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Coddling of the American Mind

Pamela Galli

By Pamela Galli,
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wherorangi

wherorangi

Posted
Posted

i dunno why your post disappeared either. I didnt see anything wrong with it myself. It was a restatement of your previous posts pretty much

i only quoted the bit I did bc you seemed to think I was saying something that I wasnt, apart from that was all good I thought. I didnt see anything contentious in it myself that would warrant it being removed

i dunno whats going on with stuff getting deleted on here. Seems pretty random to me

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Phil Deakins

Phil Deakins

Posted
Posted

You managed to read it before it disappeared? I didn't think any of them were in the thread long enough for that. I suppose you must have seen one of the attempts as soon as it was posted and, of course, when it's in your browser, it stays there until you load another page. Yes, It basically repeated what I've said before because that's pretty much all there is to say.

I saw someone else post that messages were being put in something like administrative hold, where they are waiting for a moderator to clear them. I think it was Freya. I checked to see if any system messages gave that indication, but none did. The only messages were the usual "posted successfully" ones.

Anyway, we've pretty much beaten this side-topic to death, so it's no big deal.

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Freya Mokusei

Freya Mokusei

Posted
Posted

Phil Deakins wrote:

I saw someone else post that messages were being put in something like administrative hold, where they are waiting for a moderator to clear them. I think it was Freya.

Yeah, though mine was from an automatic wording flag. Some term (probably terms, it was occuring in multiple paragraphs) was causing the automatic filter to move my posts to Rejected Items.

In my experience, most of these terms are associated with the types of automated spam we get here (escorts, movies, sports), but it's possible a few of those terms are far-reaching.

You might have fortune finding yours and rewording, then you can resubmit and it'll appear in place. For me, though, every time I posted it it'd immediately be stripped back out.

HTH. :)

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Freya Mokusei wrote (to Phil):

HTH.
:)

I had to look HTH up in the Urban Dictionary. Now I must choose to understand your use of it as one (or more?) of:

Hope This Helps

  • An acronym standing for "hope this helps", used sarcastically after answering a dumb question or pointing out an obvious oversight to a person of inferior mental qualities. Limited generally to message board posting.
  • Used frequently on tech-support type forums, and also jokingly as a dismissive term after offering no help whatsoever

    (Note: Either definition makes me grin.)

Horny, Tired, Hungry

  • A progression of steps one must do in order to have an excellent day.

    (Note: I have newly spare bedroom and plenty of leftovers in the fridge)

Home Town Honey

  • That person on whom you cheat while you're away at prep school or college.

    (Note: If you feel cheated upon and desire vengeance, see my 2nd note.)

;-).

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Phil Deakins

Phil Deakins

Posted
Posted

I didn't get any messages like that. They just disappeared in seconds, after being seen in the thread. I saw your post listed in the thread where you couldn't post. I read and replied to the one before it and, when I got back, yours had disappeared.

So, whatever the reasons, the posts actually get posted, perhaps passing one filter, and then a, or another, filter is applied.

It doesn't matter in my case, though. There wasn't anything so important in it that it must be read.

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Freya Mokusei

Freya Mokusei

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Curse Urban Dictionary for exposing my insincerity. Or my horniness. Or my dalliances! :D (Yeah I'm not helping you narrow that down - I need my air of mystery!)

@Phil - sorry, that's a mistaken understanding of what happened, let me clear it up. I edit most of my posts for up to an hour after posting them (not a personal quality I enjoy, and I try to minimise the effect it has on others), it was one of those edits that caused the trigger to fire, and then I couldn't get it to not-fire. The post would submit, but disappear from the page immediately upon refreshing. It's possible you saw one of the incomplete copies I did manage to submit.

There was no message, no notification. But it appeared in the Rejected Items list (which... I don't think is in date order).

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Phil Deakins

Phil Deakins

Posted
Posted

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Phil Deakins wrote:

I
have
to agree with you, Snugs, but let's keep that between you and me, eh?
;)

Well there you go Phil, escalating
want
to
need
. How long before you escalate it to a
right
?

