By the way, I posted this under the “Advertising” section of the blog because that’s all the commercial news is anymore: advertising. Commercial news is news about sponsors delivered by public relations companies, shrill and inhumane examinations of personal tragedies, and propaganda for the owners’ agendas and the companies that pay their bills. CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, ((You’ll note that I will not link to these organizations, I’m so sick of them. And anyway they almost never link to their Internet sources.)) they don’t even get the facts remotely correct anymore, and their prioritization of entertainment and sensationalism over important facts is virtually surreal at this point. The new British Prime minister came into office today, but on CNN, one of the top articles is “Girl, 7, Says She’s Trapped in Boy’s Body.” Who the f**k cares! I hope she and her parents work that out, I do, but the world is at war.

McNeil/Leher, the BBC and CBC are responsible and thorough in what they cover and their allegiance is to the facts precisely because they are not funded primarily by commercial interests. If they want to do a story on the oil companies or MacDonald’s they don’t have to worry about those companies or their subsidiaries pulling their advertising. It’s clear to me that it’s the economic incentives and the system in place that allow for these informational distortion whirlpools to exist, but what I don’t know is how we get rid of them. Public policy is going to be incredibly hard to significantly change so long as the public debate is as vacuous as this:

“The immigration bill is amnesty. You can tell by looking at it.”

“No, no, it’s not amnesty. We wrote it and made sure it wasn’t”

“But it’s amnesty! I read it and that’s what I think. And amnesty won’t solve anything!”

“You see but it’s not amnesty because I just said that it wasn’t.”

Ironically, this one reason why I can’t support Ron Paul. His attitude that markets can solve everything is called into question by the very treatment he received on Fox. When commercial and private interests run the public airwaves and news, that interview (ignorant and politicized) is the kind of garbage you get fed to you. For what it’s worth I have BS in economics and I can tell you extreme Libertarians out there that markets do not always solve everything, and that is especially the case when information is not already transparent.

First thing’s first. The Star-telegram of what? Where? I’ve pointed this out a million times, folks: when building a web site try to keep in mind that your audience is not omniscient. They don’t know where you live, what paper you write for, or most importantly when you wrote something. Now, of course, none of this is Mr. Kelly’s fault! This Star-telegram of [insert city name] is pretty typical of a lot of online papers that are starting to look positively ancient for their lack of understanding about both CSS and their inability to think outside of a box. I’ve just gotten to the point where when I reference another web site, it’s impossible for me not to point out the really obvious mistakes. At least this site puts “posted on” dates on the page. A lot of these little newspaper sites don’t even realize that’s important. But, before I quit the nit-picking, one more thing. Right alongside the article is a list of “related links.” I cannot understand what part of the concept of the hyperlink newspapers and other online publications (CNN is the worst) don’t understand. They must seriously be worried that their content is so useless, so banal, that if they put a hypertext link in the middle of the column we will just click away. And they’re probably right. But that’s no excuse not to use the medium properly.

On to the review! To an extent, he’s right. A lot of computer animated film has taken on the rather droll task of portraying something odd but realistically and have forgotten one of the major tenets of cartooning: cartoons can do things that real people and things cannot. Of course, with special effects that line gets blurred every day. Bugs still has the upper hand though when it comes to stopping a crashing plane because it ran out of fuel. I’d really like to know where the surreal comedies like Bugs and Ren and Stimpy are.

Still though, one thing Pixar understands a lot more than the also-rans (yes, Shrek included) is style. Pixar is the Disney of computer animation and if you look at Disney characters you are going to see a lot of uniformity in style. Their eyes are the same; their body types are the same. Even the older movies’ rotoscopic animation was all the same. Pixar, even throughout major technological shifts has maintained a Pixar-look and I think a certain amount of that is perfectly fine. Nobody would cut down Nick Park for looking “too Nick Park.”

In fact, what bothers me about the also-rans (Shrek, Ice Age, Antz, Sharks Tale) is how blobular and generic they all look. There’s no personality to the character design—or it’s very diluted at any rate. Pixar established it’s look way before Toy Story if you have a look at their shorts and they have some right to look shiny and plastic-y because they’ve been doing computer animation for so long. The others have no excuse other than their lack of talent—that and their driving motivation seems to be crapping out as many as they can for the money. I would trust a guy like Crapzenberg [Katzenberg, Dreakworks Animation Chief drollmaker] to do exactly that. Anyone who let himself get quoted as saying, “‘It’s great,’ Katzenberg says, ‘but what I think you need to do is have her kick him in the nuts.’” Wow. I am in awe of his genius.

I’m always fascinated by that video piece because it IS such blatant propaganda and technically good, too. Even though I agree with the premise that the US is engaged in war corporatism, I know that piece was created not to persuade people, but to energize the people that already believe what’s being said. To that degree, I believe that anyone who unquestionly buys in to propaganda without measuring the facts is in idiot insofar as you define idiocy as possession of ignorace. What I wonder is if the student who made that comment would equally think that the makers and watchers of Fox News or even Superbowl advertising were idiots.

