Hoodwinked by Facts

 Is the Truth out There?

by Karen Hamilton - Monday, July 5, 2010, 07:06 PM

While it is true that the web allows anyone to be a knowledge provider and inevitably leads to more and more information that we as users must sift through, the technology or Web 2.0 is not necessarily the problem. Technology may serve to amplify the problem. For me it is wholly a question of critical thinking skills and that, hopefully, is one of the most important skills that should be gained from education.

Moon Hoax 1835

Humans have been hoodwinked, bamboozled by false facts from the beginning of time. Do we trust print or media? In 1835 Benjamin Day's New York Sun ran a series of six articles that captured the nation's attention. There was life on the moon and Sir John Herschel, well known astronomer said it was so. The moon was full of bison, goats, unicorns, and bat winged humanoids who built temples. People couldn't wait for the next edition. Using the grandiose scientific language of the time, the story was so popular that it was reprinted and circulated in both local and national papers. After the story had its desired effect, it was revealed as a hoax. The great Moon Hoax of 1835 had done its job: increased circulation. And in 1938 when Orson Wells on the day before Halloween broadcast his War of the Worlds drama on radio causing panic amongst listeners who believed aliens were invading, there was the inevitable outcry against the evil and dangerous broadcast industry. Here we go again.

Do we trust what we see in the news, when their driving force is often, “If it bleeds it leads?” Can we trust a textbook? Pick up a textbook from the 50s and check how much of the so-called facts still add up. If we look at a home economics textbook from back then, we would certainly know that a woman’s place is in the home baking cookies and having babies not worrying her pretty little head with matters such as these. Knowledge isn’t a static kind of thing. It’s subject to revision. An authority today may not be the authority tomorrow.


That’s not to say that there is not more to consider in light of user-generated content and knowledge that is collectivized. But to me what it says is that education is more important than ever and it’s a teachers job to provide students with the experience of sifting through the muck to find the good and trustworthy bits. The search is important.

Instead of banning the use of sites like Wikipedia, students should be taught how to get to the truth of what is posted. There is no putting the genie back. The students are on the net; it’s our job to harness the powers of it and help show them a critical eye. Constructivists believe that students should build their own knowledge. Web 2.0 gives that opportunity as students and teachers can deconstruct and recreate original content and share it. With contribution, also comes responsibility. Should we discourage the collective contribution? I think not, but teaching thinking is never easy. In college many times students come prepared to memorize facts and they haven’t always been encouraged to think. It’s our job to get them questioning things. From what I’ve heard in K-12 it is often about answers set in stone. But even so called educated people can have narrow thinking when they expose themselves to only one side of an issue.

Would our students become relativists believing that it’s all equally true and believe that there is no real truth because of all the information that they can’t weed through? Would they believe that it all depends on one’s point of view? In my experience of 20 years teaching college, I have to say I haven’t found a lack of opinion. A problem more often is belief in things just because they are on the net or in a book, or “so and so said”. The courses I teach all address the media, so if I can’t get across the importance of critically evaluating any evidence no matter the media, then I haven’t done my job. But with all of us a creators also comes responsibility. As potential authors, students and contributors should learn to evaluate the consequences of what they post. In this way, the learning opportunity expands even further.

To me, what the web offers is neither a wondrous vision of the collective unconscious nor the gates to Dantes Inferno; it’s a complicated place that needs careful examination. We must examine not only content but also the meanings of all these words: knowledge, authority, expert, trust, fact, independence, reality, truth, credibility, wisdom and how they relate to both old and new technologies. It’s all about thinking, critical thinking.

Maybe we need a course on Prankonomy..

“Take and be taken. There's a skeptic born every minute. Every man a mountebank, every man a mark! These are your new commandments, O children of Barnum, Borat, and Blair Witch. The source of hoodwinkery has shifted from the all-powerful (ad agencies, governments, MTV) to the tweeting masses—and lo, charlatanism is democratized. …Still, it's sometimes hard to distinguish a prank from a scam, a sham from a fraud, a Nigerian prince from Prince Albert in a can.”
See Wired’s Guide to Hoaxes: The Official Prankonomy http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/mf_hoax




References/Resources

Brown, S. (Aug 24, 2009).Wired's Guide to Hoaxes: How to Give — and Take — a Joke, Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/mf_hoax

O’Reilly, T. (Sept 30, 2005). What is Web 2.O, Oreilly.com. Retrieved from http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

O’Reilly, T. & Battelle J. (2009). Web squared: Web 2.0 five years on, Web 2.0 Summit. Retrieved from http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194

Wesch, M. (Jan 31, 2007). The machine is us/ing us. Mwesch:YouTube. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Online- is it Up or Down

Is a Digital Hug Enough?

