Josef bugman posted:

Is it okay to agree and disagree? The business relationship has not altered hugely due to the new technology, but I'd say that the way people relate to media has. The reason I say the business relationship hasn't changed that much is because the fundamental reason for most media in terms of things like Newspapers, TV, radio etc has been to generate profit. The excuses as to why you can pay Opinion writers so much and actual journalists so little has changed, but you could argue that the essential condition hasn't fundamentally altered. As regards how people relate to the media though, you are absolutely right on that.

Josef bugman posted:

But isn't this, whats the opposite of reductive, adductive? Ragebait and clickbait have always existed as part of the media ecosystem, however their relationship towards readers or listeners has altered.

Josef bugman posted:

Not especially. It's arguing that the relationship of "get the most eyes on product" has simply shifted emphasis from an internal audience (keep the readers reading) to an external one as well (keep the readers reading and try and entice new readers).

I'd say it's important because it shows how little has truly changed.

quote:

Five Key Questions of Media Literacy
1. Who created this message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
3. How might different people understand this message differently than me?
4. What values, lifestyles and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
5. Why is this message being sent?

Five Core Concepts
1. All media messages are ‘constructed.’
2. Media messages are constructed usinga creative language with its own rules.
3. Different people experience the same media message differently.
4. Media have embedded values and points of view.
5. Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power.

quote:

While it is too early to state whether the new coronavirus variant discovered by CCMB (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology) N440K, is the variant that is creating havoc in Visakhapatnam and other parts of the State, experts say the new prevalent variant, which is being called as the AP variant as it was first discovered in Kurnool, is at least 15 times more virulent than the earlier ones, and may be even stronger than the Indian variants of B1.617 and B1.618.

quote:

Divya Tej Sowpati, scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, and who closely works with genome sequencing of coronavirus said that the variant was closely related to the coronavirus lineage B.1.36 and had previously been linked to a spike in cases in several states of South India. "The defining mutation is N440K, a mutation that was known since last year and widely prevalent in Andhra Pradesh. When tested in cell culture studies, they appeared to spread quite quickly but that's not how it always plays out in the real world," he said in a phone conversation.

“N440K is slowly dying out and was fast being replaced by two other variants — B.1.1.7 and B.1.617 in almost all southern states including Kerala,” said Vinod Scaria, scientist at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi. The N440K had been associated with cases of reinfection in Delhi and possibly helped the coronavirus bind tighter to lung cells. B.1.1.7 and B.1.617 are the 'UK Variant' and the Indian variant, also known as the 'double mutant.'

quote:

“We are still to ascertain, which strain is in circulation right now, as samples have been sent to CCMB for analysis. But one thing is certain that the variant at present which is in circulation in Visakhapatnam is quite different from what we have seen during the first wave last year,” said District Collector V. Vinay Chand, who has been updated by senior doctors in the health department.

quote:

Confirming the enhanced power of the virus, District COVID Special Officer and Principal of Andhra Medical College P.V. Sudhakar said, “We have observed that the new variant has shorter incubation period and the progress of the disease is much rapid. In the earlier cases, a patient affected with the virus would take at least a week to reach the hypoxia or dyspnea stage. But in the present context, patients are reaching the serious condition stage within three or four days. And that is why there is heavy pressure on beds with oxygen or ICU beds,” he said.

quote:

Experts also point out that unlike during the first wave, a shorter exposure is enough to acquire the virus, which enables an infected person to infect four to five persons, within a shorter contact span.

“Most essentially, none is spared, as we have observed that it is affecting the younger population in a big way, including those who are fitness freaks and have high immunity levels. It is also observed that cytokine storm is occurring faster, and some are responding to treatment and some are not,” said Dr. Sudhakar.

quote:

According to the experts the bottomline is — this variant is highly unpredictable.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

I think some of the heat your dismissal has been getting comes from the imputation of bad faith to the authors of the book. What convinces you that the authors have this specific goal and aren’t to be taken at their word?

