Slashdot Mirror
The Dark Side of "Me Media"
Most people online cherish and support the freedom to control their information environment, to evaluate sources of information, to block spam and obnoxious intrusions. Reader moderation (and even higher-order filtering systems) represent the first meaningful efforts to control the epidemic hostility, spamming and chaos that overwhelm public spaces online. This self-policing in media is a radical and powerful idea -- but it isn't that simple. It also permits people to eliminate opposing points of view, promoting a new kind of fragmentation.
Those who moderate comments on Slashdot, Kuro5shin and other community-based weblogs may downgrade content they don't find worthwhile in a genuine effort to express their thoughts as readers and participants -- a freedom no newspaper reader or television viewer has. One person's new freedom is another's' censorship, though. Congress has required, for instance, that schools and libraries who want to take advantage of lucrative e-Rate funding for their networking projects employ content-filtering software. The same basic mechanism (content is chosen before it reaches the viewer), but with very different motivations. As various methods and reasons for content filtering spread, they bring with them some dark clouds.
In republic.com, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argues that through its filtering and moderating systems, the Internet may be Balkanizing speech and thought, and thus weakening democracy, by eliminating the public spaces that traditionally offered common ground. Sunstein asserts that the age of mass media is ending, that radically de-centralized and intensely individualistic forms of information are not only emerging but becoming dominant. But he believes that certain elements remain essential for a well-functioning system of free expression, and that filtering and moderation software may endanger them.
People living in democracies, Sunstein maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might not have chosen themselves. Unplanned, spontaneous, unanticipated encounters are central, though they "often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating." They are important, nonetheless, he says, partly because they protect against fragmentation and extremism, a predictable outcome when like-minded people communicate only with one another."
Sunstein also cites the impact of collaborative filtering programs like those used by Amazon and other sites which collect information on past use and preferences, and allow people to pre-select from a menu of subjects and books they are likely to like or agree with. Clearly this is a customer service, but it's also a way of filtering out ideas and subjects people don't want to hear. Browsers in a store are nearly guaranteed to come across unanticipated or new ideas. The users of collaborative filtering systems will see far fewer.
Sunstein believes that citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without them, any heterogeneous society will have a much tougher time addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. "Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form of social glue," he notes.
Sunstein's imagined -- but very plausible -- world of innumerable, diverse editions of the "the Daily Me" is the furthest thing from a utopian dream; it will, he claims, create serious problems. Sunstein offers several possibilities for reform. He suggests "must-carry" rules in the form of links imposed on the most popular websites, designed to produce exposure to substantive questions. He even advocates "must-carry" rules, also in the form of links, for even the most highly partisan websites, designed to ensure that viewers learn about opposing views.
These interventions into Net content are provocative, but a bit of a shocker coming from a Constitutional scholar. Should sites really be forced by law to carry view points that are abhorrent to them, to mimic the press's deadly habit of balancing every single point of view with an opposite one, creating eternal arguments and stalemates that turn civic discussions into WWF matches? In a democratic culture, isn't polarization as much a choice as consensus?
Such requirements, he argues, aren't rooted in nostalgia or reactionary love for the past. Nor is Sunstein taking a position for or against technology or its value. He wrote the book, he says, in an effort to explain what makes freedom of expression successful -- a question little considered online, or even in the United States Congress, which routinely enacts censorious, anti-democratic laws in the name of patriotism and morality.
But hardly anyone in high-tech, contemporary America engages in face-to-face, participatory democracy in their town parks and streets. If they do this anywhere, in 2001, they do it online. The Net is the new public space; does that mean it needs those same constitutional protections, and are Netizens obliged to keep at least some of this space open and unfiltered?
Sunstein doesn't fall into the obvious trap of romanticizing the era, blessedly over, when three TV networks controlled much of the news and offered Americans bland, incomplete mirrors of the world. But he has a point when he says that for all their flaws, TV broadcasts had vast audiences and had the quality of a genuinely common experience. One of the central accomplishments of the American Revolution was the crafting a political process that peacefully absorbed different points-of-view. It has worked astonishingly well, longer than almost any previous democratic political system.
In the last 30 years, though, the networks have lost about a third of their audience, or 39 million viewers. The most highly rated show on any current network has fewer viewers than the fifteenth highest-rated show of the 1970's. Sunstein doesn't suggest that all our new choices -- the Net, Web, cable -- are bad. "My only claim is that a common set of frameworks and experiences is valuable for a heterogeneous society, and that a system with limitless options, making for diverse choices, will compromise some important social values. ... if we believe that a set of common experiences promotes active citizenship and mutual self-understanding, we will be concerned by any developments that greatly reduce those experiences."
People who care about the Internet ought to be concerned. The tech nation may be a collection of brilliant, creative, outspoken people, but it defines the notion of being politically disconnected. The legislative system which nominally represents Net users passes laws from the Communications Decency Act to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to the Children's Internet Protection Act that directly impinge upon our freedom of expression. But there is little organized response, or even much awareness.
The truth is that people who increasingly turn to filtering programs (including ready-made portal sites) become accustomed to censoring ideas they think they may not like. But they can't ever really be sure, since they have no idea what they're not seeing, or how the person or ideas they are blocking might have evolved.
Just ask Jeffrey Pollock. When Pollock ran for Congress last year, he posted campaign information and position papers on a campaign web site. Among others things, he declared his support for Federally-mandated use of Net filtering programs to block porn in schools and public libraries. He was amazed to learn that his own site was blocked by CyberPatrol.
If there is a flaw in Sunstein's arguments, it is that the information winnowing he decries has become more and more necessary due to the sheer volume of data beamed at individual users. In a sense, the moderation advocates are correct when they say they are preserving people's freedom to think and make information choices.
The volume of hostility and junk communications coming off the Net and Web is now staggering, itself a threat to a democratic culture. Moderating systems can also identify leaders and spokesmen, and make it easier to find intelligent or responsive comments. They take some power away from the hostile and disruptive. And they have quickly become valued communication tools: "I personally love the moderation and meta moderation system," e-mailed one advocate of this site's tiered approach to moderation, "self-policing while at the same time adding a degree of competition and ego-feeding."
Sunstein offers no meaningful solutions for dealing with flamers, or professional lobbyists who flood people with spam.
His argument also seems to pre-suppose that common spaces won't evolve on the Net without help. But just why not? Wouldn't a democratic model hold that eventually, when enough people want such a space, they will create and participate in it? And if they don't want such a space, isn't that also their choice?
Perhaps these spaces won't be like the old TV networks, but they could conceivably be big and open enough to host the civic functions that streets and parks used to serve. After all, television networks themselves act as a giant filter, as does much of Big Media. They picked a handful of stories -- fires, celebrity gossi$presented them as a picture of the world. They were inadequate and incomplete, and people abandoned them in droves the first chance they got.
"If an individual freely chooses to join a service that moderates or filters some source of information according to criteria that are fully disclosed to the joining individual, even if those criteria are the 'whim of the moderator,' then the viewer has expressed his inalienable right to listen only to what he wants," writes Shawn McMahon (himself a moderator) in an e-mail to me. "Nothing," McMahon adds, "could be more democratic."
He has a strong point. Don't people have the right to choose the information they want?
But that doesn't make Sunstein's questions any less valid, or his book less significant and compelling.
Look for another viewpoint on this book in an upcoming reader-submitted book review.
I agree. In fact i wish there was a way to cap the level of posts you see. I have no desire to read some long winded "+5, informative" karma whore that isn't a real persons thoughts just a reiteration of slashdot collectives view. Seriusly anything above +3 i really don't want to read. I already know what the slashbot hive mind thinks, i don't need to read it everytime a new article gets posted, i'd rather read a real persons ideas.
This is definitely a wordy way of saying 'why don't we let people do their own content filtering.'. Well, duh!
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
...in his book "Earth." Admittedly there wasn't much dedicated to it - one of the characters, Jen Wolling (IIRC) had a program written for her by a hacker that randomized her news input so that a certain percentage of her news would be drawn in from random sources, as opposed to her preselected resources.
Said hacker was in jail at the time for doing this for a bunch of other people, without their consent!
InThane
posts/topic
36/baseball
136/mouse
164/unsearchable
120/p-to-p
101/GSLV
203/ads
195/broadband
225/Boucher
217/Katz
130/CVS
161/laptops
179/lcd's
324/OS/390
187/10Qbits
Nope.
Katz don't draw 'em out of the woodwork like he used to.
Ranking *after* a goddam politician, and languishing in third overall.
Probably fall back to fourth after baseball gets some more hits...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
That being said, I'm not sure the present situation is any different from what existed in the past. Clearly, depending on the Old Media led to a carefully filtered view of the world -- one which the majority of us had very little control over. What that view bought us, at least in the opinion of the author, was a base level of common experience on which we could build communication. However, that filter was so skiewed toward one dominant view of the world or another, that I seriously doubt it was of real value.
Bottom Line: In the end, we must filter the information that comes at us. The physical structure of our brains is built around filtering information. In fact, the ability to filter and extract meaning from the huge amount of stimuli that hits us every second of every day is one thing that sepparates us from the machines we build around us. Our brains can't deal with it all, so we pick and choose. It's not a question of "if" we filter, but "how".
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Your Servant, B. Baggins
Oh, that doesn't even begin to cover the huge holes in Sunstein's arguments
Admittedly, I haven't read Mr. Sunstein's book myself, but this is the second review that I have read, and they are consistent in their statements of Mr. Sunstein's views, I will assume they are both correct
For a much more logical, intelligent (although peripheral) review of Sunstein, see this George Will column.
It amazes me how someone claiming to be a constitutional scholar interprets the simple mandate "Congress shall make now law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ... " to do exactly the opposite.
Will Catholic web sites be forced to show Satanic messages? Will Gay/lesbian web sites be forced to show Ku Klux Klan viewpoints? What sane person wants give the federal government this power?
Thanks Beboxer, beautiful post. I am fed up with all the negativity surrounding the comments on a Jon Katz post. It really sickens me. It's amazing how poorly Slashdot readers are able to discuss some of the idea presented.
~Squiggle
Complexity Happens
So, once again, some moron thinks that the government should mandate what can and can't be on the internet. Sounds great. Slashdot-style moderation systems work only because there's an option to browse at -1 for those who don't want to be told what they can and can't see. As soon as [insert governing/controlling body here] takes that control away from the users of the information service, a large portion of that information service's users go elsewhere. That would be a terrible thing to do to the internet.
:)
Now, if we could just find a way to run the stupid people away instead...
First off, how can anybody mod up a post which has a sentence ending with "of this there can be no argument."?? Please tell me that you're using your own accounts to mod yourself up.
The precise moderation mechanism used here might be a first, but the concept isn't.
Moderation is no more a right-wing thing than political correctness is. And a right-wing attitude would be to hold people responsible for their actions, so I'm not sure how you come up with the opposite.
What would go a long way toward moderation here would be to get rid of the "Overrated" category, maybe replacing it with more specific negative mods (like "Factually wrong"). "Overrated" has basically become, "Well, you presented your argument in a perfectly reasonable manner, but I don't like your opinion. Zap." Seeing stuff at 2 or 1 get moderated down for being "Overrated" is just cowardice.
Anyway, you've gotta be having a good laugh at the people who modded you up, because there's no way in Hell that you wrote that in any sincerity.
Cheers,
It could have been a troll, who knows. Like I mentioned, the message is the same whether it is a troll or not. There are plenty of people, I'm sure, who share the belief that moderation is dangerously close to censorship. And it is up to us to silence those people. Just kidding.
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Personally I disagree with your comment, but I would still mod it up. Sure, it could be a troll - but does this change your message? Should the poster's intent, as opposed to the actual content, matter? I will also respond to your arguments.
Your comment is flawed from top to bottom by the assumption that all media is, or will be controlled by corporate interests. It is true that corporations control a great deal of our media today, never mind in 20 years. This control does influence our culture more than any other factor. But did /. start out commercially? You seem to be assuming that no other moderated forums will ever pop up after /. and k5.
When enough people are fed up with corporate influence of one site, a new one will be created. Unless free speech on the Internet is stifled (I guess this could happen, though) there will always be a place to speak your mind and hear others' views without being subjected to countless trolls and goatse.cx links.
I am assuming that since you disagree with moderation, you browse at -1 and hide the scores on comments. As of this post, your comment is at 4. Like I said, while I disagree with your views I would never mod your comment down. Remember that moderation is a work in progress and is in its infancy. As long as the goal is to promote civil discussion without silencing anyone's viewpoints, moderation systems are really the only good solution.
At the bottom of any Yahoo! news story, you can "discuss" the story with your fellow netizens. Please visit a story there, preferably on a controversial or incendiary topic, and see what people are "discussing" there. You will find name-calling, racism, and downright ugliness in EVERY discussion you look at there. This, folks, is what we would have if not for moderation.
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In 20 years time it will be the geeks here that created the moderation system moaning about it in YRO articles. This is, yet again in the geek community, hypocrisy.
You seem to think there's an ideal solution; one that will please - if not everybody - then at least the 'right-thinking' people.
You've given a compelling argument for kicking off abusers; the argument against it is the oldest argument in free speech debates, and still the most potent: who decides which posts are trolls? I'd be willing to accept the will of the good Commander, but that's here. Twenty years hence, will I be as willing to accept the word of VA Microsoft, as they eject all posts that complain about MS Linux being a monopoly?
Moderation should not be used. It shouold be a free for all, with the irresponsible forced to face up to what they do.
