"Like water to fish, or air to birds, so is language to humans." - anon.
(on edit: moved the introductory history into Appendix 1 to shorten this.)
LANGUAGE IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA
The topic of this essay is language - specifically, the impoverished and biased language foisted upon us by the corporate media. (Can you say "double-plus ungood"?) This language is identifiable by its blatant over-simplification of complex issues, its lack of historical and social context, its black-and-white choices, and its blatant pro-GOP bias. Politics is reduced to a "horse race". International relations are reduced to good guys (us) and bad guys (anyone who "crosses" us). Tax cuts are always good. Government is always bad. Solutions to problems are invariably called "wars"; and, increasingly, war is the only solution the U.S. seems to have for its many troubles.
Why does this impoverished language work? For two related reasons: rationality and emotion.
Critical thinking used to be at the heart of good reporting; so it couldn't simply be dropped. Instead, it has slowly been replaced by a barebones "rationality", consisting of simple, literal events: this poll number, that soundbite, this highly-selective listing of the facts. These data constitute a highly abstracted (and highly biased) digest of the news of the world. They are increasingly a blizzard of disconnected factoids that can be assembled to any purpose, like a bunch of custom Lego blocks - except that they can only build evil liberals and virtuous conservatives.
Of course, this skeleton of rationality would easily be recognized as impoverished and twisted if it were not for its skin of emotion - a sort of reactive armor against facts. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_armor) Emotional provocation in the mass media (i.e., demagoguery) was legalized by the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1988. All of the sudden, the corporate hirelings in the media could character assassinate anyone they chose, present lies and made-up propaganda as truth, and get well-paid for these outrages. The result was an outpouring of hate speech unseen since the 1930s. The usual suspects were targeted: gays, feminists, liberals, Hispanics, welfare recipients, crack addicts, college professors, Democratic politicians. Wedge issues like abortion, school prayer, gay rights, and evolution were lathered thickly over the threadbare skeleton of "legitimate" news factoids.
So, to summarize, corporate media can be characterized as a large collection of random facts, connected by a few simple rules, with a slick user interface. It is an artificial and biased machine constructed by corporations; and yet many people think of it as a genuine and honest organization full of independently thinking people. This false projection of "personality" onto an artifact reminds me of the whole, decades-long (~1950-~1990) fight over the hyper-rationalist, "hard-AI" version of artificial intelligence. For those unfamiliar, the next three-paragaph section is a thumbnail sketch of hard-AI.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO "HARD A.I."?
From the moment computers were invented, there was a group of people that automatically assumed that they would become "intelligent". At first, because no one had a clue about how the brain calculated even the smallest of its myriad outputs from its even larger set of inputs, this idea was open to experimentation. Given the concept of "programming" and logical decision making, the hard-AI crowd tried to write enough rules and provide enough of a database for a program to behave intelligently (i.e., pass the so-called Turing Test). (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test)
After decades of elaborating upon their basic idea, with ever more powerful computers and software, the hard-AI crowd produced nothing of value - only "toy" applications or merely "competent" bookkeeping systems. Even the DOD recognized this, and pulled the funding plug (which was all that kept the hard-AI crowd in business) at the end of the Cold War. Within a few years, almost all the hard-AI workers had departed for other fields.
Over the same period of decades, graphics hardware and software became so good at simulating pictures that it began to be indistinguishable from real movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood script writers have become as formulaic as corporate news directors, so the special effects "skin" covers mostly threadbare plots. Even more depressingly, 12-year olds (of all ages) still rush to these pathetic movies, further embedding the corporate control memes of action and violence into their impressionable young brains.
LANGUAGE AS A VENDING MACHINE
Corporate media has caused a large database of facts to be compiled. Like hard-AI, the extraction of facts from reality (what the hard-AI crowd pretentiously called "knowledge engineering") is highly selective for a few important "features", which the corporations have determined to be the ones that make corporations' behavior look benevolent. The media then operate on that data with a very simple set of rules - rules that are highly biased: pro-corporate and anti-democracy.
They have replaced the communication between the electorate and the politicians with this simulacrum of communication - this bogus hard-AI pile of biased news factoids and talking-head spinmeisters. They want voters to buy into the idea that what is presented on TV news is an accurate copy of real world, the same way the hard-AI crowd wanted Turing testers to buy into the idea that their AI system was an accurate copy of a real human brain. The corporations want the output of their "news-AI" to be accepted as genuine political thinking.
However, even worse than the hard-AI crowd, the corporate media crowd knows from the start that their assertion of genuine thinking is a pack of lies, that the biased conclusions are implicit in the biased programming choices. (Interesting that both computer people and TV people use the word "programming"; except geeks program machines, while corporations program human beings.) So the media distract people from that embarrassing truth with immense piles of theatrical interface bullshit: screen crawls, graphics, live reports from the field, election center sets, news center sets, drumbeat music themes. But, if you can see through the glitz and the emotional hype, "there is no there there."
FLUNKING THE TURING TEST
The problem is, many Americans are flunking this Turing Test. They are buying into the idea that political thinking and political action is nothing more than selecting from a multiple choice list, where all the choices are bad. They are buying into the media setting the agenda. They are comfortable with political language being akin to a vending machine, where the corporations select what items (i.e., bought politicians) are for sale (cf. "The Permanent Campaign") and the voters only choice is which button to push.
Most worrisome of all, citizens (don't hear that word often in news-AI land) are comfortable with corporate media being the gatekeeper of political vocabulary - the organization that gets to "stock" the vending machine. That means they are comfortable with (or anaesthetized to) the hijacking of vocabulary, the lack of objectivity, the exclusion of viable alternatives, and the ridiculing of even minimally non-trivial thinking and planning by government. They have been so conditioned that when they find the vending machine doesn't have any candidate they like, they take whatever junk food is for sale.
