Hermeneutic Heretic

TIME.com: Time’s Person of the Year: You — Dec. 25, 2006 — Page 1 America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Digg: On the Outside Looking In. « East Coast Blogging However, I fear that Digg itself has become irrelevant to most of us. Not that the site won’t continue to grow and prosper, nor will many of us stop using it. But we will only be using it as a member of the audience, not really good enough to participate, just good enough to watch the action unfold before us.

MercuryNews.com | 12/27/2006 | Technologist focuses on media and democracy Florin said he is concerned by both the cutbacks in traditional media, as well as the enormous increase in unconventional sources on the Web. “There’s a problem: It’s hard to know if you can trust the information that you can get. But there’s also an opportunity,” he said.

Just as time magazine was gushing over the social revolution
on the web, others have been putting a more realistic perspective on things. In particular, on how real groups work. It seems to be clear that there is no such thing as unlimited freedom in collective decision making or wisdom of the crowds. Any collective needs to have structure and that will always emerge no matter how flat the org-chart seems to be. Also, any collective can only exist if there are people on its margins and outside of it. And if the collective controls most resources…again…no freedom. And finally, crowds can be only wise about themselves. So if we want to know how the crowds will behave in the marketplace - we should ask them. But if we want to know things that are outside the interest of the crowd, the majority, the collective, then they are the wrong person to ask. However, these things are also only in the interest of some other crowd or collective so we need to join them. This, again, is nothing surprising or unusual - multiple identities have been with us for millennia.

So the conclusion is, the internet can bring nothing new to the table of human social behavior. However, it can bring a new demarcation of groupings and a reorganization of topological connections. But the ultimate complexity of the system can only increase in as much as its weakest link will allow. And that is the human brain’s capacity for social knowledge and the concomitant limits of time and space on maintaining social interactions. E.g. having 100 ‘friends’ on MySpace doesn’t mean that a larger group is being maintained. It just means that the maintaining of personal identity and certain groups includes short messages on the boards. Any close sociological interaction analysis will show the limits of these links (I’m pretty sure) to be similar to those of links maintained in more traditional ways.

A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog
Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding ideas. These attempts to ward off the unknown through the ritualized assertion of familiar core beliefs are what anthropologists call a “ghost dance.”

…

In our time, the ghost dance can be seen in a celebration of laissez-faire capitalism, radical individualism, and the alienability of all human activity and nature for market consumption. In their time, these myths were invaluable. They helped emancipate the “common man” from ancient obligations to feudal overlords by giving individuals the power not only to elect their own representatives, but to freely sell their labor in open markets. Civil freedoms would henceforth be linked with market freedoms.

This is a very powerful and important analysis of the status of the Free Market Doctrine within the conceptual framework of Democratism. However, the authors, by proposing a wholesale alternative are committing an equally grave error. Particularly since they appear to be willing to pull together anything that even smacks of respectability in support of their ideology. Particularly their reliance on evolutionary psychology (mostly a collection of long tales about our reconstructed ancestors’ needs) leads them astray. It is not without interest to note that Darwin’s ideas on evolution through natural selection are widely recognized to have been influenced by the prevailing social economic orthodoxies of his time.

Social exchange theory is beginning to describe how people naturally make decisions and cooperate.

This is surprisingly reminiscent of the early enlightenment debates on the nature of freedom and moral value. However, the need to refer to human nature in any way makes this as much as part of the ritual of frame negotiation as the free-market doctrine it criticizes.

FMD is also ill-equipped to allocate resources and incentives in fair and humane ways. Yet just as the Enlightenment and market capitalism lifted the yoke of feudalism and unleashed unimagined forms of creativity, prosperity and civic participation, so the renaissance of the commons offers new strategies for resolving many of the paralyzing conundrums of market capitalism.

The authors are assuming that it is only the FMD that went from analogy to ritual, but they managed the same in a single paragraph.

That is not to say that I wouldn’t subscribe to this doctrine over the overhyped FMD but I would do so for political rather than ‘rational’ or ‘academic’ reasons.

Left Behind Games
The storyline in the game begins just after the Rapture has occurred – when all adult Christians, all infants, and many children were instantly swept home to Heaven and off the Earth by God. The remaining population – those who were left behind – are then poised to make a decision at some point. They cannot remain neutral. Their choice is to either join the AntiChrist – which is an imposturous one world government seeking peace for all of mankind, or they may join the Tribulation Force – which seeks to expose the truth and defend themselves against the forces of the AntiChrist.

This is a great example of coded messages recognized by a subcommunity in the face  of incomprehension by the larger community. Anyone outside the Evangelical community would have to interpret the equation of AntiChrist with an “imposturous one world government seeking peace for all of mankind” as more than oxymoronic. However, this sentence makes perfect sense in the context of the moral vocabulary (conceptual framework) of evangelical Christians where ‘peace for all of mankind’ is associated with secular humanism and ‘one-world-government’ is an anti-American UN-like abomination. Lakoff described how these moral frameworks are constructed in Moral Politics.

