New Medium

There’s a few ideas floating around in this piece, all of which revolve around the idea of the medium is the message as extrapolated to our current, vivid times.

Some events:

• It’s been pretty well established that in the online environment, sensationalism (outrage) pays dividends. Nuance and thoughtfulness do not propogate as easily as moral outrage.
  • An acquaintance of ours, noting the new strand of coronavirus originating in London, lashed out at the apparent hypocrisy of the West, and wondered if we would see people calling it the Peckham Plague, and caucasians would have slurs thrown their way.
  • It’s a powerful comment on the double-standards, and the West’s often racist over-and now overt-tones. However, it is also a very different situation, comparing the apparent source of a particularly effective mutation of the virus, and the original source. One could potentially make an argument that the blatant disregard that the UK citizens have had towards this virus has potentially driven the possible petri dish for this strain to appear.
  • In any case, I’m somewhat conflicted, in that I think it’s important to uncover people’s hypocrisy, and being a little loud does draw attention, but at the same time, we want to ensure we can maintain our (moral) superiority, and not resort to specious arguments.
• Recently, there was a whole scandal about the Caliphate podcast from the Times (here’s an NPR article]. One reading is that the main person is a 21st-century journalist, seeking something more than just the truth, but a powerful and important story, and will not let the failings of reality get in the way of a good story.
  • Thus, even the media on the left seems to have succumbed to the times, and the loudest voice, the most sensational pieces, have too much power and sway. And perhaps it’s sort of like a prisoner’s dilemma type thing, where if everyone maintains journalistic integrity, then it works, but if a subset are to defect and start forfeiting their integrity for eyeballs, it becomes untenable for everyone else to maintain theirs without losing the attention game.
• Having recently been hooked on Twitch (as a viewer), I find it a fascinating medium of communication, one that is so foreign and on paper feels like it just wouldn’t work, but it does.
  • An obvious observation is that, due to the way these things work11 you have a chat-box, and, once you have sufficiently many people interacting in the box, it seems like it would be impossible to actually keep track of people’s messages, it pays to speak in memes (or copypasta).
  • In other words, in order to actually say something, the community must resort to group-think, and get things to be repeated, as that’s the only way for messages to go from noise to signal.
    • As a statistician, I can’t quite help but think in terms of information theory and sparsity and what-not.
  • I think it is one of the ultimate distillations of our current communication appetite.
    • It is quintessially a 1-to-many relationship/mode of communication. One might argue that much media is 1-to-many, in that, say, a newspaper is authored by a handful of people, but then read by millions. The difference is there you’re talking about dissemination of information, not a two-way communication channel.
    • So actually what we have are two channels: one for information, and the other for communication.
      • In Amusing Ourselves To Death, the author is focused on the medium of the first channel (information), and makes the case that the exact form of that medium distorts our perceptions of the message.
      • What about this second channel, actual communication channels? Do the same things apply?
  • One interesting way of quantifying this is to look at the quality of communication as a streamer’s viewership grows (though I guess it’s not anything new – companies also have the same problem, as they grow in popularity)
    • what we want to evaluate here is the noise to signal ratio, or the compressability of the texts