Sekhem posted:

That's not an ultimatum to require every response to do so. It doesn't preclude me from addressing your posts requesting examples from me personally, for instance. I don't think you're engaging in good faith here.

Sekhem posted:

I think a useful framing of the PM is that it understands the processes of bias as "filters" that data is processed through. It doesn't provide us with the methods for verifying the bare data that forms the inputs, but I don't think any media analysis framework will. We're always going to need to invoke political, economic, historical analysis in order to do that. What media analysis does help us do is recover the input data from the filters that impact its presentation. We correct for the distortions that over/underemphasis, narrative framing etc. present, in order to recover a presentation of facts that's as neutral and value-free as we can manage.

Sekhem posted:

It's not a normative judgement, it's a thesis from MC that describes relative media presentation of victims of violence. An example given in the book is the assassination of one Polish priest in the Socialist Poland paralleling the execution of untold numbers of dissident priests by right-wing death squads in Latin America during the same period. The former is deemed a victim "worthy" of persistent media attention, while the latter is "unworthy" of the mainstream media and relegated to a marginal concern.

The point of bringing this up is to question whether the propaganda model necessarily leads to skepticism towards the reality of events. MC doesn't question the factual basis of the assassination of Father Jerzy, yet recognises that the relative attention and significance given to this event in proportion to others is indicative of a political line.

This is a rejoinder to the claims that the PM necessarily implies a factual rejection of stories reported in mainstream media. Rather, it explicitly presents the "worthy" / "unworthy" lens as an illustration of how the reality of events is a distinct question to how events are leveraged narratively in the media.

Sekhem posted:

You're repeatedly saying that it can't reliably make predictive claims, is unfalsifiable and can justify anything, etc. but I simply don't see how this is true. The PM, to me, clearly seems to provide falsifiable claims about what narrative framing and what level of attention are going to be given to current events in a statistically significant aggregate sense. MC makes very clear direct quantifiable metrics that could be used to assess these predictions, such as number of stories, their relative wordcounts, placement of such stories in the outlet's pages, frequency of use of particular terms and designations, etc.

Sekhem posted:

I don't even particularly like Chomsky and am barely familiar with Herman's independent works. My posts have had some pretty critical things to say about both of them. Part of what I'm interested in is how this model - despite what some detractors have claimed, but I think their objections were pretty thoroughly dismissed in previous pages - is taken pretty seriously academically. That would be a very curious, and concerning, fact if genocide denial or related colossal failures of reasoning were implicit or endemic to this methodology.

Particularly what leads to me being skeptical of this is that MC is, as far as I remember, a very transparent and direct work. It makes its theses and methodology very clear, in a way that's pretty easy to isolate from anything else the authors might have written. If such faults were so endemic I think they would be very identifiable in the text itself, but the critiques and rejections here seem to be doing basically anything but engaging with its model of media analysis directly. Which is what this thread should be for, I think.

Discendo Vox posted:

I'm desperate to spend less time at the Omaha Zoo's latest exhibit

Sekhem posted:

I don't think it's necessarily the best approach to doing all this, but I certainly don't think its contributions are trivial.

Sekhem posted:

Sure, there's critical discourse analysis and sociology of knowledge that follows people like Foucault, Bourdieu or Habermas.

Sekhem posted:

What would sealioning mean in this context? My questions and points of arguments were, as far as I can tell, responsive to relevant and direct arguments people were making.

I never intended to provide a positive argument for the PM's model beyond the basic fact that it's a falsifiable and nontrivial model. People were disputing that, so I thought it was reasonable to contest these claims. Are these arguments just off limits for me to respond to? Am I supposed to just ignore them if I don't have a vociferous defence of MC to pull out? I'm really struggling to understand why you're expecting this of me in particular.