Again, who decides what's irresponsible? If you're willing to accept one man's[0] decisions on who is responsible, you're courting disaster.
[0]You know what I mean.
Pay attention. "The same goes for ideas...the pre-digested pap can be replaced by discussion, collaboration, and exploration." quoth my original post.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If your opinion is not like mine you are morally defective anyway.
So what was your point, Katz?
I agree with you that choosing the types of stories I want to see, etc. But, I've intentially chosen wide so I would be exposed to more than an extreemly narrow range of topics.
It is the synergy of otherwise unrelated news and information which can bring new ideas. How many people do you think fail to see this and instead severly restrict the type of news (here, or elsewhere) that they are exposed to?
On the other hand, if I never see another sports score I'm sure I'll survive...
Their research showed that people who get their news online frequent *more*, not fewer, sources of news than their offline counterparts, and are exposed to a broader range of topics as a result. Furthermore, nearly everyone checks one or two "general news" sites like NYTimes or CNN, and sees all of the "front page" headlines there. The most common scenario is someone who checks a major site like CNN regularly plus a variety of sites on more specialized topics. Furthermore, the net allows much greater coverage of those specialized topics than would be possible in a print media. So the long and the short of it is, no, there is statistical evidence out there that people don't put blinders on their eyes and only read narrow slices of the news; the vast majority of people in practice chose to combine the narrow and the broad.
And I dare say the average person who gets their news online is better informed than the people who only watch the 6 o'clock news! TV news is all sound bites and no substance; text on the net has more details, more bite to it.
I really wish I could remember the name/source of this study. Anyone help me out here?
- Marshall (Reads WashingtonPost, spacedaily.com, slashdot, bottomquark, and fifteen different AP newsfeeds from ClariNet. Yes I'm a news junkie. ;-)
Not even an article moderation approval header referring to Cats? Damn, you guys do play hardball! ;-)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that punishment (holding someone accountable for their actions...) was a conservative/right-wing ideal, whereas implementing systems to work around the "badness" (ignoring it, giving people freedom from it) was a liberal/left-wing ideal. Anyone else?
But it's not the government's prerogative to force carriers to link to opposition (Should, say, B'nai Brith be forced to link to Stormfront? Should FDR's fireside chats have been followed up by the latest from Tokyo Rose?), nor to require that people read them.
And who decides admittance to the club? Should every fringe philosophy automatically be entitled to the same consideration? If someone were to post the meanderings of toddlers from a classroom, should they carry the same weight? I doubt it...
People have a heavy dose of confirmation bias. That's normal. But the proper place to fight that is probably in the schools, where critical thinking skills can be critically assessed.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I doubt that CNN often provides as detailed coverage as, say, _The Economist_ or other *good* magazines, many of which have online sites (be they pay or otherwise).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Well, they could present JUST the relevant facts -- for instance, on a Constitutionality issue, references to what clauses are purported to apply and why. On many issues, studies and raw data can, and probably should, be cited. And so forth.
And remember that there are usually many different points of view rather than only strict opposites. The bimodal view, such as that often presented by pro/con editorials, often ignores intriguing ideas.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
True enough. It seems to be traditional now on some campuses for leftists to steal and trash/burn school newspaper runs in order to implement content-based censorship...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Neither you nor anybody else has the absolute right to dictate another's thoughts, or lack thereof. You're generally not obligated to agree or even listen to them, however, since that'd be infringing on your thoughts and privacy.
Besides...
Do you have an opinion about, say, WWII? Have you read _Mein Kampf_, _The Will to Power_ , _Also Sprach Zarathrusta_, and other primary sources? Can you trace the development of the Wilson Doctrine, it's failure at Versailles, the weakness of the League of Nations, the structural weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, and so forth? Have you studied how the Germans Wehrmacht learned from the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, which in turn can be traced at least in part to Clausewitzian theory? Do you recall details about the rivalry between the SA brownshirts, the Schutzstaffel, and the various internal power struggles even within the National Socialist party? Have you ever seen an SS army organizational chart?
How much information do you believe is required?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Mainly because, while most people will mod the crap down, it is still there to be read. Sure, I don't really care to read "first pr0st" but sometimes valid viewpoints can be found in the dregs of Score 0 or even -1 sometimes.
Alternativly,
Back in the days of yore (ok 1997) I used to frequent a CCG manufacturers BBS, they had a closed form of moderation that basically meant if you start flaming or being an idiot you'd get your account pulled and your IP blocked (and all yon offending threads would disappear), this was all fine and well until politics got involved. Suddenly people who didn't share an absolute devotion to the company's ideal BBS content started to disappear (read: "the latest release of the product stinks, here's why" would qualify as flame). This at first wasen't a big deal, until more and more users and threads started to mysteriously "disappear". After a while the crowd filtered out to just people who had "nice things to say", what was once an ideal forum for real discussion provided by the company (free market research!) had turned into the "do as we say" BBS where, in order to keep your user account you had to be careful what you said and thought.
So I ask you, is it better to have a form of moderation that is justified by the people, for the people and keeps all content alive (at least while its active). Or is it better to have "someone" choose what content is good for you, and punish those who generate "unwanted" content by giving them the boot, or otherwise restricting their acces? (I, of course, assumed this is what you meant by punishment)
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crazy dynamite monkey
Or are they? It seems to me that peer pressure, brought on by Meta-Moderation here on /. or "Truster User" status on K5 seems to imply that people have a sociological need to moderate other people. People enjoy being lazy, by their very nature. Look at the U.S.A., for God's sake. Just give us our Whoppers, a La-Z-Boy and some XFL football and we're happy for the next 2 hours until we fall asleep and droll all over ourselves.
Television is still going to be the most efficient way of communicating with the masses. People hate to read, write, or do anything constructive. They want the information fed to them. Katz can scream about the "New World Order" of the 'net, but in the end, this is doomed just like all adventurous tasks; there's too much thought involved and people are turned off by thought.
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That's just the way it is
People living in democracies, Sunstein maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might not have chosen themselves.
I actually agree with this. What I *disagree* with is the notion that line noise, trolling, flames, juvenile "I'm better than you are"-ing and other such artifacts of online communication are classifiable as ideas that I need to be exposed to. And in most cases, it is *this* sort of electronic idiocy that most moderation removes - the equivalent of children waving to Mum in the background of news coverage of a disaster.
The other advantage of moderation (even of minor sorts of moderation, like mail filters, or usenet scorefiles) is that it helps me prioritise my time. I have a limited amount of hours in the day that I can spend reading things like Slashdot, usenet, email and soforth. I can choose to read that which I value higher first, and *if I have the time*, I can read that which I value less highly. My value choices are based on my own value system, and one of the things I value highly happens to be reasoned, calm discussion. I'd rather read a well-justified, calm refutation of my arguments than a hotly emotional, incoherent post in support of me.
Possibly I'm strange.
Meg Thornton
--
Perkin's Postulate: Online tech support is designed to provide everything short of actual help.
I'd dispute that anyone can be a primary source of information on a war who died decades before that war was fought.
In Nietzsche's case, though, it's not as silly as it seems to be to cite him as an authority on WWII (but I agree with you that the original poster is citing him out of an ignorance fostered, ironically, by Nazi propaganda).
My great-grandmother's (Jewish) family emigrated from Austria to the US in the 1890s in part because her husband, perceptive to the point of paranoia, and one of Nietzsche's few "fans" at the time, saw in certain passages in Zarathustra, and in N's creepily-worded denunciations of Wagner's circle in Bayreuth, the first warning against a coming "Final Solution."
Not enough is made of this in the literature (Weaver Santiniello made an allusion to it in one essay whose name I don't recall, but that's about it), but Nietzsche not only wasn't an inspiration to Hitler (which even Hitler admitted), but he may have even been the first anti-Nazi, fifty years beforehand. Someone should write a book.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
The fact of the matter is that there is too much information; there certainly is now, there always has been, and will continue to be. As the 'net allows much greater freedom and ability to make ideas public, the issue will only become more pronounced.
How will the Sunsteins decide what information will be mandatory? I don't even mean this question at the Orwellian level: there is just simply too much information to choose from for any possibly democratic organization to make the decision. TV decides what you can watch, and they can do this because (a) it's expensive and complicated to make a TV show, and (b) they control the stream and can thus make whatever programming decisions they want. But the 'net can't be like this, since neither is true.
I think filtering (collaborative or otherwise) is crucial in this day and age, but even if you don't use a computer to help you filter, you do it anyway yourself. The key is to be wary of the ethics and indeed tractability of filtering for someone else!
The media consists of a group of ignorant crackheads whop simply spew out simplistic solutions to social problems like gun control and socialized medecine in order to avoid offending their audience and *gasp* making them think.
poop.
The Internet is at once the greatest threat to and the greatest hope for our liberties. The threats: the web is increasingly the turf of a handful of media companies: Time Warner /AOL, for example. The web also contains sites which most people would find repellant, making it easier for the well-meaning and the prudes to demand access restrictions.
At the same time, the web is our greatest protection from tyranny. Look at what has happened with attempts to ban DeCSS code or obfuscate the power companies' complicity in the California crunch.
How did I run across these things in the first place? Simply by reading /. with a low threshhold. The truth is out there, but adults shouldn't expect to be spoon-fed.
The moderation on slashdot is worse than merely people choosing not to moderate.
The moderation system is corrupted through moderating by viewpoint rather than content.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
Id like to moderate this article as a troll.
I love Americans. Good people. But a wonderfully rose-tinted-glasses view of their own history (it may be Katz saying this, but I find it true of most Americans unfortunately). Personally, I think the Civil War is a great example of not 'peacefully [absorbing] different points-of-view'. Not to say America hasn't done a pretty good job of it, but I think that might tarnish 'astonishingly well' just a little.
Wood Shavings!
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
...actually talking out of his mouth. What I have to comment on is what was said about the moderation system here. I've had my share of positive and negative moderation, from a "First Post!" (which I have done twice, almost had a third for this discussion)and all of my off-topic posts, to all the on-topic stuff that people may consider reading and debating (like my proposed question to Rep. Bucher). Though most of my posts go un-noticed, it's nice to know that there is a moderation system in place that allows the members of the /. community to earn their recognition among the rest of /. Who knows, maybe I could post something and have it modded up to +5 (informative) each time I post.
trolls don't hate homos, you homo.
Take this personaility test.
Democracy means freedom to choose Nope. Democracy means you have to choose what Katz-like leaders of the mob demand you choose. A constitutionally limited republic (such as the USA) means freedom to choose. Words mean something, as much as Mr. Katz would like you to believe otherwise.
But the really important fact here, is that people usually don't like to completely limit their information sources. Who hasn't taken some guilty pleasure in dialing the radio into some talk show (be it Limbaugh or NPR) that you vehemently disagree with and yelling your responses back at the host, letting them get lost in the traffic noise? And who hasn't read the alternative viewpoints on slashdot that seem to regularly get moderated up by having four idiots think it deserves a +1, insightful just for disagreeing with the majority? And lots of people go looking for forums to start arguments with people who disagree with them vehemently. I know that in my early 20s I spent a *lot* of time on Usenet getting into arguments with people whose viewpoints I did not share. I think the only problem with the internet right now is that its hard to find forums that have substantial content -- there's too many trolls, too many Natalie Portmans, too many first posts...
So I think the premise is just crap. They're inventing a problem and an issue in order to try to retain homogenization in how people get their information and how people think.
'Common Framework' sounds suspiciously like 'Group Think.'
This is a foolish characterization. By common framework, the author is referring not only to shared experiences derived from entertainment and the media (e.g.: "where were you when Kennedy was shot?" or the last episode of MASH), but also, and more importantly, to simple acts of citizneship, like voting, school board meeting attendance, and volunteerism to name a few. If that is "groupthink," I am proud to be in the group.
I lot of you seem to be missing the point. I think what he is trying to say is that our personalized sites (my netscape, amazon) and daily web haunts are narrowing our perspective. By looking at the same sites every day you get exposed to relatively the same stuff every day. Slashdot, for example, is pro-linux. It rarely says anything pro-microsoft, pro-freebsd, or anything like that. By limiting yourself to only pro-linux views you will start to think that linux if great just because. Windows is an OK product when it's running, so you close-minded people should stop bashing it.
:wq! DOH!
I think what he said about moderation is a little exaggerated. True, a very bigotted group could sign up for hundereds of users (on slashdot) and start moding down anything they don't like. But that's a little extreme.
The internet is dumbing down america, but by God it's our constitutional right to do so. If you really cared about the other side's view you'd go to their sites too.
Roy Miller
--Roy
and you will be doing a crime against democracy, you bastard!
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Je t'aime Stéphanie
I think the unjustifiable assumption in this argument is that there is a significant amount worthwhile content in the common ground of traditional media. Also that this common ground is not already being filtered. It is being filtered of course, but not by an online community of your peers.
Moreover, if media is not only filtered but propagated by one's peers, I think it's more likely that we'll have greater access to a wide variety of content. In effect, we may be "six degrees of separation" from virtually everything out there.
> I'll grant that "Me Media" produces less conformity
> (whether this is a bad thing or not is a separate
> discussion).
I don't think I buy that, nor do I think that this is Sunstein's argument (as presented). Just the opposite:
> People living in democracies, Sunstein maintains,
> should be exposed to ideas they might not have chosen
> themselves. Unplanned, spontaneous, unanticipated
> encounters are central, though they "often involve
> topics and points of view that people have not sought out
> and perhaps find quite irritating." They are important,
> nonetheless, he says, partly because they protect
> against fragmentation and extremism, a predictable
> outcome when like-minded people communicate only with one
> another."
