posted
Dvice.com did a particularly interesting article on how George Orwell would most likely disdain our open information society and willingness to broadcast intentionally (social sites, dating sites) and unintentionally our information. I was surprised to find a serious social piece on a site dealing mostly in nerdy toys, such as the tonton sleeping bag.
Thought I would toss the subject over here and see you opinions.
Posts: 2302 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
So Orwell would disdain a society that has the free exchange of information that subverts authoritarian control?
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: So Orwell would disdain a society that has the free exchange of information that subverts authoritarian control?
Haven't read the article, but I'm assuming the author is spinning the broadcast of personal information through corporate and open channels that can be monitored and controlled as the modern version of "big brother watching you."
The problem with silly questions like: "how would George Orwell see us today," is that George Orwell in his own time seemed to firmly believe that it didn't matter what human beings actually did, we were simply insufficiently able to understand the consequences of our collective actions and history. It's not like Orwell wrote "warnings" about the future. He was writing about the way he saw human societies in his own time. Anybody who's actually read 1984 all that closely realizes that it contains absolutely no advice for its readers, and intimates no hope for an improved mankind.
And besides, you can spin Orwell around and around because all of his works were self-contradictory in their nature. He wrote extensively about the dangers of politically charged words, and he himself created a plethora of political watchwords. He did this on purpose, and yet people still bought right into both his theories about society, and all of the things he supplied along the way that he considered to be destructive and evil. He was a literary critic who decried the bastardization of English, but he was also fervently anti-intellectual. Hell, just read the end of 1984 and tell me which side of that story Orwell hated more, Winston or the Party? One is gutless, self-conscious and ineffectual, and the other is rabidly power-hungry and amoral. I'm sorry, but 1984 is a swan song, not a torch.
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quote: Missing from Dashboard is any search records for users not logged in, or any cookie data (which Google uses to target ads). Google's argument is that cookie data is usually associated with a computer's IP address, and not an identifiable individual, so it doesn't fall within this personal-information disclosure.
For the most part Orwell was used as a selling point of the article, which questions how much information do these companies have on us? how do they use it and who do they sell it to? and personnally I dont like the idea of Google remembering what I do online, I dont even want to remember some of the things this laptop has shown me.
And yes, Dvice is owned by Syfy but is dependable for the daily dose of new trinkets and technology, the solely advertising reviews are few and far between. I would also send gamers to its sister site Fidgit.
All the way back in elementary school I was taught to never disclose my name age or location, and yet I have to tell papa johns that plus my phone number and e-mail just to order online.
Posts: 2302 | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: So Orwell would disdain a society that has the free exchange of information that subverts authoritarian control?
I have no particular authority to even begin to suggest what Orwell would disdain or approve in modern society. But I think he might have some interesting things to say about the signal-to-noise ratio our "free exchange of information" generates, and how it is manipulated.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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There seems to be one primarily concerning effect that today's media environment generates and fosters, and that's the phenomenon of group polarization. It's essentially the perfect opportunity for that to flourish and control our information environment.
quote:In 1970, two psychologists at a small college in Michigan performed the following experiment. After administering a questionnaire on racial attitudes to seniors at some nearby high schools, they divided the students into groups. Those students who, based on their answers to the questionnaire, exhibited “high prejudice” were placed with others equally biased. Those who expressed “low prejudice” were grouped with those who were similarly tolerant. The students were then instructed to discuss issues like school busing and fair housing. Finally, they were asked to fill out another questionnaire. The surveys revealed a striking pattern: simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant. People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still. (Interestingly, in this last experiment hawks, after talking to other hawks, became less hawkish, though they remained more hawkish than the doves.) Even judges have been shown to exhibit “group polarization.” Democratic appointees who sit with other Democrats are, it’s been found, more likely to cast liberal votes than Democratic appointees who sit with Republicans, while Republican appointees on all-Republican panels are more likely to take conservative positions.
Why group polarization occurs is not entirely clear. According to one theory, when people engage in discussions with others who share their opinion they are apt to hear new arguments in favor of it, which prompts them to believe in it all the more strongly. According to a second theory, people are always trying to outdo one another; if everyone in a group agrees that men are jerks, then someone in the group is bound to argue that they’re assholes. In ordinary life, there are, of course, many opportunities to engage in group polarization—at the country club, in the union hall, at church or in synagogue, at the monthly meeting of the local feminist book club. Here again, though, Sunstein maintains, the Web takes things to a whole new level. (Group polarization, it should be noted, is the subject of another recent Sunstein book, “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide.”) There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so outlandish that he will not find other believers on the Web. “Views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities,” Sunstein observes. Racists used to have to leave home to meet up with other racists (or Democrats with other Democrats, or Republicans with Republicans); now they need not even get dressed in order to “chat” with their ideological soul mates. “It seems plain that the Internet is serving, for many, as a breeding group for extremism, precisely because like-minded people are deliberating with greater ease and frequency with one another,” Sunstein writes. He refers to this process as “cyberpolarization.”
The dvice article's take is questionable at best. Free information exchange in far many more ways is the scourge of authority. China can't really deal with it in the long term. Iranian twitters were the seed that sees the death of the regime there. In the case of the American Republican Party, it's resulted in a situation where the party's been hijacked by the people they used to exploit for votes, and it's not working out in an electorally pleasant way.
In short, honestly, the article's a little off.
Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote:Iranian twitters were the seed that sees the death of the regime there.
This is a bit of internet mythology. While there were some Iranians twittering, this was pretty much entirely for the benefit of the western audiences; so few Iranians twitter as to make the impact inside the country nonexistent. If anything started a degradation and eventual toppling of the regime, it is the protests the twittering was about, and they would have done so regardless of the twittering.
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