Do you understand how it's also immensely frustrating to be expected to suddenly post a detailed and elaborate argument completely different to the one I was making on a completely different subject, without actually engaging with the arguments I'm making?

I was simply asked for another example, so I responded with one. If you're expecting more than namedropping, then maybe they'd ask more than a single sentence request? Don't we have a meet effort with effort expectation here?

e: To make my perspective more clear, what happened in this thread as I saw it was an immediate and reflexive preemptive dismissal of even engaging with the model on its own terms. This was to the degree that fool of sound had to step in at several times to try and get discussion on the subject along a more productive path.

It may appear curious why someone who isn't particularly defensive of the model itself would wade into this discussion, but I'm of the stance that we all benefit from the engaging with serious methods of critical thought on their own terms. Immediate shutting down these considerations, in a way that I saw as basically specious, seemed like a deeply unproductive closure of discussion and disagreement to me.

Sekhem posted:

Particularly what leads to me being skeptical of this is that MC is, as far as I remember, a very transparent and direct work. It makes its theses and methodology very clear, in a way that's pretty easy to isolate from anything else the authors might have written. If such faults were so endemic I think they would be very identifiable in the text itself, but the critiques and rejections here seem to be doing basically anything but engaging with its model of media analysis directly. Which is what this thread should be for, I think.

Fritz the Horse posted:

A short layman's guide to getting started with reading scientific literature

I encourage anyone who is reading and posting a lot about the COVID-19 pandemic to spend a little time digging into actual scientific literature. With some practice you can get fairly decent at interpreting literature and evaluating claims made by the media or on the forums or social media platforms.
This is only meant to get you started and to demystify academic literature. It's not only for supernerds, any ol' goon can read publications. Caveat: this is very bare-bones basics, I'm just encouraging people to start reading publications. There is a ton of nuance and complexity not included here.

• 1. How did I end up reading this publication? How did I get to this article? Was it linked in the forums, a news article, on Twitter etc? What are the motivations and claims of whoever linked me this publication? Is it a preprint? Preprints have not been peer reviewed and often have major flaws. It doesn't mean they're necessarily junk, but approach with great caution. There has also been a flood of "publicity" news releases during the pandemic. Someone will post a preprint about a scary new variant, a journalist will interview the authors and publish an article about how scientists have found a scary new variant. This isn't good science or science reporting, it's the equivalent of posting Twitter hot takes to get clicks.
  
  
• 2. What are the authors' qualifications, are there any conflicts of interest? Is the journal reputable (not predatory?) Glance at the first and last authors of the publication and see what institutions or organizations they're affiliated with. Also see if you can find declaration of conflict of interests or who funded the research. It's important to know if the authors have any biases or if the research is being funded by groups with a vested interest in certain findings. Are the authors experts in the field they're publishing in or are they LARPing because COVID is trendy right now?
  
  There are many "predatory" publishers out there who will publish virtually anything in exchange for a large fee. A lot of bunk pseudoscience gets out this way. It's not always easy to tell, but one way is to simply google search the name of the journal, maybe with "predatory" and if it's a predatory publisher that will usually come up in the first couple google hits.
  
  
• 3. Read the Abstract. This is a one or two paragraph summary of the research and its findings. Often if you don't have journal subscription access, this will be all you can read. COVID publications tend to be made public so you often can read the full text.
  
  
• 4. Read the Discussion and Conclusion sections. You may need to refer back to a Results section to find relevant graphs and tables. Discussion and Conclusion will go over the results of the research, their implications, and directions for future research.
  
  
• 5. If you have time and interest you can read the Introduction/Background section. This may or may not be terribly helpful depending on how familiar with the subject you are. It's probably not worthwhile to get too deep into the Methods and Results sections as those will be highly technical and difficult for anyone not an expert in the field and familiar with methodologies.
  