The way I read this, Sunstein's arguing that "Me Media" breeds _more_ conformity, not less. Not conformity with the vanishing mass culture, but conformity with group norms or the dominant philosophy of self-selected, filtered news source.
It's as though my only source of news was (pick your politics) _Mother Jones_ or _National Review_. If I choose not to be intellectually challenged, or to have my assumptions questioned, then by my definition I'm embracing conformity. Certainly complacency.
Sunstein's saying that I'm far better off if I read _both_. He's also not saying that I should adopt some mushy middle position between the two extremes, just that I should do everything in my power to ensure that I'm developing a _thoughtful_ perspective on issues in public life instead of seeking mindless reinforcement.
How often was your average farmer in the year 1810 exposed to new ideas? Once a month? Once a year? Did our system of government collapse?
How often do you sling opionions on issues you do NOT care about? Ever? Ever skip over a newspaper article about something you didn't care about? Everyday?
I don't think it matters what FORM the media takes, we all do the same thing. Scan for what we care about, junk the rest. A farmer from 1810 did the same thing while cruising the conversation at the Chruch Social. My grandfather did it with his newspapers, my father did it with a TV remote control, and I do it on slashdot.org.
And still, no anarchy.
...or maybe not.
Slashdot is essentially a moderated discussion. The important key is that the moderators act in a responsible fashion, modding up posts that have value. And it is possible for an opinion to be valuable, even if you don't agree with it!
The sheer amount of data out there, irrespective of the signal/noise ratio is overwhelming; there needs to be some way of sifting through it all. That's why I generally read /. at +2, 300+ posts are just way too much for me to get through in any reasonable amount of time.
The problem with the negative mechanism is that it relies on an outside agency to make a judgment call about what information i can have. Thanks, but I want to be able to decide that information for myself. Once access to that information is gone, there isn't even any way to determine if the decision to restrict access was a valid one or not. Take for example, the fact that many censorware programs block access to sites that are critical of them.
Basically the point I'm trying to make, and that this guy seems to gloss over, is that there needs to be some way of sorting through all the chaff to get to the information that these 'citizens' need/can/want to absorb.
Just my $0.02
I hate it when I hit submit instead of Preview... -Galapas
Funny how they normally store books on shelves, in relative order to that which was in card catalogs... Maybe you could look there instead.
In data collection, there's the same possibility. I check out cnn.com every once in a while to look too see other news.
However, filtering news is not really a new thing. I'd say a large percentage (insert fake statistic here) of the paper newspaper is not actually read. People skim headlines for things that strike them. That's why their are headlines, so people can filter through the articles faster.
I find it interesting whenever someone takes some statistic or finding and says "Look at this! it's a brand new problem!" when it likely isn't.
Theoretically, the semi-random visitor is an improvment over the former.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean I have to listen to you, it just means you get to say whatever you want.
Well said. I found JonKatz's comments to be a bit too idealistic:
The truth is that people who increasingly turn to filtering programs (including ready-made portal sites) become accustomed to censoring ideas they think they may not like. But they can't ever really be sure, since they have no idea what they're not seeing, or how the person or ideas they are blocking might have evolved.
It's true that someone's views and ideas may have evolved, that they may have new arguments that are worth considering. But who has the time to read even a fraction of the information that is available on the Web? You have to play the odds. If you hear something useful and informative from a site or a person, keep an eye out for them in the future; you're likely to get more. If you encounter something particularly offensive or simple-minded, don't go back for more. You're likely to get more of the same.
Moderation and preferences are a necessary evil. They're imperfect filters that help you get to the information and ideas that you think will be of value.
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
At the same time it's not possible to listen to all of the many voices, here or elsewhere. Moderation is one tool that helps you locate the voices that your peers find interesting (or informative, or alarming). It has less potential for abuse than, say, handing control to an editor at a privately held, for-profit news center. It is direct democracy for information.
People living in democracies, Sunstein maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might not have chosen themselves. Unplanned, spontaneous, unanticipated encounters are central, though they "often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating."
blahblahblah
So is he giving that old line that opposing spam is unamerican? Or is he just supporting political spam? One of the things I like about democracy, at least in theory, is that I can choose to not be involved with any of it, live alone and secluded, and not HAVE to hear anyone's personal propoganda. Of course I would have no expectation to be able to complain about the state of the system, but that may be my choice.
funny munging
If all we need to read all 6 billion posts from every single person on the planet before we can make a decision on how to vote on some issue, we are surely doomed. We just don't have the time to listen to everyone.
Representative forms of governing have failed to bring about a just society, in large part because of the tendency of the representatives that we pick to entrench themselves and separate, detached, even foreign to the people they are supposed to represent.
By contrast, moderation of the sort seen at Slashdot does, IMO, a better job. Moderators are not that much different than the average user, at least in terms of their abilities to affect the content of the website. Their power is extremely transitory and their influence as an individual is weak.
Still, in order for the system to work properly, the moderators must be intelligent and at least somewhat fair. They *could* only mod up comments that they agreed with, without regard to how articulate the speaker made his/her point. But even if this is how all moderators behave in practice, there should be a tendency for the differing opinions of moderators to cancel each other out, and we should expect to see the full range of opinion displayed.
Executed properly, moderation serves to keep a discussion on topic, reduce the amount of time you need to spend reading by cutting out redundant comments, and offering a better position to particularly insightful or informative comments by elevating and amplifying them above the rabble of the non-visionaries, the inarticulate, and the pranksters.
And most often, if the opinions are there in the crowd, I think they will be represented in the moderated discussion. Moderation isn't supposed to decide what opinions are correct, but rather what opinions are well-constructed and well-argued. It may not do so with 100% accuracy in practice, but show me a system of evaluating arguments that works perfectly.
The reason we don't see every possible opinion is likely to be because of the demographics of the participants of a particular forum. Thus, a site like Slashdot tends to appear to take on the personality of the majority of the people who read it. But even then there is room for differences of opinion, sometimes even radical differences. But for the most part it should not be surprising that opinions tend to converge over time. This is not a bad thing in itself; what would make it bad is if this convergence is forced by authority.
I don't really see how forcing someone to change their mind is feasible on the internet; most people have only a very limited means to reach other people, and almost all of these methods cannot incorporate force or violence.
And what's being contested over is generally not something most people are willing to go to war over or become corrupt for. It's not like the outcomes of these discussions has any force of law or anything like that in the real world; it's just a bunch of people blowing steam. We share ideas with each other and come to conclusions which we may then apply to the real world, but I think it's very likely that those who already have power in the real world already know what they want to do and are not likely to have their minds substantially changed by any discussion on the internet, whether it be moderated or completely open.
So even if a moderated discussion doesn't allow every participant to be a moderator, I still don't think that the system is as corrupt as traditional politics.
---JJJIII
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You can't force people to look at stuff that opposes their view. Well, maybe you can but I wouldn't expect the results to be very good. People have ALWAYS been able to shut themselves away from opposing views, by living in a neightborhood of people like themselves, working in jobs with those people, only reading newspapers or magazines that reinforced their views instead of challenging them, etc... The web is an extension of that, and these proposals only look at curing the symptoms not the disease (that is if you think of people only seeing one side of everything as not good, like I do). If you really want a populace that is open to new ideas, even those that conflict with thier own deep-seated beliefs you've got to raise and educate them to be open minded. Forcing people to see opposing material when they are not open to it will not fix the underlying problem and people will just tune it out.
I've read this argument many times, and each of the authors harkens back to days of his youth when 'everybody' watched the same TV shows last night, and when you went to school or work the next day you all had something to talk about. Or, you all watched the same news shows, so people had a common reference as a framework for discussion.
/.), subject is often becoming less important in delivery. So while on tv your sport news may always come last, online it's often dependant on when the winning goal was scored.
Memories of "better days gone by" are usually contaminated with nostalgia...
We're not missing common reference points now, they are just different. Current affairs, whether that be politics or entertainment, or old fashioned news. With so much content being delivered in date-important format (including
I love the Slashdot moderation system. While there are definitely some common themes that get moderated up or down -- causing some bias (biases that agree with mine for the large part) moderation has the intended effect of letting you see well-written or at least well-reasoned points of view.
I too love the Slashdot moderation system. If you don't like the bias of moderation, you can simply have your information delivered without it. Personally I like it for the highlighting of well written posts. The Moderation class of "Interesting" often yeilds very different viewpoints, as does "Insightful". And of course the rubbish is removed from view.
While this is customisation, and maybe I am close-minded when it comes to goatcx links, filtering, in general, does not work 100%.
If all your customised information is filtered, something that slips through the ever present cracks is rather noticeable. I don't think we need to worry about people never seeing an opposing view. Humans are opinionated little things, even the ones who don't vote.
People who aren't open to another point of view will usually ignore it when it's offered, so are they missing out? But even if you do want to remove all material you don't support, you won't succeed... while there are porn filter programs that block political sites and breast cancer information sites, they also fail to block porn 100%.
Although it is something we should be aware of for the future, right now, computers simply don't have the intelligence that we do to make certain connections. And until they do, blocking or customisation will never be 100%
Realize that the residents of the Carolinas didn't have much in common with New Yorkers at all. Thus the importance of the states. We were more of a federation than a unified nation; a group of independant states loosely bound together for mutual protection in the face of a strong outside influence (The United Kingdom). It's not until the Civil War in the 19th century that technology (telegraph, railroad, etc.) shrunk the country to the scale where news, information, and views were shared across the country. It's not suprising that the shrinking of the country coincided with the resolution of the schizophrenic views of slavery.
The problem is that we have advanced so far in information distribution that there is now far too much. It's no longer an issue of being able to get news from other areas, it's now an issue of being able to sort through the mountains of data to find things that are relevant, useful, or important. And to those who don't think this is accurate, compare how you use the internet with how folks of previous generations do.
It's simply not possible to read or see everything. Instead, we all sort information one way or another. And tools that help do this are extremely beneficial. I only consider these tools 'censorware' if I have no control over them. Basically, we all censor information... it's an unintended consequence of how we work, and the situation (more data than time). Those who wish to call themselves 'well-informed' will try to gain multiple viewpoints, while others will be content with what they receive. Just as in the past, people will tend to associate with those that have similar views as they do... it seems to be human nature. So, will society be balkanized? Well, it is, and has been for quite some time... so I don't see any reason it would increase. If anything, the ability to quickly and easily reach outside views that the internet provides would reduce this balkanization. It's so easy to find and see alternative views that it's a large improvement over what we used to have.
>The real flaw is that Sunstein wants somebody to decide what everybody needs to know, somebody to tell us >what to believe.
While this may seem flip, it is probably accurate. Sunstein's previous books (including "The Partial Constitution" and his First Amendment tome "Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech") advocate a far greater role for the government in regulating speech. Sunstein has argued for a "New Deal" (increased regulation) for speech, because he believes the the purpose of free speech is to debate issues "fundamentally concerned with democratic sef-government," and that the First Amendment must be interepreted to advance that end at the expense of other viewpoints. Taken in light of his general views on speech, his disapproval of personalized media is unsurprising.
I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
Exactly! These moderators have no right preventing the proper attention due to the endless expressions of fp, goatse.cx, Natalie Portman, status quo JonKatz flames, occasional manifesto, ad nauseum...
/*drunk.. fix later*/
The danger of being ghettoised is mitigated by the sophistication and intelligence of users. If you are sensible enough to realise that you should get a range of views, (as most people are), then hit lots of different pages.
Each morning I skim about 10 different news/tech sites and, between them, they give me a fair view of what is really going on.
Individual sites might only push a particular view, but readers will get used to jumping across a few to avoid monotony and boredom.
Isn't this article about the exact same topic as last week's? Who does Katz think he is, some kind of freedom fighter for the Net? Does he think he's John Quincy Adams on the Net? Jeez, John, there's nothing to fight. Democracy on the Net never has existed, and probably never will. Deal with it.
, to simple acts of citizneship, like voting, school board meeting attendance, and volunteerism to name a few
But even that, I should be able to filter out. I don't personally care about any of that crap. I pay my taxes, I have roads to drive on, and that's all that I want to know about my government. If I don't want to participate, I shouldn't have to. The US is about being able to live in the woods if you want to. I don't want to have any kind of democratic bullshit shoved down my throat.
Yes, choice is bad. Ever try to argue with someone who geot all their news from Rush Limbaugh? But a survey of dedicated listeners who rejected all other news sources showed that they considered themselves more, rather than less informed than the average citizen.
The old saw goes "everyone is entitled to his opinion." But I would argue that I am entitled to my opinon only if that opinion is informed. By choosing to listen only to the news I agree with, I am abdicating my responsibility to inform myself. Therefore I am not entititled to my opinion. So I listen to Marketplace on NPR, even though, or perhaps especially because I find its slant on the news disturbing.
An interesting thing about Slashdot is the occasional reminder you see to read at -1, newest first. I think you'd have a hard time finding a traditional news source which even occasionally reminds you "hey--don't trust our filtering." That message is the first thing that tends to get filtered out.
Yes we should have the right have some choice in the information we want. However, Americans are very used to having their information filtered. It is done daily and with their consent, its called newspaper.
Newspapers already do everything that filtering software claims it will do. The difference is whose message is filtered and that is the key to the who shebang.