Also, it is interesting to see, how these frameworks are negotiated by the community. On Christian TV, for instance, one can find a whole range of devices from explicit discussion of why “world peace” is ‘bad’ to negative contextualization leading to the creation of negative semantic prosodies of certain phrasemes and memes. This game is one more such device, leading as it does to gamers “having a great timeâ€? while “thinking and talkingâ€? about matters of eternal importance.

On The Media: Transcript of “Paper Wait” (December 1, 2006)
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why not then stick to “sectarian violence�? What changed?

BILL KELLER: You know, it’s kind of emerged as an issue, and then last Sunday we ran a story about one of our reporters in Baghdad, Ed Wong, who surveyed a number of scholars and experts and said the consensus, and not unanimous but pretty broad, is that this clearly fits the definition that most political scientists use of a civil war. You know, I think Ed’s piece kind of raised it back to our attention and so we talked about it some more.

I mean, one of the reasons for not using it was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement. So we used it in a qualified way, or we’d cite other people talking about it as a civil war.

But as we were discussing it over the past week, it also became clear that by that standard, it’s a political statement if you don’t call it a civil war. And having Ed write that piece kind of brought it to the surface.

This probably as good an illustration of both framing and frame negotiation as you can find. It shows framing as a process in its entire complexity. There is no final static product at the end only more and more finely structured domain which is susceptible to blending (which profiles some aspects and neglects others). Particularly the last sentence was revealing: no matter whether it is or is not called ‘civil war’ calling it something is a political statement (such as the one below from O’Reilly). However, it is still important that the appellation be perceived as ‘descriptive’ (i.e. corresponding to the real world) so it was necessary to ask experts for definitions.

What is surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly at all) not mentioned much is what kinds of images and idealized scenarios do we bring up when we mention civil war. The Americans have a nice image of the Civil War and we also have a more recent image of the war in Yugoslavia. I would imagine that O’Reilly is bringing up the image of the former to make sense of this statement.

BILL O’REILLY: You have violent, out-of-control chaos, not civil war. Of course, the American media is not helping anyone by over-simplifying the situation and rooting for the USA to lose in Iraq.

And by that token, he is probably justified in saying that of all the prominent features of the US Civil War more are missing in Iraq than are present. However, on a practical note, the Iraqis would probably welcome an old-fashioned two or three-sided civil war, right now, because what is happening is “out-of-control chaos” which is more stressful and dangerous for the average citizen than a war with its fronts and uniform-clad soldiery. Civilians die much less in wars than they do in states of lawlessness.
However, ‘war’ is also a much stronger word and since the situation seems to be worsening, a stronger term is needed. This brings up another (often slightly neglected) element in framing which is iconic and scalar schemas. “War” is associated with an upper range on the scale of conflicts (right below genocide) so it needs to be used to indicate a stronger state. This can override some of the other images of conflict that are brought up.

Column by PC Magazine: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute
DIGITAL CAMERA ARM STRETCH. Okay, let’s get to the meat of this essay. Perhaps the weirdest societal change has to do with digital cameras and the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself. Even ten years ago, nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures this way. Give people a pro digital SLR camera and they will still hold the thing in front of them at arm’s length. I find it amusing to go to a tourist area and see all these people using the cameras this way.

This observation points to something not often discussed in connection to new technologies, the change in our expectations of the visual world around us. We could call them visual frames or, as I prefer to think of them, image schemas. Image schemas are idealized images of variable richness but never completely photographic (indeed it could be said that even a photograph is schematic in some sense - for instance color richness, depth, framing, etc.) The original conception in Lakoff would differentiate between schemas and rich images but they are better thought of as the same thing on a scale. In this case, the typical image we have is someone taking a picture holding a camera to their eye. Now that is changing more and more to holding it in front of the face with arm slightly outstretched. Since that is the visual expectations, people who are not professionals will use even an SLR that way even though they are intended for use with a viewfinder.

Right now the image schema is in an interesting flux because all kinds of cameras co-exist. This becomes prominent when a group picture is taken and multiple people pass forward their cameras to someone. There is usually the odd film camera in the mix so the photographer has to adjust his or her behavior. Furthermore, some digital cameras have a viewfinder and some don’t. It would be interesting to study the behavior of people and see how their instincts are changing overtime. This pertains to the question of to what extent can our unconscious behavior be brought to the surface for willful decision-making.
Of course, what Dvorak fails to mention is that not so long ago, the stereotypical image was of someone looking down into the finder of the camera not holding it to their eye.