  
• 6. Does the research support the original claims made? How many samples or participants were in the study? How reasonable is it to apply these results to real-world scenarios? Was this study done in vitro (in a test tube / lab), in an animal (in vivo), is it population data? Are the statistics robust? This part can get a little tricky and discipline-specific but again, practice! And ask experts.

Again, it's going to take practice to get good at this. But you should be able to quickly skim an article in maybe 15-20min and get a good idea of what the actual scientific literature is saying.

CommieGIR posted:

No its not? Even if the GRU released evidence of what everyone already knew: That the DNC rigged it against Bernie, what does that change? Not a god damned thing. It doesn't make the leaks more trustworthy? It just basically confirms what everyone knew.

What else in the leaks changed anything about the DNC? The fact that their emails were crass? Please. But given the context of why Putin and the GRU wanted them leaked, as well as Assange's personal goals and arrangements with Trump's campaign, it was media fodder and not much else.

quote:

On August 12, 2016, DCLeaks released information about more than 200 Democratic lawmakers, including their personal cellphone numbers.[18] The numerous prank calls that Hillary Clinton received from this disclosure along with the loss of her campaign's email security severely disrupted her campaign, which changed its contact information on October 7, 2016 by calling each of her contacts one at a time.[2]

Nix Panicus posted:

Could you be more specific about what you believe was the misinformation being spread? Was there something else, or are you still saying the DNC leaks were 'misinformation' because you find it convenient, ideologically or rhetorically, to disagree with them?

fool of sound posted:

Yeah wow, this is wild. I've been skimming archives and while outright debunking got coverage, basically every paper of note was platforming outright smears of Wilson's investigation or the apocalyptic 'insider' reporting of Judith Miller that were largely just the uncritically repeated lies of an Iraqi opposition group lobbying for a coup. It got much fairer play in foreign press, even in the BBC.

It's remarkable how well the narrative was shifted to "well we were just doing our job but were lied to" once the truth started coming out, even the NYT's famous mea culpa just reads as rear end-covering and a barely-apology.

The Kingfish posted:

What is the relevance of any of this if the leaks are true?

The Kingfish posted:

Not when the “facts” at issue are primary documents.

Probably Magic posted:

If you have only negative examples of what you're talking about and then can't really provide positive examples, that comes across more as just using a supposedly academic thread to poo poo on people's sources who you don't like because you are, well, never putting your own sources under the microscope.

Like, a guy can't wait to refer to his own OP, and then can't name a single source on demand for where he's getting his OP from. At no point is there a works cited in that multiple-post OP. I can't imagine in college listing in the bibliography, "Probably Magic, stuff I read in the library, check out my rental history if you want to know what I was talking about."

Discendo Vox posted:

I've repeatedly cited sources in the individual effortposts. That said, while setting up the OP materials, this was a list I made at one point of the books I was working from. This isn't exhaustive; I know I have some Toulmin I was reading for this too.

• Shannon & Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication [in the OP, freely available online]
  
• Rice & Atkin, Public Communication Campaigns, 3rd ed. [common applied persuasion text, some parts online]
  
• Jowell & O'Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, 5th ed. [common undergrad text from a mostly humanities perspective]
  
• O'Keefe, Persuasion: Theory and Research, 3rd ed. [common grad/undergrad text on persuasion theories]
  
• Littlejohn & Foss, Theories of Human Communication, 10th ed. [Another undergrad text, may be available online]
  
• Multiple essays from Dieterich, ed., Teaching about Doublespeak [unused, old and from outside mainline thought, was going to use for a section on propaganda]
  
• The AP Stylebook (2012 version) [just the one I have on hand]
  
• Pfau & Parrott, Persuasive Communication Campaigns [out of print now I think but good undergrad text on comm campaigns for e.g. public health]
  
• Newman & Newman, Evidence [Think I used this for some examples, mostly about policy argumentation]
  
• Crossley & Wilson, How to argue [unused, for an introduction to claims iirc]
  
• Fotheringham, Perspectives on Persuasion [old and weird but good on basic examples of communication]
  
• Janis et al, Personality and Persuasibility [more persuasion theory]
  
• Latour, Science in Action [for ANT and network effects, which I'm going to have to cover later]
  
• Esrock, Hart & Leichty, "Smoking out the Opposition: The Rhetoric of Reaction and the Kentucky Cigarette Excise Tax Campaign", from Communication Activism vol 1 [unused, from a first draft of including reactionary rhetoric in the OP]
  

(That said, I also wound up deleting a ton of stuff from the OP so it would be less overwhelming and get it out on time.)