See, newspapers, news magazines, and most news shows are controlled by left-wing liberals. This is easy to prove (just watch CBS's Dan Rather constantly attack Bush while claiming BC was the second coming). See the story about the poor gay guy killed in Wyoming get national coverage with nearly 3100 stories, yet when a gay couple does the same thing (and worse) to a teenage boy in Arkansas there are less than 50 stories. When Palestinians kill Israelis the coverage is a hundred times less than when the Israelis do it. Heck, if the Palestinians bomb a bus its always the act of an individual, but if the Israelis bomb a building its the whole damn nation which as fault.
So Jon, yes we have a right to information, the problem is that the liberal left is very afraid that average citizens will actually get to choose what is filtered compared to the scenario in place today where the liberal left decides what is and what isn't newsworthy.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The 'moderation = censorship' this is ridiculous when you consider that any reader of /. can choose to read all the posts if they want to anyway. The only form a censorship going on is of the self induced variety.
...
Quite frankly, I find this whole debate, including the premise, to be meaningless and boring. Let's move on
SOUNDS very plausible, however ...
it ignores the Theory of six degrees of separation between even the most distant nodes in an optimal network.
Therefore, I'm only need to follow six hyperlinks to find the antithisis of anything I consume, or to find the 'Anti-Me'.
Basically, if I understand this argument correctly, the thesis is that people who read only "preference-filtered" (mmm, dark roast) content online (and elsewhere) will only be exposed to opinions with which they agree, issues in which they are already interested, and stuff like that. The problem is, if you don't read things with which you disagree, you don't learn anything. You especially don't learn how to examine your own beliefs and opinions for logical holes, flaws, and evidence of outside propagandizing. (In the circles I run in, we call that "critical thinking.") So, if I read correctly, "Me Media" is always "preaching to the choir." (As any evangelical knows, you'll never get new converts that way. :))
Case in point: If you only read articles saying, for instance, that everybody on Welfare cheats, drives a big car, and has 17 kids (to use a Reductio Ad Absurdum, but you see what I mean), and you've never talked to a Welfare recipient or read any real facts on the situation, how will you know "Welfare bashing" from reality?
Kafka's Dictum applies to the Net as well. Uncle Franz said, "I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?" I won't quite go that far, but I do always try to read the critics -- no matter how unsavoury they may be.
?!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
And I've been waiting a long time to use the words "picayune" and "setentious" in a post. Thank you for making my afternoon.
Also, to split some rhetorical hairs, I'm not entirely sure if "stentorian" is the right word to use on the largely silent internet. (And no, I didn't click the link above.) It's not as though the controllers are always SHOUTING, is it? That "priveledge" is usually reserved for people who have no power (@aol.com). Usually the people involved in trying to control the Internet are clever, quiet, and subtle, although no less powerful than "stentorian" implies. I might say "Machiavellian," but then again, I'm paranoid at best.
Interrobang, MA, Applied Rhetoric (aka LPW)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I think that there is a simple solution that permits all the "benefits" and avoids most "liabilities" of such mandatory links on all web content (including the numerous technical problems of monitoring and responsibility for (mis)implementation)
Simply put an "other suggested reading" button on the browser that would search all government- mandated sites for the highlighted words/phrases and open a new window with the results.
If a user wants to read more, it's just a button click away. If s/he doesn't, they'd ignore a mandatory link. The code is already available. The servers would be essentially free, since every search engine would soon include a "mandated sites" search option, just to keep eyeballs
Here's an interesting question: What does the Constitution say about our freedom of impression? We have the right to express ourselves, but what do you do when the amount of information becomes so enormous and so broad that someone HAS to choose what you allow in to your senses? I think that end-user controlled systems like this one here at /. are the only reasonable answer, particularly since anything else is censorship by definition.
Ignore the notion of someone limiting their own experience and input and thereby harming themselves...that is such a non-point it is ridiculous. Time and time again, lawmakers, courts, and groups like the ACLU have repeated one of the most understated fundamental precepts of the Constitution: government is not supposed to try and protect people from themselves. We are entitled to the chance to screw up and close off too much information.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It's ok, take a deep breath and read my reply again. Notice the quotation marks this time. I was pointing out something that looked amiss.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Summary of the article:
Getting a limited view of the world and forming your opinions on that view is wrong.
People should be obligated to get a broader view of the world to form valid opinions.
"... Should sites really be forced by law to carry view points that are abhorrent to them, to mimic the press's deadly habit of balancing every single point of view with an opposite one, creating eternal arguments and stalemates that turn civic discussions into WWF matches?"
^-- By this argument shouldn't content blocking sites be obligated to have goatse.cx links?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
You say "Their voice is smaller, by being one in several million", but doesn't that serve to ensure that by voting, we guarantee that a decision is arrived at by 'consensus', that is a general agreement. That agreement might not be one that we all arrive at, but that a majority of us will approve of.
I understand what you are saying here but I disagree with it. Majority rule is not consensus as it does not account for the fact that the minority may have valid input to the question. Consensus is 'give and take', not winner take all. Democracy is also predicated on informed opinion. Robert A Heinlein had some entertaining rants in his later books (between the incest) on this - "democracy is thinking that 100 000 people are smarter than 1" et. al.
Dan
1) So long as anyone can register a domain name and write HTML code, the internet provides the ultimate means of exercising free speech.
2) 'Free speech' has never, and will never, entitle one to a popular forum. Warping freedom of expression into an entitlement to others' attention spans is a fascist notion.
3) Suggesting that the 'service' which slashdot.org filtering provides is somehow a detriment to our 'citizenry' is a load. School libraries are a different beast - they ask us if we should censor what our spawn should be exposed to. I've yet to hear of someone being held at gunpoint to level 5 threshold.
Leave it to a left wing nut to transform the single invention bringing the world one giant step closer to ubiquitous free speech, into a solvent for our precious 'social glue'.
Taking his ideas further (as he no doubt does in the book?) we are left with the plauge that is destroying our great colleges and universities, and turning academians into babbling socialists -- that exposure to divergent ideas itself should not be a choice, but a requirement to be placed upon citizens for the good of 'democracy'.
Mad ravings such as this only remind me that even something as wonderful as the internet can be perverted into liberal FUD.
I would like to step out on a limb and say that democracy is hazardous for the long-term health of society, since it encourages these sorts of breakdowns.
The most effective system for community/society building is one based on consensus, not vote. It's about actually coming together, instead of "it's my vote, I'll do what I want with it."
How can we possibly hope to achieve any kind of great things as a society by being hundreds of smaller societies only co-existing for resources?
Anyone who turns on a cable news talk show these days still has a 50:50 chance of seeing a Clinton hate fest. Like get over it guys, he isn't even in office.
Now some folk may be interested in that stuff but for the appologists of the traditional media to claim that the net is encouraging a monoculture of views is somewhat ridiculous.
What this comes down to is that the traditional media have been on a yellow journalism binge ever since the OJ Simpson trial. The traditional media are set up for reporting on one news story that lasts for eight months or more at a time and allows for endless ramifications. The only place real political issues get dicsussed in the US is on the Net.
Hence the allegations in the report are not only wrong, it is the traditional media that are the threat to diversity of thought and the net that is the solution.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Of course people choose to avoid certain arguments. This does not necessarily mean that they only want to hear what they agree with.
The arguments I don't want to hear are SPAM, certain trolls and certain boring idealogues. I simply don't want to hear from the type of people who claim to have an absolute solution to all the worlds problems based on the works of Karl Marx, Lenin, Ayn Rand, the second ammendment, Milton Freedman or the Bible. Nor do I want to hear from either side of the abortion debate.
It is not that I am uninterested in the issues raised. I just don't care for circular argument, whether from the right or the left. Fortunately since the fall of the USSR we have had a few years freedom from lefftie megabores. Unfortunately these types are regrouping with a bunch of nebulous complaints they call 'globalism'. Meanwhile right wing idealogue bores are running the country.
Ulitmately there are always people who try to rise to the top of any movement by being the most extreeme advocate of ideological purity. It is very easy to get notice by being extreeme. It is not the positions that people vote to exclude, it is the people.
Slashdot does have a built in bias, but it is not overwhelming. The quickest way to increase Karma is to attack Microsoft, the only negative points I have ever got are from defending MSFT. I don't think that in general moderation is on the side taken.
The same cannot be said for the traditional media. During the last election Chris Mathews said of Al Gore's proposal to have weekly Presidential debates 'he just wants to discuss boring stuff like issues he doesn't want to discuss politics'. In other words the media don't want to discuss who will govern, they want to discuss whether the imbecile or the liar should be elected - the frame of reference they wanted to discuss.
The other curious feature of US media is the insistence of Journalists that all communications must be mediated by them. We don't see politicians debating issues like happens in every other country, we see journalists actring as proxies for politicians.
Given the abbysmal service of the traditional media the net can do no worse.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
That is unlikely since the main franchise these days is through the pocket book and not the ballot box.
However the current administration is clearly not listening to the high tech top earners, it is listening to old money plutocrats.
Warren Buffet, Gates and Co have good reason to want tax cuts to be given to the middle and working class rather than directly to the ultra-rich. More money in consumers hands means the economy grows faster, means my share portfolio grows.
The six percent tax cut on offer from Bush would at best reduce my taxes by a few thousand. On the other hand the drop in the NASDAQ since he was selected has cost me several millions. And the cretin thinks he is doing me a favor?
As Denis Miller said 'I didn't expect him to narrow the chasm between the rich and the poor this way'.
If it would return us to 4% growth and the NASDAQ to 4000 it would be just fine by me if Clinton was made President again and allowed to run the country out of his choice of Heffner's Playboy Mansion or the Chicken Ranch in Nevada.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
C'mon. American stereotypes are so passe. Geez. The civil war. Yeah, a great example of America's violent past. Fighting over slavery abolition and liberties... those bastards. As I recall about that time that the rest of the world was trying to conquer indigenous tribes and make them speak French at gunpoint... Or better yet more recently, put people in ovens or make them work as slaves making weapons to destroy their own people. WE saved both sides from killing others or being killed in WWII, because we are friends to freedom. We do care about the rest of the world, despite whether you call us capitalist pigs or Imperialists. We send our sons to Bosnia to get shot at because it is the right thing to do. We are the only country that actually still believes the ideas of liberty brought up in the French revolution, and follows them the best we can. The USA is the only country keeping NATO and the UN propped up, no matter who the American bashing president is. Don't be jealous that we are happy and proud to be Americans, it requires a lot of effort other countries people aren't willing to give. We make websites that worry about our freedoms, to let foreigners speak their minds against a flawed but good country (although we certainly wouldn't be able to speak our mind somewhere else on a personal level), and agree with their take on our history when they're correct. Its just in this case, whoever posted that stuff bringing up the civil war was not correct. Check the record, because America is trying to be everyone's friend, no matter how bad a friend the rest of the world is back.
but you know it's true. With this Balkanization now we can see/hear/read only the things we like or find appealing. Take /.: try saying something bad about linux or good about M$ and the moderators here will censor you into oblivion; now all of the others (who only read at +3 or above) can safely read only the good and happy things that a) they already know or b) are ideas they are comfortable with. e-masturbation at its best.
/. at -1
fight censorship: read
Mister Black
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
The real problem is that the mass media usually "balance" views by presenting two views out of many, and usually two veiws that are quite close together. They'll debate what a gov't agency should do, not whether it should exist at all...
...that Usenet and newsgroups must be the ultimate evil, since newsreaders have had killfiles anf greps and filters for over a decade, huh?
--M.
I am rather certain a Paine and Jefferson didn't have the Tories down the road over to have heartfelt discussions about wither or not revolution was a good idea.
I can hardly see Martin Luther King inviting the Grand Wizard of the KKK over for coffee to discuss voting rights.
Can anyone else see ludicrousness of this? We gravitate toward those who share our opinions on things we hold important. If we find someone or their beliefs obnoxious or offensive we disassociate ourselves from them. Moderation serves the same exact purpose. You can filter out things you are not interested in or don't agree with. And that is a good thing.
Democracy does not work because everyone listens to a thousand voices and give equal credence to them all. Democracy works, when it works, because most people will vote for their own self-interests, which will often coincide with the collective interest. Now granted sometimes this backfires and you end up with short-sited bad laws, but they end up being righted overtime as people feel the pinch and vote in opposition. Democracy promises that the majority's voice, "the voice of the people", will be heard (and on that point it often fails). Democracy is never a guarantee that YOUR voice will be heard.
Why should I even comment here - I'd just be talking to myself.
That is Sunstein's problem with moderation, and my problem with Sunstein: "It ... permits people ..." I happen to find a wonderful diversity of opinion on /. and on k5, but if a few leftists, for example, wish to confine their web
activity to leftist-only weblogs, that is their right.
Right, sure.... And there should also be a law that allows me and you and anyone else to address Sunstein's law classes, for as much time as we deem appropriate.
There are some valid points in Katz's review. These new forms of popular communication we enjoy really haven't led to much in the way of actual organizing. That is something worth thinking about. Meanwhile, perhaps a few /.ers in the Chicago area could organize a little demonstraton in front of Sunstein's office!
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Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
He even advocates "must-carry" rules, also in the form of links, for even the most highly partisan websites, designed to ensure that viewers learn about opposing views
And is he volunteering to decide what view, overt or hidden, a forum is pushing, and what consitutes an opposing view, and what links best represent that opposing view? Or does he at least propose an oversight mechanism for deciding who watches the online watchmen?
Slashdot has already answered that question. We're all watchmen, and we all watch the watchmen. Seems to be working OK. ;)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We always had the choice to filter. The Internet gives us the choice not to filter.
