Media Analysis & Criticism

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cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; I am interested in most phases of data processing.

Cease to Hope posted:

[...]
My personal thinking is that "noise" is a fundamentally wrongheaded way of thinking about it.
[...]
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.
[...]
there is no message independent of the "noise".

I'll expand on this, there are boring and confusing words.

The Shannon-Weaver model (which should just be called the Shannon model) attempts to adapt the Shannon model of information-theoretic communication to human communication. This isn't entirely invalid, especially because information theory is often interpreted through subjective Bayesian probability. But "correct" and "useful" are two different things. You can contort anything into anything and everything is a special case of everything else.

The S-W model conceives of human communication as having a sender and receiver. This is sufficient in principle, but it just adds to the awkwardness, because it is first-order on the surface. There's no first-class treatment of higher-order bidirectional feedbacks, which affect the distribution of the noise, and vice-versa. In addition, only pairwise interactions are first-class, which sucks when talking about more than two agents.

For these reasons, I don't think it is particularly useful. But what should a useful model look like?

First, let's make a model of a model. Models are things which try to naturally mirror the structure of things. A good model should naturally extend its structure to internalize observations of the objects outside of itself which it is attempting to reflect. This is to say, its structure follows the structure of the processes external to it which the model attempts to reflectively internalize. Put differently, additional evidence should be universally explainable under the model, to the best extent possible/reasonable.

Social systems (of which media communications are a part) are incredibly complex, and of unbounded order of interactions. The real kicker, though, is that is that anyone thinking about these systems is part of the system. That means that anyone claiming to be "objective" is objectively wrong (but saying that also necessarily has a tinge of subjectivity). All models themselves, of any kind, exists in moments coded as mental states, papers, speech, etc. As such, every model ever was developed by people who are informed by their own contexts, and thus always contains at least a whiff of implicit subjectivity. This matters the least in the most objective areas of inquiry - mathematics and to a lesser extent theoretical physics - but even these are subject to interpretations of probability and computation, choices of axioms, etc. As such, these effects can usually (but not always) be ignored in these fields. However, widely-applicable models of complex systems - especially social systems - can't get away from this problem, as much as many social scientists would like it pretend it doesn't exist.

So far, we have some words about what a broadly useful social communication model should be: it should internalize not only pairwise interactions between individuals and the media, but also be extensible to relations between individuals, their material situation, etc. As a part of this (and vice-versa), a good media model should be able to reflect moments of itself within itself, to account for its place in the context of things it is attempting to model. These requirements, taken together, describe a dialectical system.

For these and other reasons I really think dialectical methods are the only sane framework(s) to understand problems like these. Everything is subjective, so it's better to include subjectivity explicitly, but then synthesize moments of pure objective structures out of that subjective seed. This is a natural, or equivalently, universal, in that it follows the structure of the underlying process. We are arguing about media bullshit now, jointly introducing, contradicting, and synthesizing our ideas, both as mental structures in our brain and communication as posts in this thread, all subject to our context - this is dialectical. Contained within this are moments of more particular model structures, such as the S-W model, but these also arise from this same dialectical process.

The main objective parts of the Hegelian formulation of dialectical logic - higher order synthesis of "unities of opposites" - even has a formal basis every bit as valid as the Shannon information model, in terms of higher category theory:

http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/Aufhebung
http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/adjoint+modality
http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/Hegelian+taco

In addition to social models, etc., this is also a natural framework for the foundations of physics and mathematics. The big idea, I think, is that this sort of dialectical ontoogical expansion allows us to "factor out" subjectivity in a pretty powerful way, and thus also change or localize on new interpretations.

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 14, 2022

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 18:03

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 22:11

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; I am interested in most phases of data processing.

Cease to Hope posted:

It always comes back to Hegel, lol

I think all of this is a productive way of understanding thought and communication, but where I disagree is the nature of a message and its meaning. I think approaching meaning from the idea that it can/should be understood in the way you understand the existence of an objectively real object, nor do I think it can be accurately described by formal structures in the manner of mathematics.

