. Media literacy could be much lower now than thirties years ago (deeply sceptical there), but that could still be evolutionary. Could you give a brief explanation of how you would distinguish something as being revolutionary vs. evolutionary?
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Apr 30, 2021 20:54
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