In other words, if nowadays I want to hear raw, unfiltered viewpoints, I can. Balkanization? I can look up stuff written by the various sides in the original Balkans and think about the issues of the region myself! Or, I can decide it's all just propaganda, and not look it up. But the choice not to hear some group's ideas was always there, even in the town-crier-style democracy much cited by the nostalgists. The ability to hear those ideas anytime, anywhere is new, and I have a hard time seeing how it's a negative.
The idea was, the higher class you were (the more money/power you had?), the more consistent your media consumption should be with that of your peers. It seems to me that if someone is already arrogant, exposing them to new ideas won't make a scrap of difference. Those who are open-minded (my what a jaded term) will continue to use the information systems to their advantage and edification. The real issue should be censorship in our libraries, not people with customized slashboxes =)
IMHO.... Moderation really isn't fascism... not having some form of moderation could be considered anarchy.
/. (just as an example): Some of this already exists, some of it doesn't. You can't just post a new story to /. You must submit your story, and if it "deserves" to be posted it will be. This is the first level of moderation and it's similar to getting a "booth". Now the analogy "falls apart", and could be analyzed much differently than what I'm about to say. Since the original article is a one-time show, the crowd breaks up to discuss it. Some people just walk around and listen to various discussions, some start saying their points of view. Some of the audience will in and of themselves attract a crowd, some will be ignored. As a member of the audience, you are free to hear the viewpoints of all - regardless of whether or not the viewpoint is relevant. You might choose to walk over to the big-crowd, where there's a heated, on-topic debate. This democracy could be applied to /. in a variety of ways... Maybe EVERYBODY should get a few points per story (the points could be considered equivalent to time at a convention), and you can apply your points to any post or posts you want. The posts with the highest score could be filtered just as they are now on /. You might choose, while browsing at a convention, to listen to the big crowd, or you might choose to listen to someone who is off-topic. You might be able to bring some other people into the off-topic discussion if you "applied your points" because you thought it was worth it... I could continue to analyze this analogy but in the interest of time (mine) I'll end it there.
/. or any other online community.
/. falls - or where any other forum on the internet falls.
Taking input from the original post, it seems that maybe we should take a look at what happens outside the net to determine what kind of moderation system would work best to keep the net a democracy.
For example, take a look at a business or tech convention. I would consider this to be "average" moderation.
In order to get a real "space", you have to be relevant - you have to be selling a product or service or have a viewpoint relevant to the topic at hand. You may also be screened to verify your product's or service's relevance; You may not be allowed space if all of the space is taken. You may have to pay to get the real "space" (a booth). When walking around the convention, you may run into people that don't have a real "space", and you can have meaningful discussions with them about irrelevant topics; you may see a booth that's crowded and you decide to stay to find out what the fuss is all about; or you could walk by an empty booth which has something you personally find cool or interesting in which no one else is interested.
To apply this analogy to
Another real world democratic system to analyze would be a city square. I would consider this to be "little" moderation.
Anyone can get in and get space, for free, without moderation, but you can't set up a big booth (but you might have a megaphone and a soap box). Your discussion doesn't have to be relevant to anything. It DOES have to be legal - the cops will throw you out if it isn't, or if you're too obnoxious (this is the first level of moderation), but if you're basically law-abiding, and the space isn't already full, you can have your first amendment rights to free speech. Again, you'll attract a crowd if people are interested; and while walking through a city square you might see a crowd and want to know what all the fuss is about.... Or, you might walk past a beggar ignoring them - it's up to you. I won't try to apply this to an online environment, but again it could be related to
One last real world example I'd like to mention is the radio talk show. I would consider this to be "extreme" moderation.
First, the talk show topic is chosen by the producers of the radio station. Secondly, (at least for most radio talk shows) all callers are pre-screened for relevance. Yes, a caller can get in by claiming they are relevant, and then go wildly off-topic, but then they are frequently disconnected by the host. As far as a listener: Although you could look up what's happening at a given time on a given station, or you may know because of advertising or a regular schedule, may listeners simply stumble upon a discussion randomly, and listen if they like it. The producers try to keep some consistent format so that they attract a specific listenership - this is the only real democratic part of the process. If no one listens, the radio station won't exist (for long).
I will leave it up to you to consider where you think
Are these "real world" scenarios fascism?
Are these "real world" scenarios democratic?
Anarchy?
Maybe less conformity overall.
Within this site opinion is so homogenous that many people will mod up trolls just to get some alternative viewpoints out where they will be read.
How many people don't instantly recognize "Kiss the Blade", that "Lover's arrival" person, and Peredia as being trolling accounts (likely of a single person). They still get good mods because that is the only way we won't all just sit here nodding our heads and saying "Yeah".
I love watching those posts zoom up to +4 or +5 before the cry of "Troll" brings them down to +2 or less.
The Amazon example is a good one. It's really annoying that my first page load on Amazon always presents me with books or videos that are like the books and videos I recently bought. Presumably I already know of an author or director if I have bought a book or film by that person. So I do't want to be given a list of other works by that person--I'm already more or less aware of those works.
What I really want is to be introduced to something new. And this is where filtering totally breaks down. They enforce sameness and fence out novelty or difference.
Celebrity-bashing aside I think that to get the most out of 'me-media' you need to clearly define 'me'. Dilbert, User-Friendly, Slashdot-et-al is 'me'. Broadsheet (as opposed to tabloid) newspapers are 'me'.
Finding a 'me' on the internet is easy if you know what you are doing and what you want. At least with the internet everything is tailored for.
On the topic of moderation, I think that it is a fair enough process although a more detailed reason for moderation could be considered. People should not take moderation too seriously, after all, it's a pretty subjective view. But then again so are comments you publish on such sites. Put together it's a discussion where everyone can give their own view and be heard. This is important for free speech.
Claric.
PS. I apologise that this comment is slightly all over the place, too many views, too little time.
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There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
This strikes me as an oxymoron
and that a system with limitless options, making for diverse choices, will compromise some important social values.
How about the social value of freedom of choice?
Wasn't this how the second world war got started?
and mutual self-understanding, we will be concerned by any developments that greatly reduce those experiences."
Slashdot and others like it do provide a common social experience. A far greater social experience than sitting at home alone reading the newspaper or watching TV.
I guess some people just don't like change.
You go to a site to hear a particular area of interest. Thus repressing material irrelevant to the subject is essential. Because I want a particular focus. Just as I do not expect to hear about the elections on the sci-fi channel, I do not expect to hear about brittany spears on slashdot. I think that is natural, and expected.
:)
Besides, if i were to receive every post from every person on every subject, my computer would scream in terror, flip upside down, shut off the dsl modem, and stage a coup, then commit suicide.
We should be able to mod down articles as 'flamebait', not just posts
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
In my opinion, he offers a very weak point. A better solution, as far as I'm concerned, is simple education. The majority of slashdot readers I think probably do not listen only to the news they want to hear, most are educated enough to fetch a diverse range of viewpoints(isn't that what things like THIS comment system are supposed to provide?).. Granted, if someone wanted only to read news about a certian subject, and only from one paradigm, they could do this, but they could make the choice to do that over any other medium as well.
I admit that the net DOES make it quite a bit easier to accomplish this, but this is why we need to--instead of focusing on Sunstein's proposition of forcing other viewpoints on people, and basically manufacturing how they think--and educating people TO think. A person who understands the value of comparative reasoning is more likely to seek out varied opinions on a subject than someone who is taught HOW to think.
Americans are stupid
America is stupid
Katz is an idiot
Anarchy rules
Governments and anyone in power sucks
Well, all we need is Microsoft suckx dood! and we have all the thoughts for 95% of the readers..
I have an idea. When you read something, think about it, don't just post the same thing that is always posted. Do you think flaming (see everything above) is original? How about you analyze what you read and try a form your own opinion.
At least Katz makes you think, maybe even get a little mad. But will you do anything about it? No, you will not. You will go back to you l33t hacking and buying your bawls from ThinkGeek becuase the name makes you snicker.
And BTW, Microsoft makes a few good products, America has at least a couple really cool people in it, you wouldn't be able to spout off and show your ignorance if it wasn't for governments and Katz at least gets a response from you dullards..
Think on that.. PLEASE!
Disclaimer: I am not American, do not work for Microsoft nor the government.
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Mams for me and mams for you!
I would be afraid of reading a news site which *only* displayed news articles that the site guessed I would like based on the virtual identity that this site constructed for me.
A virtual identity, just like a real person, should be treated as something which is dynamic. Perhaps a good way of thinking about how to establish and maintain a virtual identity is using a standard AI technique: hill climbing. A news site could choose, say, 90% of the articles that it will first display to you from a list of articles that it thinks you will like. The remaining 10% could be choosen completely at random. Thus, this system would simultaneously (1) discover what other topics you may like, or have recently grown to like, and (2) expose you to articles that you would not have normally been exposed to based on your current virtual identity.
Typically, hill climbing is used to find an "optimal" solution to a fixed problem. But in this case, it would be used to continually probe you to see how you may have changed, while at the same time keeping you connected to "common knowledge".
Just a thought.
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."
OK, let's say you wanted the world to hear your voice. How would you do that? By trying to get print, radio, TV, or other "traditional" media to distribute your message, either by paying for it, or being newsworthy enough to get it for free. Certainly that is a much more difficult barrier than submitting to on-line moderation. With a site like slashdot, there is less control than an editor has over his newspaper, or a producer over a news broadcast. But there is still control. It's a necessary evil in a world of flamers and spammers, hot grits, goatsex, and whatever else.
Try as I must, I cant seem to keep these Katz
posts off slash-rot.
Being a student at the University of Chicago, and being quite familiar with Professor Sunstein and his work, I am quite surprised at his blatant support of an unconstitutional quick fix to a much larger problem. I think the central issue is Professor Sunstein's ignorance to the fact that people have the right to choose courses of action that are detrimental to themselves, and that government really has no recourse. This is a fundamental right of all Americans. You have the right to do anything that does not impinge upon the rights of others. If someone wants to filter out all content except (random example) white surpremisist literature, it is their perogative....yes, it will not lead to the creation of a better citizen, but why does this give the government permission to stop them? Why am I reminded of Soviet Russia? It is not the governments role to say, hey, that is wrong for you, don't do it.....it is their job to give people the option of choosing....and teaching them such as to make an educated choice. Mr. Katz also misses the boat when he claims that users will adapt common ground if they want it. Professor Sunstein's clearly implies that he believes that people living in hermitages would have no impetus to seek the company of others, and I wholeheartedly agree. The user who only recieves e-mail notices of the latest Klan news is not going to be spontaneously driven into a racial equality discussion chatroom. Well, what are we left with? I tend to agree with Professor Sunstein's feelings that the world is headed toward irreconcilable fragmentation, and the political disenfranchisement of the typical netizen is not helping. The answer....a more informed consumer....why do so many issues boil down to education? Well, the natural instincts of the human animal are toward self preservation, and while becoming a hermit will mostly increase your lifespan, it will not be beneficial to society if each and every one of us were to choose that path. We need to be taught how to work in the group dynamic, inorder to further society as a whole.....but, then again, shouldn't we all have the option of choosing not to be part of society? Why is society so important? I am sure that republic.com is going to be on my reading list for the upcoming weeks.
For example I don't want to talk to the people who are trying to tell me because I am an observant Jew I am going to go to hell for not sharing their faith. When they come to my door I don't open it when they send me email I delete it. As far as I am concerned there are some view points which I do not want hear. (Missionaries, hate, holocost revionism etc) I admit that they have rights too, but not the right to harras me.
I don't see why I should have to have this stuff shoved in my face.
(Want to bet someone is going to accuse me of censorship here?)
Erlang Developer and podcaster
This is a big issue in a lot of ways. For example a TV or radio show only has a fixed amount of screen time per day, and a newspaper only a set number of collumn inches to use in any given day. How to pick what leads, what comes next and what gets cut. There are many issues that are very important to one community but not to another. For example use of public land for ranching is probably very important in places like montana, here in New Hampshire we probably don't care. Different groups have different issues which will touch their lives.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
European release CDs? Small market? Man, I wish I had 0.5% of that small market...
However, I would contest that even with every post visible, you would choose not to read most of the things abhorrent to you - except if you are a zealot looking for a jihad, in which case reading them isn't likely to help you much because it just bounces off.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The problem with interactive sites, moderated or not, (and more generically, with the entire web and the cause of so much dross in web searches,) is that people can submit anything without regard to its organization and retrieval.
It not a question of censorship, its a question of "What the [expletive deleted] are you talking about? What was the INTENT of your comment?"
We desperately need a generic, interactive "content creator" which will allow us to add classification tags to that any item can be identified as to provenance (who, when, where,) subject taxonomy(ies since something can be about many things,) information content. Where can we find some tags? Try starting with the Dewey Decimal system... Try something...
So far we can sort of infer the first (if you feel like poring through message headers,)and fall on our sword on the third (words rarely mean what they say, connotation is far richer than denotation and search engines have to rely only on the latter,) and so far, the most useful feature of any library, the reference system used to catalog the content, is entirely absent from the Web and the 'Net.
This means that most of the time, we end up wading through irrelevancies.
Is a dictionary unjust? Only when you can't find the content you're looking for, regardless of because its just not there or you're forced to read the entire thing to find a single page.
We have got to get better organized. Its not censorship, its common sense.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If you get the news from NPR instead of ABC, you get a different perspective. How is the Internet making this any different? The only difference I see is that you get a number of sites that specialize in certain kinds of information within certain types of communities (slashdot for geeks, etc). Is it really somehow better to have your news filtered by some faceless editor in a news corporation, or have it filtered by like-minded community members.
