Kolya on 9/12/2019 at 22:31

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I posted this on my own forum but I think I may get some more replies here (if any).

I've been thinking about how society was once based on the common narratives distributed by the gatekeepers of information, such as newspapers (I work for a local one.), governments and other institutions. These institutions created, filtered and directed a public opinion building process that boiled down complex issues to usually 2 - 3 perspectives and corresponding ways to move forward.

Considering the information chaos the world has been plunged into for 10-15 years now, I admit that I was a bit pining for these old days, because I saw this process as a productive way of society reflecting on itself and communicating with itself until it could form a coherent opinion. However I also saw the dilemma that this process being created, filtered and directed by institutions meant it wasn't very democratic. And that everyone having been handed a sender in today's mass communications was actually more democratic, but at the same time leads to unprecedented rise of conspiracy theories, esoteric thinking, "alternative facts", fake news, propaganda and lies spread at an alarming rate.

What does it mean for the venerable model of democracy if public opinion apparently cannot be established by the demos itself?
I look at this issue from today's perspective and as I said I was a bit sentimental about how it used to be. Maybe some well meaning and as impartial as possible direction of public opinion was for the better? Noam Chomsky didn't think so.

"Manufacturing Consent" is the title of his 1988 book, in which he proposes that the mass media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".

This title derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent," employed by Walter Lippmann in his book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)) Public Opinion (1922). Here's a great video about it.

[video=youtube;e-t77-Zr8po]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-t77-Zr8po[/video]

These points being made about the old model of manufacturing consent, where does that leave us? Why is consent even important? What's wrong about all of us making up our own minds? Misguided as some may be, will it not even out in the end? Won't the better idea win in this market of ideas?
Personally I don't think so. I think that each of us has way too little time to give the attention to each issue that it deserves. Even with issues that concern us deeply and personally we're susceptible to manipulation and propaganda. Even worse, on an insufficient basis of facts (that require research, which requires skills and time) we're likely to decide opportunistically what's best for us and not what is best for society at large.

In the end a step toward real democracy in which everyone can participate has to be a good thing. This was handed to us by technological progress. What I think we need is a technical implementation of a public opinion building process. But the requirements contain paradoxes. It needs to be transparent and secret, personally identifiable and private, enforceable and ensure free speech, with stratified rules for a dynamic number of recipients. It certainly needs to go beyond opinion polls, 5 star ratings, reviews, filter bubbles and online petitions.

At one point I toyed with the idea of a personally configurable filter bubble. While that may work as a matter of self defence it still prevents developing coherent public opinion.

icemann on 10/12/2019 at 02:35

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One of the biggest issues these days, is that much of the news we get is with an agenda or leanings to the left or right. In the days of old, we'd just be told the news of the day. Pure facts, no subtle undertones.

Over here in Aus we get quite a bit of anti-climate change action style leanings in the newspapers and TV channels run by the Rupert Murdoch. Much of that we used to influence elections. Stuff like that should be outlawed.

demagogue on 10/12/2019 at 11:11

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Having worked in both the government and advocacy, I think there is a natural check that limits how far anyone can manufacture opinion, at least in cultures that value results and aren't outright theocracies or dystopian ideological dictatorships.

And that natural check is just: bad ideas don't work. When you try to rule a society with terrible ideas, basic things start falling apart. So then there's a reckoning. Either you have to whip people up into some revolutionary fervor where they think the social and economic dysfunction is somehow necessary and the alternative is much worse, or the whole facade just crumbles instantly and completely apart and, if the society is lucky, people who know what they're doing step into the vacuum to rebuild by force of actual necessity. (If they're mot lucky, then the cycle just repeats itself.)

But who knows if we'll have a reckoning this time around or what form it will take. It's not guaranteed.

As far as Chomsky goes, I've always found him a sub-par political thinker. It's not that I'm not open minded to the ideas, just that they strike me as superficial compared to actual academic political theorists like Rawls or Dahl or Siedentop.

Kolya on 10/12/2019 at 17:53

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vurt made the same point as you on the other forum (for different reasons). What I'm really interested in is how a public opinion can be formed that's less susceptible to manipulation and actable. And I think this means a process of reduction where you cannot question previously established points on every step of the way, unless significant new information emerges. Like a court case procedure for democracy.

@dema I think I already addressed the natural checks you describe when I mentioned the "market of ideas" and I don't think trial-and-error is a useful strategy here. As an example: If I voted for a shooting every immigrant dead who ever crossed the Aegean from North Africa to Europe - how will I ever notice that this was a bad idea? Where's the natural check? Nothing will fall apart for me. In fact it might make my life simpler. And yet it is obviously a terrible idea.

Sulphur on 10/12/2019 at 18:33

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I think the obvious answer is that monolithic institutionalisation of information dissemination and unbiased analysis decentralises with our current information delivery mechanisms. The fragmentation we're seeing must be very much akin to what life would have been without dedicated information channels that sifted out information relevant to their demographics - i.e., word of mouth was king.

So if we can't depend upon newspapers et al. to filter our information and process it because they're too slow, and the volume of information too large, the two gating mechanisms I can think of off the top of my head are a) the medium itself and b) the delivery mechanism.

As far as a) is concerned, I think enough people are skeptical of just one platform - say, social media - and its tendency to agglomerate trending topics du jour directly depending upon factors like how controversial/sensational they are; you can opt out of social media if you want and still not be information starved.

I think b) is the key - Google already filters my news according to what it thinks I might be interested in, even if it misjudges the tone and tenor of how I prefer it. The immediate future's going to be very much about machines learning our preferences as demographics and automatically funnelling our preferences back at us while soft censoring perspectives we don't care enough to view. We will be (and perhaps are already) stratifying pretty much on how we want our news delivered to us, and our filters will be intelligences we train or think we're training to give us information at our preferred level of bias. Perhaps they'll even re-interpret and reproject information in terms we approve of, given enough time and tweaking - so we can feed our own, personal propaganda back to ourselves.

Sorry to go off on a sci-fi bent there, but it's an idea I've been actively interested in exploring as a concept in fiction. There's no clean answer to the question of democratised information - there are only agglomerations and relevant strata, and the ones you wish to subscribe to.