Karen Hamilton - Saturday, June 26, 2010, 12:59 PM

In our online course our professor left an audio prompt for us to discuss. The prompt concerned the difference between print media and computers and social networks and asked whether the changes in communication were positive:

To me this prompt was very interesting in that within itself it illustrated one of the advantages of the computer. How different and better are we finding this real voice compared to just the usual written text discussion? I’d say a lot. It brings us closer to the speaker when we hear how the words are spoken and we can feel another level. Is this just word processing? I think not.

The computer allows us to hear the voice of the writer at a time of our choosing, and sometimes through multimedia and it can bring us closer. It can create a wider community that the pencil would have a hard time doing. From the listener’s point of view, we are there, and we often have the opportunity to respond. But what if, we just listen and feel close? Are we really in the community, or only partly there?

The reason I ask that question is that I have a writer friend who died last week from cancer. She was the kind of person who loved nothing more than to have an audience. As a writer, she blogged every detail of her impending death. She wanted her life to have meaning and she wanted to perhaps help others but she also wanted to reach out and pull people closer. Just before she died, she wrote about the strange sensation of having all her friends and acquaintances knowing and having all these details and feeling like they were close. She found it odd that some people still felt so close when in fact they had not contacted her at all. In some ways, her blog enabled people to stay away. So while I love the community of social networks and believe they can bring us closer to more people, there is a distancing factor inherent in them. They bring us together and keep us apart. Kind of perfect for those who have fears of commitment.

I’d have to agree that the changes to communication and writing through the use of the computer are not always upward. But what is up? Is progress up? It’s all subjective. For me what it is, is different. In some ways it pushes us outward and in others the pull is inward.

What it pushes out sometimes can be great- everyone has a voice- there’s more information available. But what happens to our information and ourselves. We give ourselves and we loose our selves. Some of our privacy is lost. Who owns our stuff? Who controls it? Google digitizing books is great. We can sneak a peek into books we don’t buy. It’s a little like a library. But what happens when there is only one library that has all the books?

In an interview with Vincent Rossmeier, Baron is asked why he named his book “A Better Pencil.” He says that his choice of name was “From Pencils to Pixels” but the publisher didn’t think it would sell. They wanted something pointed- a hook. To me “Pencils to Pixels” is more what it is about. The computer is not a better pencil. They are both artefacts but very different.

When I think of the choice of writing an essay with a pencil and no internet or online resources compared with a computer with access to everything, there is no comparison. I don’t have to buy every book or take it out of a library and then plug away piecing things together. I can collect my references on delicious, have access to them on any one of my computers. It’s all there. Maybe what we do though is spend more and more time because we have so much information. The computer that was meant to free us sucks us in and steals more and more time. I went to a live meeting this week and was discussing all the things going on in my life. We had quite the laugh when I said, “That’s a lot going on for someone who has barely been out of the house in a week.”

Many of us have talked about the beauty of a good book. The books today certainly have been word processed but now we can see them in print or digitally. Will we fall in love with our digital copy like we did with our old favourite printed books? And what will happen to book covers if all is digital? A March 30, 2010 New York Times article laments the potential of the book cover if all is digital.

When we write on the computer to others in networking sites like facebook and twitter is what it does to us the same as if we were writing a handwritten letter? Adam Pennenberg writes in “Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love.” that social networking releases the chemical oxytoxin in our brains and we have a sensation associated with the same kind of warm fuzzy feeling like when we get or give hugs. Can a pencil do that?

But is that good? Are these digital hugs enough? Are we closer or farther away?
Or is it just different? All I know is that a nerd has to be careful- that’s why I’m going out there into the wide world today, turning off this computer for at least awhile.