What you are telling us, with every post, repeatedly, is that you're actively contemptuous of the idea of discussion of a shared reality and want to wield information as a rhetorical cudgel without being called on it.

Probably Magic posted:

That was a problem before 2021, though, so what event could've precluded that this thread just had to be invented to counterbalance all the misinformation out there... oh, the election of Joe Biden, I see.

fool of sound posted:

I am a swing state NoJoe who is thoroughly pessimistic about electorialism,

fool of sound posted:

I am a communist, albeit of the depressed variety who thinks that the conditions for creating a communist state don't currently exist in the developed world and the best we can hope for it to make do for the foreseeable future.

Ruzihm posted:

I might be misconstruing the conversation but I don't think "the art" was referring to the diagram used in the post, but was a metaphor for a piece of media which someone may not have the ability to make but may be able to criticize regardless.

Cease to Hope posted:

fool of sound posted:

This thread is intended for goons to cooperatively improve their ability to navigate the fraught modern media landscape; assisting one another separate fact from editorial, guiding each other to quality information, and teach each other to avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias.

This thread will be strictly moderated. To an even greater degree than most other threads, you are expected to read entire articles, think about them critically, and make thoughtful, earnest posts. Remember: bad articles aren't necessarily propaganda, and 'universal skepticism' is frequently just as intellectually lazy as credulity.

If you want to dunk on outright obvious garbage, consider instead posting in the Right Wing Media thread. This thread is for analysis and potentially debunking of competently constructed articles.

quote:

What have we learned?
First, what you mean isn’t the same as what you say, or what your audience hears. Your ideas or beliefs or intentions have to be converted into a message, which travels through a medium that further distorts its content, and then has to be interpreted by the recipient.

Second, to communicate your meaning, you have to think about how the message will be received. It’s not enough to care passionately about your beliefs. Hell, caring passionately can make it harder to communicate! You need to be able to anticipate how your message will be mediated to construct your message so that it conveys your desired idea and your audience will understand it. GreyJoyBastard didn’t have too much of a chance because of radium, but if he’d included a short message at the top of his post saying “I understand this is not like my usual posting, but I promise this thread is not related to my collection of My Little Pony alternate universe harem novellas”…it might have helped. He needed to think about how the forums could screw up his message, and how his target audience doesn’t share his well-known love of 1980s camp cinema and costumed horse romance.

If you don’t actively think about how your message will be mediated and received, and how it relates to your goals, you’re talking to yourself, not others. You're masturbating, not communicating. DPPH is closed. We try to discourage that practice these days.

Third and most importantly, all messages are mediated.
When we usually think of media, we think of getting information from an outside source, like a newspaper, that “mediates” the message. But every medium, every source, selects and influences how a message is shaped and ultimately received.

What’s more, messages are mediated many times over. When you see and post a tweet that contains a link to a news story, the reporter is a mediator for the message- but so is the source for the story, and the way they talked to the reporter, and the editor, and the newspaper’s social media account, and the person who retweets it, and the twitter format…and so are you, the person who posts that tweet on the forums.

When we think of media literacy, then it’s not just about understanding how the “news media” operates. We get information in all kinds of ways, and very little of it is only mediated by reporters. Media literacy is about understanding how the process of communication affects the messages we receive, and how we can better participate in communication, as message creators and receivers.