I mean, when I go through my day, the vast majority of the real news I get about the world comes from NPR. I get my geek news from Slashdot and news.com. I go to other sites to discuss what I've read and I share my ideas. I know the type of information that I get and the overall quality of it for each information source. I intentionally seek out news from many sources so that I can get as accurate a perspective on the world as possible. I'm aware of how each outlet filters their news and I take that into account. When I attach validity to the information. Slashdot is notorious for overreacting on stories so I take any news from here of somebody's rights being trampled with a huge grain of salt.
People who wish to remain oblivious to what's going on in the world have been able to do that for a long time without the Internet. Look at the gated communities in the distant suburbs. Do you think these people keep in close touch with the reality of poverty in the inner city? The Internet isn't some huge new threat, it's just another aspect of the same problem that's always been there.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Personally I see nothing inherently wrong with the fragmenting of culture. Sure the internet culture leads people to have less and less in common with each other, but also with the broadening of the internet demographics, a wider array of participants are able to share a greater portion of their cultures. i.e. I have less in common someone in the US not of my demographic, but I have more in common with someone in India.
The more information that is available, the greater innovation can occur. Natural scientist had this problem in the 17th and 18th century which is why they founded scientific societies. They then would spread new articles around to each other and then have meetings to discuss the meaning of the article. Thus more people could get exposure to an issue withouot actually having to become an expert in it.
What we have now with the cultural fragmentation is an increase in subdisciplines oriented on exploring differing classes of interactions, with the more advantageous gradually replacing the less advantageous. The increase in fragmentation means that society is more able to adapt to rapidly changing situations, as the dominant culture might not have the infrastructure to handle a massive disruption, but some splintered subculture would more readily embrace the changing situation, and replace the dominant culture.
Moderation, while not perfect, is a useable technology for making sense out of chaos, whether it be here on /., on USENET, or on another medium.
Failures of moderation make a given medium less and less useful over time. Lack of moderation at all allows takeovers and spam. I've seen that numerous times over the years: the "Meowers" were one fairly well known example that spanned numerous groups.
Moderation is not anti-democratic, instead it is the only way **I** know of to prevent the so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" online. . .
Actually, if you believe that Nietzsche was anti-semitic, or in favor of those things that the Nazis believed, in general, you've been listening to the wrong secondary sources. I'd dispute that anyone can be a primary source of information on a war who died decades before that war was fought.
>People living in democracies, Sunstein
/. is, in many ways, its own insular little world (ask someone on the street about Open Source or "All Your Base" or DeCSS and you will most likely get a blank stare), but the real problem is the lack of open discourse and tolerance for divergent opinions in the centers of higher learning (or more accurately, Political Correctness Indoctrination Camps) that are generating the current and next generation of industry, cultural and government leaders.
>maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might
>not have chosen themselves. Unplanned,
>spontaneous, unanticipated encounters are
I hate to say it, but if want to eliminate the tunnel vision of people's views, you should start at the universities, not the Internet.
We are seeing an increase in the trend of people being allowed to suppress Free Speech because of such abstract and subjective (and whiny) reasons as "taking offense" or "hurting my feelings" or "intellectual harassment".
This is where the true danger lies.
What has happened in this country is that many liberals blame the conservatives for being close-minded and intolerant (and many are), while being blind to their own close-mindedness and intolerance.
The problem is "Diversity" is a code word for supporting the minority and attacking or suppressing the majority (particular when morality is concerned). "Diversity" should mean treating all views and opinions based on logical merit, but we all know of public figures (*cough*Jesse Jackson*cough) who cry racism (or some appropriate other -ism) in response to someone's heinous unAmerican crime of disagreeing with them. I'd like to see a little more judgement of people on the content of their character, and their ideas on the content and logic of their words, but that would mean having to be honest, hard-working and most of all, not a Victim.
There is no doubt that
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
How do you propose I manage the information that comes to me, then? I can't read all of it. I could ignore the internet entirely, as half of Americans and most of the world do, and get all my information through people I meet IRL and from the "corporatized" TV & radio networks. Or I can filter it in some way.
Filtering can be done automatically based on rules, like spam filters; it can be centrally mandated; or I can choose a group of people who I trust (in aggregate) to make the same kinds of decisions I would make. I choose the last.
I hear plenty of opinions here on slashdot that I disagree with. Gun control, parenting, Microsoft: all are divisive issues with informative and insightful people on both sides.
Jon, if collaborative filtering really meant you only saw positions you agreed with, how did you ever find out that people were pissed at you stealing their Hellmouth posts?
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E_NOSIG
Realistically, the debate would be rigged by having the side the government doesn't like represented by the most offensive extremists available.
If Sunstein's proposal had somehow been enacted and not laughed out of court, conservative appointees could select a link to Peter Singer's defense of infanticide as the token "pro-choice" link. When liberals come to power, the "pro-life" side would be represented by the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Amen. And it frees up time.
My mental killfile: All reality TV. Anything to do with Hollywood - who's fucking whom, who's making what movie, who's wearing what at the awards. 90% of sports broadcasts. 100% of the weather report, 75% of the time. Commercials. Routine (i.e. current levels of) fighting in the Middle East and the Balkans. School shootings. Mainstream (i.e. network news, not CNBC, which rules!) business news coverage.
Out of a typical 30 minute nightly newscast, that leaves two or three minutes of actual content. Basically, I used TV news last week to see pictures of space station chunks falling into the Pacific.
I get the news I care about (New CPUs, new space probes, daily reports from current space probes, technological advances, biotech, business) from the 'net.
I then use specialized news broadcasts (CNBC, PBS' Nightly Business Report) to "catch" any business news I missed, and other specialized news broadcasts (PBS' McNeil-Lehrer) to get caught up on issues I haven't been following closely (e.g. who's blowin' up whom in some brushfire war that the media have forgotten about).
I watch the same minutes of TV every day, but the S/N ratio is improved by a 10:1 margin.
Ditto. I don't do it with radio, I do it with web sites - reading both salon.com and enterstageright.com.
What I like about doing it on the web is that I know I'm getting biased coverage - neither site pretends to be objective. With MSNBCBSABCNN, it's a joke. Plus, I can read more spin in 10 minutes on both sites than all the networks together could give me in an hour. (Did you ever notice that you can make just as much sense out of the evening news by ignoring the screen and just listening to the words? Now - do you really read that slowly? Plain text is the fastest way I know to cram data into my brain ;-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here on Slashdot we have developed, as a community, and incredibally powerful tool
/. moderation, but it was not developed "as a community". It was was developed by Hemos & Taco, and the rest of the team. The rest of ./ may have collectively bitched about it, and provided a live test facility, but that's a far stretch from "developing" something.
/. and the innovators who made it happen.
I respectfully disagree. Say what you want about
Bender is an amazing piece of software. Instead of another unappreciative rant, let's show some respect for the sheer volume and popularity of
/asskiss>
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What happens when you outlaw guns
That's my point. "The Economist" is a mainstream news outlet and you get better information from such sites than you will from a "me media" site.
It all comes down to simple logistics and resources. No alternative site as of yet can offer the same level of detail and depth that a dedicated, mainstream news outlet can. Such organizations have the money, resources, and contacts to investigate stories. They can assign a guy full time to travel around the world and follow up on things. "Me media" sites do little more than restate or aggregate this information. I know of no site where I can get better information than what I get from the conventional outlets. Most of the alternative sites do nothing more than link back to the main sites anyway. The only thing they offer is unfiltered, unqualified opinion.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Is that really true though? Is it actually possible to look at an inssue in such microscopic depth on the internet? Let's say there is a story posted on CNN about Joe Politician doing something naughty. Where can I go to get more detailed, accurate information that is better than what the major news outlets publish? It strikes me that the vast majority of so-called "me media" sites are nothing more than collections of unverified, unadulterated personal opinion. Take Slashdot for example. The stories posted here are almost invariably links to other, more mainstream news articles. The comments are usually nothing more than personal opinion and commentary. They may let me know how you and others "feel" about something, but they usually offer little in the way of substantially new information pertaining directly to the story in question. When you get right down to it, "me media" offers little more than a whole lot of "me too" comments from the public. There aren't a lot of places that accurately cover news stories in more depth than CNN or MSNBC or the AP, since most of the alternative sites simply repeat what the major sites publish. In that sense I think the original article overstates the problem. I believe the internet actually does provide a shared expereince in that regardless of where you hear about something, you're usually reading the same basic set of facts about an issue as everyone else.
The real power in the internet is in the establishment of focused portal sites that aggregate information about specific subjects so people can get more breadth (not depth) to their informaiton consumption. If I am interested in some particular issue, I can frequent sites that focus on that issue and collect a large number of references to many articles that help me get a better overall picture of the issue. Such sites usually don't offer any new or deeper information, but they do make it easy to access what is already out there so that I am able to better filter the information by checking one source against another.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
To see this, note that NONE of the personalization programs require banning anonymizers so that you can't escape the control of the program.
One of the great uses of a truely personalized system is the ease with which one can find quality opposing viewpoints. If today I wonder how anyone could believe Bush "has a mandate from the people," I have to piece it together myself. But with secure, anonymized and decentralized personalization, I can easily find the top-rated opposing viewpoints so that I can better understand those I oppose, for every in every war it's important to "know your enemy."
Finally, my "Me" would contain 85% stuff of direct interest, by authors and in a style I appreciate, and %15 would be from my chosen "serendipity" authors who point me to headlines I might not otherwise see, sort of like Slashdot.
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The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
Despite the disclaimer that there is no nostalgia for TV networks controlling everything (which would be premature) the implicit basis of all this is that we should all be exposed to the same media. The news I like to read (like slashdot, Scientific American, 21C, etc)has always been, and will always be, suppressed in this 'common sources' as being beyond the attention span of 'common americans'. The idea that 'me media' won't expose people to anything outside thier balliwic, but say CBS will is absurd. To the contrary, I find stuff on line that suprises me regularly, and in the 30 yrs I've been on this planet, a major network has not suprised me EVEN ONCE. Anyone who thinks deeply enough about the implications of what I just said will probably want to have every university that gave this guy a passing grade, let alone hired him, stripped of their accreditations.
You're kidding, right? Either that, or you've never been an ass on a bulletin board with a strong sysop.
A good sysop was not just a "meaningful effort" to control hostility and chaos, they were damn effective ones, too.
> such microscopic depth on the internet? Let's
> say there is a story posted on CNN about Joe
> Politician doing something naughty. Where can I
> go to get more detailed, accurate information
> that is better than what the major news outlets publish?
Extremely good point. When I posted the parent message I was thinking more of the type of things that I'm interested in. For instance I'll read on spaceflightnow.com about a new telescope Nasa is thinking of building. That got me interested, and after reading their article, I then started trawling the web looking for more information, eventually ending up with what amounted to blueprints for said telescope. I now have a detailed understanding of the subject.
I'll grant that this level of microscopic examination doesn't always work, especially for topics like your example of sleasy politicians. But I'm a nuts and bolts type of guy, and politicians (sleasy or otherwise) just don't interest me. Thus, "me-media" works for me.
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Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
"If an individual freely chooses to join a service that moderates ... then the viewer has expressed his inalienable right to listen only to what he wants,"
/.
"Nothing," McMahon adds, "could be more democratic."
No the viewer expressed to listen to a mostly common opinion. A better way for a really democratic moderation system would be one that moderates on bases of your previous opinions and others who sort of share your opinion. Like a "me moderated" version of
You post this on a moderated web site. The value of the site is measured in 'mind-share' (or maybe time-share) of the users it has. You are contributing to this... putting your 'content vote' into Slashdot.
There is no shortage of unmoderated forums. Go post to Usenet, and watch your thread be ignored amidst a sea of non-sequitors, me-toos, flames, and spam.
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
Sure, it does happen, but it's only the minority of cases. And for every bad moderator, there's several good ones who'll mod you back up. The /. mod guidelines are that you mod up more than down, so that signal-to-noise is improved by selectively boosting rather than attenuating.
Grab.
Sunstein's fear has some basis, I guess. But in fact I think people are being driven away from traditional media by the same phenomena. Most trad. media are written by, of, and for -- and increasingly *about* -- a narrow class of traditional journalists who share the same worldview, political opinions, lifestyle, etc. It's already the "Them Media." For many people, that's reason enough to tune them out. If mass media were more inclusive, and less solipsistic and biased, this would be less of a problem.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
In general, most users of "personalized" websites receive an experience no more "personal" than a list of headlines on some topics that they've previously identified as interests. And that's only if they bother to customize the options on that site, which most people don't.
Regardless of how I've configured my Slashboxes, I still have no idea exactly what headlines or what viewpoints are going to show up when I log on to check the news every day, but I know that in general, they will pertain to the industry I work in, the people I associate with, and part of the community I participate in.
How does this really compare with information distribution of days gone by? In the late 18th century, while the United States was in it's infancy, there was no internet to spread customized news to individuals, but does that mean individuals got all the news and all the viewpoints in their Sunday newspaper?
No, much like Slashdot volunteer moderators do today, the editorial staff of the local newspaper (which in most cases only had a distribution to the local community) filtered through the news they received and printed on topics which were relevent to the industries, peoples and communities in their local distribution area. People may not have had an exact forecast of what they were reading, but certainly could expect that the local paper would print news that affected them.
I think that if the rural farmers in South Carolina were able to find some common ground with the Entrepeneurial class in New York on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, despite the balkanized nature of the press in those days, there is little danger that everyone in a globally interconnected network are going to totally lose touch with one another.