References

Baron, D. (2009) A better pencil: Readers, writers and the digital revolution. Oxford University Press

Golden, S. (Sept 18, 2009). ‘A better pencil’, Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/18/barron

Pennenberg, A. (July 1, 2010) Social networking affects brain like falling in love, Fast Company. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/147/doctor-love.html?page=0%2C0

Rossmeier, V. (Sept 19, 2009). Is the internet melting our brains?, Facebook, Salon Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil

Rich, M. (Mar 30, 2010). In E-book era, you can’t even judge a cover, New York Times. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/books/31covers.html?src=twt&twt=nytimesbooks

Do Computers Have Politics?

by Karen Hamilton - Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 03:43 PM

Are computers a "mechanism for centralized control and surveillance "or a "marvelous experiment in radically democratic social innovation?"

Do pencils have politics?

If you have been seduced by Langdon Winner’s argument in his 1986 article “Do Artifacts Have Politics,” then the answer to the question do pencils have politics, should be yes. A pencil or any writing instrument has the power to convey information that has political implications, and a computer too, which is more encompassing and complex could certainly be seen as a political instrument. But do they themselves have politics or is it their process that is guided by human hands? If we assume that objects have politics are we not giving them human characteristics, anthropomorphizing them?


I’ll be the first to admit that I am one of those wacky Mac lovers who have an unnatural fondness for my machines, but I’m not so sure I’ll give them full fledged humanity and assign them political values even though I’m sure mine would be lefties. In one of the college courses I teach, Psychology of Consumer Behaviour, I talk about the different versions of self identity that marketers are interested in. There is our real self, our imagined self, our looking glass self and our extended self. Marketers see us as a fragmented lot, open to persuasion if they can only know us. One place they would like their product to be is in the extended self. The extended self is made up of those things that become a part of you. They are often the objects we would run into our houses to get if there were a fire- the photos and mementos that help define who we are. I’ll admit, for me, my Macs have become a part of my extended self, and for sure I won’t be leaving the house without at least one. I’ll allow that my computer is close to my “me.” but it is not quite a person so how can it have politics?

If we allow computers to be seen as the determinants of our future we have the potential to see technology as the big bad Frankenstein-like bogeyman out to get us. In a June 6, 2010 New York Times article, “Your Brain on Computers: Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price,” author Richtel gives evidence on both sides of the argument about the effect of computers on the brain. He notes studies that show the detrimental effects of multitasking and studies that show Internet users who become more efficient at finding information and video game users who develop better visual acuity. Yet, in spite of these two sides, he tells the story of a family who is facing the effects of technology- mom is burning the cookies, dad is always on the computer and the son is getting C’s. Woe is us! In articles like these, we see the demon technology sucking the lives out of its innocent victims. The blame here is squarely on the technology, and all would be well if they just turned it off. And of course any person can turn it off or turn it down, so who exactly is to blame? -The technology or the people, or both? For me, categorizing technology or computers as semi human political beings makes them the easy scapegoat, and removes responsibility from we the people and I’m not so sure that is a good thing at all.

Both argument one where computers and the Internet are a “mechanism for centralized control and surveillance” and argument two where computers are a “marvelous experiment in radically democratic social innovation” lead to political ends, and for me both are true. Humans acknowledge the dual nature of man- good and evil; emotional and reasonable; enlightened and animalistic. So, then, it is completely consistent that we see objects in our world in the same way. A pencil can be a writing instrument or a deadly weapon. It depends on what we do with it.

In argument one we see the fight for control of the individual. For marketers the information tracked through cookies and other techniques on computers allows behavioural targeting and addressable ads where we are no longer just the mass receiver of an ad, but rather the recipient of one message specifically directed to us. Marketers know us in ways they had never before dreamed of. Massive amounts of information are being collected on social networking sites like facebook. And the so-called freemium movement where internet applications are free is no different than the “free lunch” we were warned about. We pay the cost with our information. Politicians like former presidents create laws like the Patriot Act that allow intrusions into the privacy of its citizens. Actions like this have caused institutions to require that no information be stored on American servers to protect students or staff. Countries ban parts of the internet, and some K-12 schools have restricted access. There are several big brothers watching us.