To be clear on the mathematical interpretation, I do not think it will ever be fruitful to try to completely formalize things like meaning and communication, and I don't think it even makes sense to try. To the extent that such formal methods could be used, I see it more as formalization of certain parts, and/or bookkeping. These concrete notions of objectivity and structure also are on spectrum - language syntax apart from semantics is pretty objective, and the category theory is really just a sub-language of symbolic rules. Still, this gives us a meta-structure which contains moments of subjectivity and objectivity everywhere, allowing us to glide between interpretations, confidence, etc.

quote:

Applying an empirical lens to meaning is always going to fail, because meaning isn't an object.

"Objective" can really be seen as dealing with "objects," more like things out of themselves. The advantage of dialectical methods here, I think, is that they combine both subjectivity and objectivity in a relatively clear way, to help avoid some of the overconfidence that ostensibly objective models like S-W tend to promote. To the extent we talk about meaning, I still see it as objective, because we are treating this ineffable thing-in-itselfness as an object, and attempting to pull some degree of objectivity out of it.

quote:

There's no way to factor out subjectivity WRT "the message". Even if you could, there'd be nothing left when you were done.

Not completely, but you can have moments of pretending that you can, which then immediately collapse.

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jan 14, 2022

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 18:53

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; I am interested in most phases of data processing.

Cease to Hope posted:

This is the approach I fundamentally disagree with. The "object", the ineffable thing, is not a meaning contained in the message, but rather (a model of) the mind of the speaker. But your process of discernment is not observing a fixed reality, but rather writing an entirely new fiction that incorporates your own narrative as much or more than it does the speaker's. Not only will this new fiction inevitably change the mind of the speaker if they ever encounter it (if only by affecting their own model of your mind), but there isn't an objectively true model of a mind in their own mind that you're only discerning fuzzily. The idea of the mind as an object is itself a model/fiction.

I actually agree with what I think you mean here. Objectiveness only exists in moments, which collapse because the concept itself cannot exist without contradiction. The value is that we can pretend the objectiveness does exist in restricted modes/moments.

quote:

To drag this back to learning how to read the newspaper better:

Minds and truths and messages are stories. It's important to separate them from objects. (This is possibly unhelpfully binary: Objects are always surrounded by a swirling tangle of stories and associations, and stories themselves exist as artifacts and events.)

To the extent we talk about them, minds and truths and messages are objects. We are reflecting them as discrete objects within our minds.

quote:

I think we need to use different models of understanding to answer the questions, "Is CNN a useful source of news?" and "What happened in Douma in 2018?" Both of these topics are media literacy! But "usefulness" is not an object we can discern the way we can discern physical things or events.

This is where we get into higher unities involving objects reflecting interactions of objects, etc. More plainly, motivations, power, etc, etc. Usefulness is subjective, but a useful media literacy method is one that we judge as helping us. I think the real proof that dialectics is the best meta-method here is that we are doing dialectics right now. These posts are encodings of the objects of these concepts in our brains, and they are interacting and creating new forms.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 19:41

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; I am interested in most phases of data processing.

raminasi posted:

In practice this means that if you find something interesting from a suspect mediator you should be able to find other commentary on the topic somewhere and compare notes rather than just dismiss it entirely. (If you can�t find anything anywhere else, well, now you know why that outlet was suspect.)

It's also important to select a diversity of outlets, whose ideological bent or (partially known) motivation is different. For example, NYT and WaPo have very similar reporting and editorial biases on foreign policy because they are part of the same political/economic establishment. This has been true even when they have both been uniformly, disastrously wrong - so we can discard the idea that their agreement is because they have converged on some mystical "objectivity."
I read them, but I also read things like Al Jazeera and (gasp) China Daily to get a perspective from sources with different FP motivations; common threads that can be inferred are then less dependent on the bias of each source.

I think this problem is getting worse for US outlets, so it is becoming more important to select a variety of less-correlated sources. Media consolidation in the US has decreased the diversity of reporting and editorial bias. More specifically, by putting media control in the hands of a smaller group of more wealthy people, reporting overall becomes more aligned to their narrow set of opinions and material interests. I would think this is self-reinforcing to an extent: The now fewer outlets independently move to reflect the interests of their (less diverse) respective managements. This then produces a narrower distribution of overall bias. Outlets then view each other's behavior in this updated, more homogeneous environment, which then narrows the "overton window" of acceptable reporting norms further.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 17:35

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; I am interested in most phases of data processing.

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# ¿ Nov 7, 2022 04:07

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