Of course, no one is obligated to pay the least attention to opinions that are ill-reasoned or ill-informed. I hear there are some cool moderating systems that actually try to filter out some of those...
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
In Sunstein's world, whoever chooses those, oh so fortunate, sites that get designated "must carry," is the moderator. I see no mention of how that moderator is kept in check.
One has the absolute moral right to speak his opinion. Everyone else has the absolute right to ignore him. Moderation systems like Slashdot's are an excellent tool to exercise the latter right.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I visit those sites to try to understand how they think, how they justify themselves, and to see if I'm missing anything in my way of thinking.
I think this is a very healthy pastime, if you can resist the urge to flame everything you read !!
Citizenship is not global. One may be a good citizen of a free association tribe without being a good citizen of a nation-state. The free associations have moral superiority to the obsolete nation-states, which in turn have moral superiority over that most coercive of all regimes, the inescapable fascism of the globe.
The primary potential detriment of social insularity is to the individual, not the globe. In the largest sphere, smaller associations balance each other's diverse impulses -- parochial extremisms tend to vanish as the sphere expands. The failure of the individual to learn from others is not similarly ameliorated. However, the greater diversity of culture which arises in a system of unforced associations allows the *motivated* individual to benefit the more from disparate perspectives. As Jesus said: To he who has, more will be given; from he who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
One thing's for sure, we have more ways than ever of tuning out of unpleasantness. However, I'm not so sure the real issue is about moderation or customizable portals. I think people have historically made active choices in the media they consume. Newspapers and magazines are good examples of this. Network TV, I think, has been anomaly in the forty or so years it's been around in any meaningful way. The Net puts us back to the day where we mostly got our information from a diverse set of print publications. As for moderation, this system is not so different from a panel discussion. The moderation system can be a way of achieving consensus in a particular community. In short these new information spaces are what we make of them.
The idea of forcing people to include links they don't like is about as appealing to me as forcing schools to teach creationism.
--
If the United States continues to increase imported talent, you could end up with a significant chunk of the top 5% of the wage earners being poltiically disenfranchised.
So you tell me where the "citizens" are.
Admittedly, moderation can be said to be the enemy of free speech, but excessive freedom in unmoderated environments seems to breed 'chaff'. I find it to be as restrictive to my intake of new ideas to allow thousands of useless or antagonistic posts to proliferate these message boards. I do not have the time in my life to personally sift through hundereds of pointless posts searching for the jewel of information. Instead, I visit places where people I am somewhat trusting of moderate the posts for my perusal. There is, perhaps, a weakness to any system, and until humans cease to exploit the relatively new anonymity of the internet for their attention-getting behaviors, I and many others will be forced to rely on moderated systems. Oh, and this is my first ./ post. I am elated to have finally found something worth speaking up about.
But I would never force someone to be exposed to viewpoints that they don't want to be exposed to. This is the central point of the article: it is good to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, but it is bad to be forced to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Unfortunately, I see no middle ground here, and I prefer to stick with the current system where people are not forced to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, as the lesser of two evils.
Some of us may remember when television stations were required to give "equal time" to opposing viewpoints. This was eventually struck down as unconstitutional. It amounts to forcing someone to speak in a way they do not wish to speak. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak (as Katz acknowledges). I have no intention of giving up my freedom not to speak, even at the potential "cost" of people not being forced to be exposed, against their will, to alternative viewpoints.
But there's another, more insidious danger with "equal time" laws, either of the sort that used to exist in this country, or of the sort that Sunstein suggests. It misleads people into thinking that there are only two viewpoints on any issue. In fact, on important issues, there are likely to be three or five or ten different viewpoints.
How many of us are fed up with both Republicans and Democrats? Under equal time laws, Republican and Democratic views can be presented as opposing viewpoints, with all others suppressed. "Surely," you may ask, "having all but two viewpoints suppressed is better than having all but one viewpoint suppressed?" No, I don't agree. If only one viewpoint is presented, I believe most people will realize that it is not the only viewpoint. If only two are presented, I fear that more people will think they are getting the full picture.
In their debates last year, one of the few issues Bush and Gore disagreed on was whether to use some of the U.S. oil reserves. Meanwhile, libertarians were asking why we have government-owned oil reserves at all; but that viewpoint was not considered. It's bad enough when it happens in presidential debates, but it would be worse to have it happen across all news.
To take another example, a website under Sunstein's rules, might expose people to "both" sides of the abortion debate by presenting an article with the extreme pro-life position, and one with the extreme pro-choice position. Extremists on both sides of this issue claim that there can be no compromise--depsite the fact that the vast, but nonvocal majority of Americans seem to want a compromise, allowing abortion early in the pregnancy but not allowing partial-birth abortions. Is this really a good way to expose people to differing viewpoints?
I (and I would suspect, most other people) simply do not have the time to read every possible viewpoint on an issue. I do not read every comment in a /. article with 500+ comments, even though I know I might be missing some valuable comments. Given this practical limitation, there seem to me to be only two possibilities: give each person individual control over how to filter which comments he and she will read (and accept that some people will apply filters that I personally don't agree with), or have a "moderation czar" (no doubt Sunstein himself would be happy to volunteer for this) who decides which alternative viewpoints people should be exposed to. I'll stick with the former, thank you very much.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I actually spent some time over the last two weeks reading at -1 and found that there were a lot of great things going on just below the "Score: 1" level. Sure there was a lot of unnecessary homophobia. But a lot of the intelligent contributions of AC's never gets modded up, simply because moderators don't browse at 0. I also noticed a lot of fairly reasonable posts moderated down for simply being unpopular or less sophisticated in their wording. And frankly, I can't believe that the average Slashdotter doesn't appreciate some of the better "All your beowulf cluster of natalie portmans are belong to us" jokes one sees in the 0/-1 range.
I do not have a signature
Those who moderate comments on Slashdot, Kuro5shin and other community-based weblogs may downgrade content they don't find worthwhile in a genuine effort to express their thoughts as readers and participants -- a freedom no newspaper reader or television viewer has. One person's new freedom is another's' censorship, though. Congress has required, for instance, that schools and libraries who want to take advantage of lucrative e-Rate funding for their networking projects employ content-filtering software. The same basic mechanism (content is chosen before it reaches the viewer), but with very different motivations. As various methods and reasons for content filtering spread, they bring with them some dark clouds."
The basic mechanism is NOT the same. In one case, no matter how low a comment gets moderated, you can still get it by changing your own filter settings. In another, someone has made it IMPOSSIBLE to reach some content through the available interface. One preserves a filtering function that allows us to enjoy our freedoms more, the other eliminates our freedoms to make our own decisions about content if we don't like the ones the authorities have made. Very different indeed.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Speaking as an old-school liberal, I have to agree - universities are becoming far too politicized and trying to express the "wrong" opionion will not be permitted. A recent survey indicated that over 70% of college students think racist speech should be banned - we've got a real problem.
These people are an insult to real liberals, who have always believed that the average person is smart enough to make up their own mind - that's why liberals have spent two centuries campaigning for the right to vote for the "lesser people" of all types - because these people matter.
Don't forget that there are too many religous schools where expressing the opposite "wrong" opinion will result in equally harsh censure.
"Deadly habit"? I dunno. I think I'd rather have the press presenting both sides, even when it's "obvious" which side is right, than to have them wholeheartedly advocate one point of view to the exclusion of alternative thoughts. With the current system, we the reader can make our own judgment as to which side to believe. With the alternative, we will never even hear about the other side in order to make a judgment.
________________
________________
Private Essayist
Esteemed Mr. Baggins,
Thank you for the honor of your reply.
Unfortunately, the worthy intentions of the book, and its cultural analysis, leave few ends to those of us who want to avoid the effects of commercialized filtering. Many Americans, like some hobbits, have an irritating tendency to shut out all but the most eminently practical things there in front of them. They will gladly put up a digital windowblind, no matter if an outside force has brought it in.
The question of how we filter is more cultural, then, than political. For this, the only options we have in politics to address are law, policy and economics, none of which are exact or direct instruments.
Our options right now are a legislative wall and a market-based, open and voluntary evolution of filtering software.
I would direct my energy at preventing the government from institutionalizing this software until a content neutral or a content specific manner can be found to block the most dangerous sites while protecting the richness of information of the Net at large.
Rigid laws must be passed as to what can be blocked and what cannot be blocked in public access places and in workplaces (corporate software filtering union organizing sites is one example I can think of).
But for the rest of us and for the home, we should not restrict the choice of blinds.. in this case the civil libertarian principle applies, and the cure is worse than the ailment.
We can only hope that the people like you, who have an independent sense of information-- the readers of this book and other messages like it-- will raise their own families with only the most limited and reasonable filters, over which they have complete control.
Sincerely yours,
Reva "Perdida" Altamira
Goat sex free since 2001
Unmoderated forums have been done. Do a websearch for 'usenet'. Hope that helps!
While I agree that it's important for people to have the widest possible exposure to a variety of different ways of thinking, I think that it's ridiculous to even consider trying to mandate it. Let's face it, some people just don't want to improve themselves. Others are too lazy. But here's the kicker: the people who get the widest exposure to new ideas, the people who are the most well-rounded intellectually and socially will be the ones most likely to be sucessful. The "me media" doesn't change that at all. And so Darwin is still going to favor "new thinkers."
Moderation systems like Slashdot uses are useful in that they do not "censor" ideas that are less popular but that they draw more attention to the ideas that more interesting, insgihtful, funny, whatever. I still read posts scored 1, just not every last one of them. I do read all posts scored at 2 or higher. But Slashdot's system I think may be a little different in that it severely limits the amount of moderation that any one individual can do. I think that's a Good Thing. More importantly, it's all voluntary. I can read messages scored at -1 if I want to.
I read about this very subject 4 or 5 years ago when the "push revolution" was beginning. The concern then was that Internet use would become passive (no more browsing) and that we would constantly be provided with information that we found interesting, relevant, or idealogically reasonable and that we wouldn't be provided with anything conflicting. It hasn't happened yet, and "push" technology is dead. I don't think that it's ever going to happen.
What we are really talking about is narrowcasting, and I think that it is a Good Thing as long as it is an option that is controlled by the user. As long as broadcasting is still an option and browsing is still an option users will not be able to accidentally paint themselves into a single idealogy.
Take for example (again) Slashdot. I'm constantly learning and being exposed to new ideas from it just by browsing it daily. I see hundreds of messages on each topic, and never have they all taken the same stance. There are always naysayers and yaysayers, and many degrees in between. And I'm exposed to their thinking (for better or worse) regularly.
Now I think back 100 years before the widespread growth of communications technology. Or maybe 200 years. We (most of us) would have grown up in some small town or village or on a farm, for all intents and purposes isolated from almost all other people who were not also farmers (or lived in the same village/town). We would have lived isolated from new ideas. We wouldn't have any way of hearing about a breakthrough in the invention of a combustion engine. But it still happened.
So even if we are still isolated intellectually (which I think requires a ridiculous amount of passivity on the part of everybody) innovation will find a way. Someone somewhere will continue to come up with new ideas and new technology. I mean, let's face it: we're human beings. It's what we do.
The moderation system developed here on Slashdot is a first, and the technology it represents can be considered a beta test by the multinationals.
How long before they take it and control it for their own ends? Moderation is a very right wing and controlling force - rather than punishing people who post trolls and flamebaitish comments, and are irresponsible, by sending them from the community they abuse (k5 can be said to do this), we instead ignore them, and blot them out, which means that they never need to face responsibility for what they do.
Furthermore. this technology developed here can be said to be very powerful, but it will be perverted by the forces that be.
In 20 years time it will be the geeks here that created the moderation system moaning about it in YRO articles. This is, yet again in the geek community, hypocrisy.
Moderation should not be used. It shouold be a free for all, with the irresponsible forced to face up to what they do. Its that simple.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
People have always attempted to filter out ideas they don't want to listen to. Did you think the Catholic church didn't have public suppor for burning heretics at the stake? Even in the short history of the USA, there are plenty of examples of both private and governmental violence being used to avoid having to listen to the other side. In the War of 1812, critics of the war were arrested for "Sedition" (quite unconstitutionally, but the Supreme Court wasn't yet confident that it could review things like that). In the 1850's, in Congressional debates over slavery there were Congressmen beating each other unconscious; at least they didn't murder each other like was happening in Kansas. In the 1920's, Attorney General Palmer (quite illegally) arrested many for "radical" views. (Hilary Clinton is more radical than most of those persecuted were.) In the 1950's, the FBI was still so busy investigating "radicals" that it didn't even notice there was a Mafia until the NY state police busted a national meeting of mob bosses. I assume nobody needs to hear more about the 60's. And so on...
So a simple internet filter is a considerable improvement over what has happened historically. It does bother me that many people can so insulate themselves as to never hear the other side of the story -- but what has changed? Throughout my lifetime the network news, major newspapers, and most magazines have kept their coverage limited to things that won't unduly surprise the 75% of Americans who don't bother to dig deeper.
Not so. The U.S. is about having the freedom to go live in the woods by yourself, but with freedom comes responsibility. Therefore, it is also your responsibility to vote, to be concerned about what the government is doing, and to be concerned about your neighbor's well being. You wouldn't have roads to drive on if no one voted for the proper people to run the country. If everyone thought as you do, we would have anarchy, and you'd be holed up in the woods, rifle in hand, hoping no one came by to take everything they wanted from you just because they could.