In argument two we have the democratic social innovation that allows us easy access to information and people and networks. It has allowed everyday users to not just be the recipients of information but to also be the creators of media. Media is no longer just pushed at us, but is pulled by us, and pushed back in. Everybody can contribute and create. (At least everyone with access and tools) Of course when everyone is a creator and using and reusing and reshaping the artefacts of our culture, the issue of copyright will be raised and those in positions of power will try to impose old laws on all that is new. We have seen the open source movement rise and the creation of sites like Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons for people to share creations on their own terms and for others to use those creations in a legal way. And at least one country Brazil is leading the way to allow more open use of materials. Their Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil fights against what he calls the “fundamentalists of absolute property control” who are in the way of the “digital world's promises of cultural democracy and even economic growth.” He believes that "A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property…No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world - and there's no use resisting it." (Dibbell, 1994)

Having accepted that both arguments are true and that both of these have political consequences, can I still say that computers do not have politics?

I’ve already complained that I didn’t want to have technology framed as an evil entity that gets blamed for our failings, and said that a pencil could be a weapon it just depends how it is used. But is that all there is to it? Not really.

The things we create can have political consequences. While I was at first seduced by Winner’s story of Moses’ racist bridges, it wasn’t long before I questioned how he came upon his evidence. Before I read the next article, I was off on an internet journey where I found much that questioned his analysis. (Oh that is the democratic web!) Then I read Joerges’ Do Politics Have Artefacts where I found a more moderate view of things. After Joerges’ I read Woolgar & Coopers, “Do Artefacts have Ambivalance” and then Joerges response, “Scams Cannot Be Busted: Reply to Woolgar and Cooper.” All of these, lead me off in many directions in search of what I could believe.

So here it is: I’m not buying Moses bridges as racist or intentionally political. I’m not buying that artefacts in themselves can be political. I would allow that sometimes technology may be created for a political end; for me, political ends may more often be unintentional. Id’ think that the creators are many times self serving and their creations reflect their own needs which are not necessarily the needs of everyone else. Joerges talks about alternatives to control and contingency theory and speaks about thinking of artefacts as “expressive values” that induce nothing but indicate something and he suggests treating artefacts as boundary objects. To me this middle ground makes sense. But I also feel that the technology we choose has an effect on us. (423-424)


Neil Postman says, 'to a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data” (Postman, 1993) To a certain extent, I agree with Postman here. We tend to see things through our own lens and our choice of media may influence the way we see things but I’m not about to go as far as to say that technology is the driver. We humans are in the driver’s seat and responsible for the political consequences of the technologies we develop.

What’s important for me in the arguments is to fight the entities who would seek to use our information and fight to ensure that what we have remains open and democratic.

The computer is neither good nor bad nor neutral; and it is certainly not the big bad bogeyman. The only bogeyman is the one we see in the mirror.


References/Resources

Chandler, D. (1995). Technological or media determinism, Retrieved from Prifysgol Aberystwyth University, The Media and Communications Studies Site. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html

Dibbel, J. (Nov, 2004). We pledge allegiance to the penguin. Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux.html

Ensmenger, N. (July-Sept 2007). Computers as Ethical Artifacts, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing University of Pennsylvania (p 85-87). Retrieved from http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/ensmenger-29-3.pdf

Joerges, B. (June 1999). Do politics have artefacts? Social Studies of Science, London: Sage publications 411-31

Joerges, B. (1999) Scams cannot be busted: Reply to Woolgar & Cooper), Social Studies of Science, JSTOR, 29 (3) 450-457. Retrieved from http://www.gouvrit.org/textos/Scams%20Cannot%20be%20Busted_Joerges.pdf

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage

Reed, L. (Dec,1958). I, pencil: My family tree as told to Leonard E. Read. The Freeman. Reprinted 1999 -Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

Richtel, M. (June 6, 2010). Your brain on computers: Hooked on gadgets and paying a mental price, New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html

Social Determinism, Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_determinism

Winner, L. (1986) The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. “Do Artefacts have Politics?” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19-39.

Woolgar, S. & Cooper, G. Bridges and other Urban Legends in S&TS
Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence: Moses' Bridges, Winner's,Social Studies of Science 1999; 29; 433. Retrieved from https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rfouche/www/readings/woolgar.pdf