COMMUNICATION FOR ACTION
I know that there is a community of political people who see through the bogus claims of the "news-AI". The question is, how do they derail the heavily funded and increasingly powerful corporate stranglehold on information before its too late?
You might want to reason by analogy and say that something like the "information wants to be free" techno-libertarian movement will save the day, as it did when personal computing got computers to the people, and out of the glass-walled rooms in the corporations.
But, that was a near-run thing. If you are interested in the history, "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop is a chronicle of just how bottom-line-fixated stupid the corporations had to be, and just how much wisely-spent government money had to be disbursed with almost no strings attached, to get to the personal computer. Bottom line: don't assume that the mere existence of the Internet means the corporate media vending machine is doomed.
The best positive action I can recommend is to go down the little-known and esoteric resistance to hard-AI. The weakness of AI is that there is no commitment behind the software - unless its the commitment of a human being or organization. You might as well expect commitment from the piece of paper your contract is written on.
This lack of commitment shows up in the so-called politicians we elect. They make promises to get elected; but there is no commitment to follow through on them. They simply declare that some action, some media factoid, counts as fulfillment of their pledge, and then they move on. In the absence of the news-AI, people would object to the politicians claim. In the false world mediated by the news-AI, the people don't have that choice.
So, my vote for the weakness of the corporate media is the disconnect between the commitments of politicians and their actions. Its all about the lack of commitment. Voters perceive their powerlessness in the face of that lack; but they don't know how to engage in a "communication for action". Those of us who can pass the Turing Test need to learn this skill.
But, I am long past most people's attention span. I can only encourage you to read the references in the Appendix 2 and hope that they make a difference.
Thanks for listening to a crazy computer-guy rant.
arendt
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APPENDIX 1 - Some historical background
THE COMING OF THE CORPORATE MEDIA
The tide of anti-regimentation, anti-Establishment, sentiment in America peaked around the time of Watergate. The upper class reaction to that sentiment was already underway, beginning with the massive funding of conservative think tanks. This reaction had been signaled by Lewis Powell, just prior to his being appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. In characteristic fashion, this signal to the upper class was "under the radar" of the public. Powell wrote a quiet memo to the U.S. Chamber of Congress, in which he agitated for a concerted conservative pushback against the increasingly egalitarian society that the U.S. was becoming.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.htmlThe memo was acted upon. By the time the pre-senile Reagan was installed, with his stage manager, Poppy Bush, the unconsolidated media that had exposed the Viet Nam debacle and the Watergate crimes was already being centralized and purged. Conservative apparatchiks, like William Safire and Pat Buchanan were inserted into the liberal media, in the name of "balance", to blunt its message. Newsrooms were made into profit centers and had their budgets cut.
The free press was slowly, but relentlessly, disassembled and reassembled into a poll-touting, sound-bite spouting "balanced" corporatized caricature of its former self - without ever missing a news deadline or flubbing an on-air line. Working class "reporters" were replaced by upper class graduates of journalism schools. It was done so seamlessly that few people at the time were able to fathom the strategy behind the seemingly unconnected tactics.
Today, an entire generation has been raised in this post-Reagan corporate media bubble - a bubble whose language has slowly been deformed so that "liberal", "union", "public interest", and a host of other common words have been demonized. At the same time, naked greed and violence have been sanitized and excused, as long as its the rich people doing the deed.
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APPENDIX 2 - Some references to the literature
The one thing that electronic media seems to have destroyed for good is the all-night, college intellectual bull session. Granted it was pretentious, but it was something that everyone should try at least once in their lives before settling down to being a faceless drone in a corporate cubicle.
In the 1960s, arguments among people like Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre were, believe it or not, actually interesting to a substantial fraction of college students. In the 1970s, the so-called "human potential movement" (read Esalen, EST, and other touchy-feeley groups) paid attention to the "veil of language". But, that is all a rapidly fading memory. Today's 20-somethings, by and large, have not been exposed to the philosophy of language - although they have been manipulated by advertising agencies full of ex-POMO philosophers. This is hardly the fault of young people, since philosophy seems to have self-destructed in the 1980s, as cognitive science exploded naive philosophical speculations about brain functioning.
This essay is an attempt to interest people in how the debate about language is relevant to politics. If you know George Lakoff, this stuff will be old news to you; although, I am talking at a less practical level than he does.
My viewpoint derives from the massive debate from 1970 to 1990 in the computer science/artificial intelligence community over language and intelligence. Key players from "my" side (phenomenology/ existentialism) in this debate were Terry Winograd & Fernando Flores, Hubert & Stuart Dreyfus, and John Searle. (Wikipedia them if you are interested.)
If you have ever programmed a computer, you may have had reason to think about language as a "thing". Philosophers, like Searle, took it much further, inventing "speech act" theory. Searle created the famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment (Wikipedia has it) that made the "hard AI" crowd (Marvin Minsky, et al) go absolutely ballistic.
There is a very important book, which most people outside the computer science community have never heard of:
"Understanding Computers and Cognition (A New Foundation for Design)" - Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1986).
A lengthy "Cliff notes" for this book is available for free at:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/380188.htmlFrom a review of book on Amazon:
A few years ago Byte Magazine named this one of the 10 most important books in the history of the computer industry. Flores was asked to keynote the 50th anniversary meeting of the ACM on the strength of the work he has done, some of which is shown here.
A "Cliff notes" for the critical section of this book, "Communication for Action" is available on-line:
http://www.inf-wiss.uni-konstanz.de/RIS/1996iss01_01/articles01/sitter03/02.html