It has been well remarked, that in pre-packaging the
selection of articles they show you, based on your personal browsing history
and what their metrics predict you’ll want to see, news outlets and news
aggregators are swaddling their readers in solipsism, so that what you ever get
to see is a foregone conclusion.
That, superadded to the bias problems of outlets with an agenda to push.
I try to fight this, in part by sampling a wide variety of
outlets in various languages and countries (the taboos in America differ from
those in Europe, for example, so that a story suppressed in one venue might be reported in another). But access to these (apart from
those I regularly check into as a matter of course, like nzz.ch and figaro.fr
and heise.de/tp and derstandard.at, usw.) is generally, again, via aggregators -- news.google.*…. Naturally, the Google staff may have
their own slant, but hopefully that differs from country to country.
Recently, however, something quite disturbing happened, on
the British version --news.google.co.uk [not a typo: .co, not .com]: They suddenly started adding entire sections grouped
by special-interest material. (This happened only on this Mac, not on our tablet running Android.)
The only previous one, “Suggested for You”, is unobjectionable, being clearly so labeled, and moreover they offer a “Still interested? Yes/No” opt-out option. For example, they flag articles about the TV show Blindspot, a holdover from when I nursed hopes (since dashed) that it might prove any good.
The only previous one, “Suggested for You”, is unobjectionable, being clearly so labeled, and moreover they offer a “Still interested? Yes/No” opt-out option. For example, they flag articles about the TV show Blindspot, a holdover from when I nursed hopes (since dashed) that it might prove any good.
But now additionally, all of a sudden, from nowhere, there
are sections, titled with the same font as the standard ones that everybody
sees (unless you specifically opt out), like “World” or “Business”, clearly
culled (though very spottily) from my search history:
“Physics” [this, in addition to the
“Sci/Tech” section that is standard]
“Computer Security” [ditto]
“topological” [sic, this one
lower-case; the relic of once search on the math topic; but results were flooded
with engineering senses like “topological insulators”]
“yemen” [again lower-case --
bizarre]
That is marginally more concerning, since I didn’t ask for
it, and since the selection is odd (I haven't searched on "topological" for well over a year). But what is really hair-raising is that, here on
news.google.co.uk, the section that I mostly log in for, namely “U.K.”, has been entirely suppressed, and replaced
by the same “U.S.” section (today’s top story on this supposedly U.K.-focussed
site: “Headless body found in Texas Pick-up”).
Why they did that is baffling. Certainly it bears no relation to my own clicking history (since that is the one and only section I ever click on at that site), let alone to common sense (suppress the U.K. section for someone specifically asking for .co.uk).
So now there are two countries whose press I cannot access via news.google -- the other being Spain, which Google stopped indexing a while back, in (justified, IMO) protest against an overreaching law passed by the Spanish parliament.
So now there are two countries whose press I cannot access via news.google -- the other being Spain, which Google stopped indexing a while back, in (justified, IMO) protest against an overreaching law passed by the Spanish parliament.
[The Label for this piece La société du spectacle, a notion popularized by the situationistes half a century ago, and
in the U.S. by Boorstin’s The Image and subsequent works.. All that has changed since then is
that, increasingly, the spectacle we watched is an individualized peep-show booth.]
~
The decline in quality -- in sheer competence -- at the news
outlets (television especially, but newspapers as well) over the past couple of
decades, is noticeable.
An interesting perspective from the White House messaging
guy:
“40 percent of newspaper-industry
professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade … The average reporter
we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of
being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know
nothing.”
~
Facebook (which I never go near -- or anyhow, not knowingly)
likewise pushes certain news stories over others, and has lately been embroiled
in controversy over their slant. To
be fair, though, the company has been under intense pressure from the Rot-Grün-Merkel
faction to censor not only news recommendations, but
individual Facebook pages, cleansing them of opinions that dissent from the Willkommenseuphorie route to the destruction of Germany. (We here at WDJ
suffer, as you see, from no such bias.)
At another level -- more fundamental -- than that of
issue-specific bias, is the general self-generated self-reflecting
echo-of(echo-of(echo-of…)) incestuous nature of “trending” stories -- trending
because they’re trending, like celebrities famous for being famous.
-- Well, so long as we’re beating up on Facebook, we hereby
huffily object to their far-from-adequate plugging of this blogspot, the “World
of Dr Justice”, pourtant the most
respected source of worldly and otherworldly insight apart from The Onion
(en revanche, we’re much funnier than they are).
~
In an interview the other day, an economist called the
market position of entities like Amazon and Google, monopolies on a scale not
seen since the days of the robber barons -- of Standard Oil and the
railroads. But while those
behemoths primarily impacted our pocketbooks, the current cyber-masters are in
a position to mess with our minds.
The comparison is obvious enough, once made; but it is hard to wrap your heads
around it, since monopolists (we are brought up knowing) are men in suits, with
smokestack hats and villain whiskers -- not cheeky dudes in chinos.
All the economist could come up with, by way of remedy, was
to somehow nationalize all that stuff, “Like the Post Office” -- a comparison
less than reassuring.
The segment struck me since, just the day before, none other
than Donald Trump had brought up much the same point, in the process pointing out that the agenda-drenched
billionaire Bezos, the king of the Amazon, bought up (the bedraggled remains of)
the Washington Post -- his new toy.
(Hey, just sayin'; credit where credit is due.)
For this Trump was sniffily dismissed by the knowing, as
naïve and ill-informed. (Much as
Hillary and her minions dismissed candidate Obama as “naïve”.)
(Hey, just sayin'; credit where credit is due.)
[TBC]
What I notice is the clumsiness and ad-aptitude of the whole thing. They peg me for lots of stuff I don't want and few things I do. Soon the whole mess will be recognized as the mess it is and dropped. I suggest that the true meaning of "newspaper--industry professionals" is "foolish dummies" which is what they always were, although perhaps more entertaining in the old days. Keep in mind that Murrow, Kronkite, Huntley and Brinkley were just reading words and ideas produced by others who were just not as attention-getting in their presentation as the afore-mentioned talking heads.
ReplyDeleteCronkite was at the very least to be credited with helping to shape the debate, in a spirit of gravitas. Murrow was before my time, but from what I have read he was a real player. And William Shirer was magnificent -- even if most of what he observed never made it into the newspapers, but into his own books:
Deletehttp://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/William%20Shirer
I use Flipboard. It isn't perfect but it allows me to set the parameters for the domestic news I receive. No doubt we cannot be passive about this.
ReplyDeleteI have been searching for years for Hitchcock's (?) "Brain in a Jar"? TV episode...late 50's?... I remember it opening with the protagonist in a hospital bed reading a well known essential writings (?) edition of Nietzsche (black cover). I've searched extensively with Google...but to no avail. Help?
ReplyDeleteHmm, poking around YouTube, no such luck.
DeleteBut that classic episode is fondly recalled here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/brains-in-vat.html
Yes, that's where I first caught your reference. Can you confirm the reading of Nietzsche in the first scene? If so, that's the episode that has remained with me for years...and I'll continue my search. I found a list of all the Hitchcock episodes at one time...I'll revisit that line of search. Thx, Dr. Dale
ReplyDelete