Talk about coddling.

She told you? Darn it! That's the last time I'm going to trust her. That's for sure.

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Phil Deakins

Phil Deakins

Posted
Posted

That's interesting. Thank you, Freya. It seems I tried 5 times to post that reply to Wherorangi. I knew it wasn't surviving. There's also another recent post from another thread that was rejected where some obscure reason. I didn't know about that one. It's necessary to watch out for such occurences.

Another question. I can't see anywhere where that page (and its tabs) are linked from. Do you know where it's linked from?

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Phil Deakins

Phil Deakins

Posted
Posted

I've been experimenting with the older post that ended up in My Rejected Items, and it turned out that the word 'e-s-c-o-r-t-i-n-g', without the hyphens, was the reason. It's now posted in its proper place in the thread. It's from July, and posting it hasn't popped the thread up to the top, so that's good. I might have a go at my rejected reply to wherorangi :) I don't think I will, though, because I won't be able to continue the discussion until next week.

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mikka Luik

mikka Luik

Posted
Posted

Yes. The photo of Kim Phúc has been etched into my mind since... well '72 i guess and to say it made a personal impact well... Powerful is not the word. We are roughly the same age.

That being said : when you sign on to fb you agree to the T and Cs, same as anywhere. They clearly state (among other things) the company position on allowed images. By the letter, this picture breaks those conditions. End of. Complete with lawyerese:

" “While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others,” a spokesman for Facebook said in response to queries from the Guardian. "

Many of us here know the context of that particular picture. Does not change much. Before anyone suggests I am supporting censorship, I would like to point out that censorship is traditionally a governmental prerogative/abuse (delete according to your view) rather than a corporate one.

But (from same source as quote) the survey suggesting that '(Pew Research Center), 44% of US adults get their news on Facebook". Interesting to match that to z's recent canning of human curation.

 

 

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

As corporations grow larger, particularly those that control the pipes, devices, and services through which information flows, their impact on society is rivaling or exceeding that of government and other public institutions like education (dissemination of knowledge) and journalism (dissemination of truth).

What's interesting about Facebook is that it's ostensibly "democratic" in the sense that FB "listens" to its customers in order to mollify them. That's not necessarily healthy, as the Founding Fathers of the US well knew. And that's why the US is not a pure democracy, but rather a republic. They feared the tyranny of the majority and constructed checks and balances against it. There are no such checks and balances in Zuckerberg's empire and I'm not sure how they'd work if they're possible.

I don't think the majority of people in any society have the time or the interest to delve deeply into the larger issues that impact their lives. They're too busy surviving, thriving or conniving to pay attention. And so it's not hard to exercise outsized influence on them via personalized mass messaging. What's new here is that the collective desires of the masses can and are being used to filter the information that's fed to them. We're being subjected to both personal and societal filter bubbles that shape our thinking, or worse yet, decrease it. And we may have nobody to blame but ourselves.

While Zuckerberg may argue that delegating curation to data driven algorithms is all well and good, he might be wrong...

https://www.datanami.com/2016/01/08/beware-of-bias-in-big-data-feds-warn/

https://hbr.org/2013/04/the-hidden-biases-in-big-data

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/07/critics-allege-big-data-can-be-discriminatory-but-is-it-really-bias.html

The last article provides some counterpoint and observes that, like it or not, big-data is here to stay.

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Freya Mokusei

Freya Mokusei

Posted
Posted

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

A related subject...

Is this a coddling through failure to get news from a news source? Or coddling through failure to get news from anything but a single source?

I mean, what else was going to happen. Facebook ain't ever gonna offer objective or controversial news coverage, they're a marketing/analytics company. Informative facts might be the thing they're least likely to provide - and also the one they're least capable of providing.

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Freya Mokusei wrote:

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

A related subject...