Whether it’s CNN’s take on the events of the day or the White House’s press release or some corporations cheerleading diatribe about the latest NEW AMAZING PRODUCT! or even anarchy protesters spouting vitriol about globalization, it doesn’t really matter what they say so long as you believe it. None of the just-named bodies or organizations are really capable of delivering to you unfettered, unfiltered and unbiased information. They all have cause. CNN wants your “eyeballs”. The White House wants your votes. The corporations want your dollars. The anarchists… well, they want anarchy but they’re still willing to bend the truth to their cause. Truly inert information is a near impossibility. Science comes closest to culling information that is “pure” but grant money and politics can affect even that noble pursuit.

So the sign post for our generation is “Information Consumer BEWARE!” Take information from one source at the peril of being decieved. It helps to ask yourself why such and such an entity is delivering information to you–what their motives are–but that’s not enough these days. The truth is often deeply buried. The best defense you have is the computer sitting in front of you most of the time these days.

The key to Bayesian estimation is a body of prior knowledge; an individual experiences something over and over again and builds a body of data regarding it. We are then capable of estimating things based on what we know using a kind of Bayesian analysis. This is the same kind of analysis is that is currently popular in designing “intelligent” software and especially popular in email applications attempting to root out spam. Given “knowledge” about what words appear in spam, proximity of those keywords, and with what frequency, software can estimate the likelihood of an email being spam.

But this kind of analysis can malfunction given the wrong set of data or when two things are mistakenly thought to correlate when they don’t. Superstitions may prove to be an example of this. To me, this begs that question, can the media warp the data so that our estimates of outcomes of events are askew? Several papers have drawn the conclusion that people (using Americans in their data sets) overestimate their chances of being a victim of a crime. From one of those papers written by psychologists from The Journal of Social Issues: “These data lend empirical support to the assumption that people typically predict more victimisation than they eventually suffer.”

What is needed then is a similar study in which the respondents are first screened for media saturation. Start with people who watch CNN all the time. Ask the same questions of people who generally don’t read the news or watch television and see if there is any difference. As of yet, I have found the study that attempts this, but I am willing to speculate the result. Although the mind clearly has an ability to distinguish between fact and fiction (at least in most of us) it is not at all clear that facts in the media do not end up becoming part of our perceived personal experiences, leading us to believe things like “All politicians are crooked” or “I will be the victim of a crime someday” or even “that guy on Banapana is always right”. All right, maybe not the last one.

Technorati Tags: baseyian, crime, media, fear

[1] Johnson, Steven. “Interface Culture” 1997. pg 36

However in his 1964 book (prior to the mainstream spread of the Internet) he could not have been more prescient when he wrote, “there is a new electric technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet. Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participatorial spoken word over the specialist written word.” This observation was somewhat premature. Although McLuhan discusses the extension of the tactile sense in his work he didn’t foresee our direct manipulation of information in the public forum of the Internet. I have argued before that interactivity can be considered the extension of the tactile sense into media. With this extension, the broadcast linear model of media is changing into a nonlinear exchange and it is this participatorial exchange that is challenging the role of the specialist. If the information is “out there” then specialist lose their monopoly on it and with their monopoly on information goes a great deal of their credibility.

The linear broadcast model lead to a fevered pitch of expert soundbytes sorely lacking in real debate or deep discussion. As Steven Johnson pointed out in his eloquent work “Emergence” the broadcast model originally based on a top-down specialist system of a hierarchy of editors and journalists began to undergo systemic changes when CNN arrived on the scene and made all of its news feeds available to local affiliates. Suddenly what had previously been a command control economy of information became a cacophony of stories dictated by ratings and not by news editors. This was the first step toward a more participatorial media and the first attack on the bastion of experts at the network news operations. Johnson also pointed out that this systemic change created a system based solely on positive feedback. To use his analogy a system based only on positive feedback is like an electric guitar leaning on an amplifier.

However, this attack on the specialist had little more effect than removing editorial control. The systemic change had not yet harmed the credibility of the news organization. Their credibility would come under scrutiny only with the development of a negative feedback system, a balance, as it were, and this balance (at least in part) has turned out to be the blog community. A single blog taken on its own is no threat to anyone’s credibility, but blogs, seen as a system for evaluation, do potentially represent a shift in credibility. The media can show a spectrum of opinions if it likes but it has very little capacity to synthesize information and let the most important facts bubble to the surface the way the blogosphere can because while the mainstream media may appear large there are actually fewer reporters in the field than there used to be.

While the expert may still yet reign in highly specialized fields like Physics, news and opinion and the deluge of information they represent are better processed by a group mind. For that matter, so is entertainment.

[coming soon in Part 2: The Entertainment inustry and Information as an Asymptote ]