Jon missed his calling. He should have been recruited for Battlefield Earth. What's wrong Jon? Still ticked that all those people who checked your box off in their preferences?
I'm finally beginning to see why people hate this guy. Every article he's put out in the last 3 weeks is a boring little whine fest. Oh nooo! Personalized media allows people to turn off my driveling opinion. What will I do? Where will I go? Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.
Next in a series. Mute...Cute little button or Satan's helper? You be the judge.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
The digitalization of information helps you find information you know about but may close you off to new ideas and experiences.
Take a look at the humble card catalogue, once a fixture at the local library. I used to find all sorts of books to read -books I never would have though to look for- simply by flipping though the cards. With a computerized index I find what I'm looking for faster, but I've lost the chance to stumble onto something new.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]
Unfortunately, as I stated in an earlier post, there is no way to prevent the divergence of media, or the Balkanization as you put it, without resorting to even more stentorian methods of control.
Admit it: you've been waiting years you use stentorian in a sentence.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]
I think it's about time I stopped letting Katz on my Slashdot page
This is the greatest piece of satire I have read in a long time. Congrats to the author for poking fun at all the other people that want to ban Katz but somehow not limit ideas!
=========================
=========================
Mams for me and mams for you!
How do things like this even get posted? It's crazy to think that open-minded people like myself would intentionally limit the ideas we are exposed to just because we don't like them. Thank god Slashdot lets me choose which stories make it to my personalized front page. I think it's about time I stopped letting Katz on my Slashdot page so I don't have to see his lame theories and rants anymore.
The real flaw is that Sunstein wants somebody to decide what everybody needs to know, somebody to tell us what to believe. Sorry, the "cure" is worse than the "disease".
The real problem is our schools, parents, and peers focus on telling us what to believe instead of teaching us how to determine what to believe.
It wasn't as consumer-driven as the 'net permits it to be, but in the heyday of the newspaper, most major cities had the Democratic paper and the Republican paper, and most people who read newspapers purchased one or the other, not both. With the rise to dominance of television and the decline of newspapers, there was less diversity in viewpoints, but the 'net and cable television has helped to restore the diversity of opinion sources. The 'common experience' apparently being extolled was not the historical legacy of the American Revolution, but was instead an abberant blip in history, and people seeking out viewpoints they agree with is the historical norm. I'm not claiming that this is good, but to argue that this is a new behavior is wrong.
(couldn't resist that bit of irony...)
/. crew would add). How dare this person suggest I be FORCED not to do this!
/. style moderation (there are enough divergent opinions among the moderators that any well expressed view will likely be moderated up) and the "groupthink" this article fears. Yes, I know there are certain alledged groupthinks here on /., but consider: how often do Pro-Windows, Pro-BSD, Pro-Mac views show up and get moderated up, in defiance to the alleged Linux groupthink. How often to pro-gun views get moderated up (or anti-gun). For a site that is allegedly "groupthink" run, a surprising diversity of opinions grace these pages...
I agree with this. The whole "must-carry link" idea is terrible: your right to freedom of speech does not obligate me to listen! If I choose to ignore you, how DARE you try to force your opinion on me!
In meat space, if someone tries to force me to listen to them, I can walk away, tell them to shut up, even kick them in the crotch if that is what it takes. Online, I can add them to my killfile (which I do sincerely wish the
There is a big difference between
www.eFax.com are spammers
My concern, and what I think the article was getting at, was the more nebulous "news" type of information, where it is difficult to get facts, and you must rely on the information provided by the "actors" themselves. "Me media" simply doesn't have the capability to investigate and filter this kind of information, because Bob down the block does not have the ability to call up Joe Congressman and ask about his recent activities at the Bada-Bing! club. News organizations developed precisely in order to discover and disseminate this kind of information. I don't really see any way that "me media" can ever make serious inroads into this network, because it is simply impossible for the sources of information (congresspersons, business executives, police, etc.) to maintain a relationship with every wanna-be alternative journalist out there. It is for this reason that "me media" sites will continue to offer regurgitated mainstream news information, and the public at large will still be afforded the opportunity to hear mainstream information, and thereby be cemented by the "social glue" of collective experience.
There will remain an important role for the non-traditional journalist however, in that he will be reponsible for paying close attention to the performance of the mainstream outlets in order to make sure that coverage does not become biased. The non-traditional journalist can "raise the red flag" as it were, when MSNBC appears to bias their coverage in favor of the their corporate owners, or CNN starts leaning too much in favor of George W. As aggregation points for mainstream news, such sites can serve as the checks and balances against the various sources of coverage, allowing the consumer to compare the various mainstream stories to try and identify what's really going on.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
People have always used media to escape reality. That's the point. This is why video/role playing games have always been bad for "geeks," providing an escape from the reality that they fear to a false one that they can feel safe in.
It goes back farther than that though. Remember your mother yelling at you to stop watching TV and do your homework? Same concept. Stop shirking important stuff just to be a zombie.
The book Katz speaks of is just the work of someone stating the obvious. Of course, Katz being the genius that he is, needs the obvious pointed out, and assumes that others do, too.
The moderation system allows me to ignore people that I might not agree with (read at 2), or to try to read every opinion posted (read at 1). This system is only censorship if there is no choice for me to read at the lower level, I quite often don't agree with moderation, hence I read at -1, but the bottom line is it is my choice just as it is in life.
If I'm watching T.V. and something comes on that I don't want to watch, I change the channel. It's a simply as that. This moderation system isn't anything new, it's a simple evolution from traditional media forms. Freedom of speech doesn't mean I have to listen to you, it just means you get to say whatever you want.
> partly because they protect against fragmentation
> and extremism, a predictable outcome when
> like-minded people communicate only with one another."
The problem with mass-media is that in order to survive it must have mass-appeal. Consequently, mass-media tends to be extremely shallow in its treatment of issues, since they know that for any story, 80% of the audience aren't interested in it. So they have to keep moving from topic to topic trying to keep their audience from becoming bored.
With "Me Media" I can point a microscope at one story, and delve far beneath the surface. In doing so I've aquired an understanding about a particular topic, not just been exposed to a dozen one-liners that will all be forgotten the next day.
I'll grant that "Me Media" produces less conformity (whether this is a bad thing or not is a separate discussion). But one cannot deny that mass-media is a lot shallower.
--
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Heres an idea - Anarchy Day on Slashdot
All account holders get unlimited moderation points for one day. Articles have no score limit. You can only mod each post once. Sounds like fun to me.
I have no idea what this would possibly accomplish or signify, but I'm sure Katz could come up with some bullshit theory about how this experiment is related to Columbine, mass media tyranny and his movie review of the week.
-gerbik
You may decry moderation as a bad thing, but I stopped having time for Frist p0sts a long time ago. Yes, moderators can and definitely do abuse their power, especially so around here where moderation happens anonymously. Do I care? Not enough to give up using moderation. I simply don't have time to listen to everyone's drivel, and I truly don't care about the troll-of-the-week. For me, missing the occasional post that the chri$tian fscking coalition or the clam$ mod down to -1 still wasn't worth my time to hunt down, because, frankly, very little of what happens around here is really "stuff that matters."
Knowing how moderation works at least lets me recognize the dangers inherent to moderation. I'd still love to see NoCeMs implemented for moderation so I could filter out some of the idiot moderators who think goat-abuse is worth my time.
John
John
I'm a web junkie, and I've given the matter some thought. My primary sources of information are USENET and the web. Of course, I only keep up with a few out of the thousands of newsgroups. Likewise, I follow a few quite specialized web sites, like Slashdot. When the focus is so narrow, it's easy to lose perspective, especially when egoboo like Slashdot kharma is involved.
Have you ever gotten hot under the collar after an anonymous coward's flame? Why? If "All you hot Natalie Portman grits are belong to us!" makes any sense to you, you probably don't get out enough.
I'm convinced that there's a danger in always agreeing with what you read. I read a Mother Hubbard at the gym the other night. It had an article pointing out the irony of a Republican senator (I forget his name) who helped pass mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions, then helped his son avoid such a sentence. Right on, stick it to the hypocrite! Then again, I feel a little insulted by Mother Hubbard's obvious agenda.
The world would be a better place if conservatives read Mother Hubbard and liberals read the Wall Street Journal, or something like that.
Nah. Moderation has been used for years on alt.sysadmin.recovery. I pity the fool that does a "all your base are belong to us" over there. :)
IMHO, moderation != censorship. Moderation is just a real nice way of cutting through some of the line-noise. You have the right to sat what you want, and I have the right to say you've got a good point or you're simply talking sh*t.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
According to Sunstein, software is helping us talk only to ourselves.
:)
Maybe so, but it has its advantages too. If it wasn't for the movie players and all the popups I wouldn't have become so close to my hand. And if I hadn't gotten close to my hand, I wouldn't be getting laid.
See...it all works out in the end
Unfortunately, as I stated in an earlier post, there is no way to prevent the divergence of media, or the Balkanization as you put it, without resorting to even more stentorian methods of control.
When you walk around in a world of printed media, it is already enclosed in private places and relationships. You walk into an adult book store to pay for the stuff. That is a place where common ground is excluded; the common ground (the street) cannot legally be a place to display the porn.
On the Internet, there is nothing intrinsically preventing the porn marketer from doing something that, to continue the metaphor of the real life adult shop, would make the windows as light and bright as Macy's, attractive to everyone who wants to see it and obnoxious to those who don't. There should be some kind of filtering software to demarcate a public space which those who want to make a buck will freely violate.
We support laws for the restriction of smoking advertisements, which use strategic locations and attractive appearances to get attention- just like porn sites. I definitely prefer filtering software, which you can choose to download and use, to laws that would make the entire internet a public space. Even better, a free market to promote competition of filtering software will improve the software far better than a static law will.
I feel those who wopuld like a wholly unregulated Net, which has no mechanism that protects us neither voluntarily or through law, are unaware of the true content, architecture and behavior of the modern Net. It is no longer a primarily scientific system... just read this CNN article about how searches can't even touch most of the hidden Internet anymore.
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
There appear to be some very valid points here. I make a point of switching back-and-forth between the most liberal radio station in my area and the most conservative, deliberately exposing myself to both points of view (the middle ground comes from other media). The two points the author appears to have missed are:
Moderation systems like Slashdot's are radically different from net nanny filtering because users have the opportunity to configure how they apply, not just the filtering criteria. I can choose to ignore moderation entirely, showing all posts, or to set various cutoff points and sorting methods. I enjoy seeing opposing points of view, but appreciate methods for filtering out anonymous cowards and some trolls (good trolling is humorous, insightful, and enjoyable to read).
Second, the homogenization of news is hardly something new. If I choose to read Windows NT Magazine instead of Linux Journal, I'm not going to read much pro-Linux information, am I? We already have a lot of control over what we see, and the changes brought by the customization of places like My Yahoo or Slashdot are parts of a long-standing trend, not something new and revolutionary.
Any given web site may espouse a certain political or sociological viewpoint, but there are arbitrarily large numbers of web sites. Hell, Slashcode is open source...if you don't like what you find out there, make your own!
The Internet is about niches. It's not about selling dishwasher detergent and Pepsi (although those companies would disagree), it's about selling imported Japanese giant robot models and European release CDs. Markets that are too small to survive in any geographic region can be profitably addressed by the Internet. The same goes for ideas...the pre-digested pap can be replaced by discussion, collaboration, and exploration. Moreover, the mere fact that there are millions of voices speaking is far preferable to the monoculture popular media we're putting up with now. If all the voices start sounding alike, that's not necessarily bad...consensus does not limit freedom, but hollering one message from one source in everybody's ears 24/7 does.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
His point (based on Jon's article, I have not read the book) seesm to be that all these choices are bad for us. 'Common Framework" sounds suspiciously like "Group Think." Its better that we all get the same info - even if its not entirely accurate?? I don't buy it, choice is good, as long as you really have a choice. The problems start when the "choices" are not really that different.
I think that this was a complete, and fortunately short-lived, disaster. I cannot imagine a worse tyranny than that of corporate-media consensus driven into everybody's skull. This existed from the beginning of mass media in the first days of nationwide network radio until the decline of the networks during the nineties. Before network radio, people lived in fairly cloistered environments [you can say Balkanized if you felt like it.] Even the churches were pretty decentralized -- there were common themes and dogma, but without mass communication each church had autonomy.
I love the Slashdot moderation system. While there are definitely some common themes that get moderated up or down -- causing some bias (biases that agree with mine for the large part) moderation has the intended effect of letting you see well-written or at least well-reasoned points of view. It certainly influences my writing; and I write differently for Slashdot than I do for USENET because of the moderation quality-filter.
The thing is, that if you want to find divergent viewpoints, you can just talk to other people. I don't know why the author of this book doesn't realize this. Whenever I'm with my friends, we talk about what we've been reading; and I find out wonderful things that I wouldn't find on my own. I'd much rather do this than be forced to skip over links of alternative viewpoints [alternatives selected by whom? on what agenda? under what supervision?]
The author's vision of mandated consensus is truly insane. The number of viewpoints on any issue of any import is nearly infinite; there is no way that you can force them all to be 'carried' under some 'must carry' rule.
Finally, a proof that consnesus is impossible is to extend the author's argument just a little further. Why should this glorious mandated consensus just be limited to Americans? If it's good for all (US) Americans to have this consensus, wouldn't it be even better for Canadians to be included too? And Mexicans? Russians? Chinese? Martians? Diversity exists, and it's a powerfully good thing. Command consensus won't work any more than command economies -- the marketplace of ideas is fluid and efficient.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.