Is this a coddling through failure to get news from a
news
source? Or coddling through failure to get news from anything but a
single
source?

I mean, what else was going to happen. Facebook ain't ever gonna offer objective or controversial news coverage, they're a marketing/analytics company.
xD

The coddling isn't from user failure, it's from Facebook failure. They're suffering the unintended consequence of being the go-to place for communications. The rejection of that image was done by a human who probably had no knowledge of its historical import.

So, maybe it's coddling through potential excessive attention to complaint, or worry about litigation. In that sense it's not unlike the micro-agression discussion. A small number of complaints can, whether from an individual person or an individual government, can have an outsized effect (nearly planet wide in this case). You can imagine large systems like Facebook falling to the least common denominator in a hurry.

I don't know how to solve this problem. Our newfound and massive ability to communicate with each other one-to-one and in self selected tribes has sidelined a substantial amount of classic journalism by giving everbody a voice and nobody the big picture. These double edged swords are hard to pick up.

On a different subject...

I've been seeing increasing discussion in the news about bias in big data. Algorithms may be very good at spotting patterns, but dreadful at understanding why they exist. Humans haven't been terribly good at the why stuff either, but big data has the potential to be bad at it faster, quieter, and more broadly than ever before.

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wherorangi

wherorangi

Posted
Posted

i think where some people who see themselves as serious people (and they usually are, like scholars and that) and wish to communicate their thoughts with the masses, do struggle with is their understanding of the masses, and the choice of channels the masses choose, and why they choose the channels they do

take FB as example. Is a channel for the masses. The masses use it for its stated purpose and for little else. FB is a social communication channel. Friend and family oriented and light frippery content

when the masses as individuals, want serious then they go to other channels for this

+

i use another example to try explain this

was a radio interview with Rick Ellis the head of our biggest public TV broadcaster a while ago. The question asked of him was:

"Why is there so much frippery content on your channel now, like reality shows, cooking contests, light movies, breakfast talky shows, and such stuff. What happened to all the serious stuff that used to be on your TV channel ? "

and he said (paraphrase):

"When we were the only channel then we had to cater for everyone. From the serious to the not serious. And we programmed accordingly. Today we are not the only channel. If people want serious then theres any number of streaming services available today that provide this. And are able to provide the time needed by the viewer to be able to concentrate on the content matter so as to better understand it. Which we cant compete with. When we devote a large amount of time to a particular topic then more people turn us off than turn us on. Like if we run a rugby game then more people are not interested in watching rugby than are, even in a rugby mad country like NZ. So they turn us off. Which is true for any other topic also

what we have found since the onslaught of streaming services is that TV today is background noise, in the same way that radio is. So we have to provide stuff that can be consumed in very small timewise soundbite/voxpops"

he further said: "It isnt that people are easily distracted or have low attention spans. They just arent concentratiing on us anymore, even when the TV is on. Serious content requires concentration. Which people are less willing to give to us, given what else they can now concentrate on in their lives"

this is what guys like Mark Zuckerberg understand also. FB is not a channel for the serious. For the same reasons. People (the masses) dont concentrate on what they see on FB

people go elsewhere for stuff that requires time to concentrate

+

seems a bit weird to me following this debate, being lead by scholars and editors pretty much

like the argument: "43% of FB users use FB as their primary source of news. Therefore FB has a editorial standard of duty and care applicable to news dissemination"

the thing is that the scholars themselves post this news and other such scholarly content on FB, and then demand that FB practice an editorial duty that the editors and scholars apply to themselves

what the scholars dont seem to be getting is that the channel (FB) is the completely wrong channel for their works

is bit like printing a scholarly essay in a oldschool Sunday tabloid. The readers dont get the tabloids to read this stuff

+

if I did have any advice for the scholars and editors who are in this debate then it would be:

stop posting your stuff on FB

bc if you dont then it wont be Mr Zuckerberg's fault if he ends up owning 99.99% of news and scholarly works dissemination on the internets

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