Too  much Disinformation

Most everyone remembers a situation when they asked a friend, “How ya’ doin?”  and they hear, in grisly detail, too much information (abbreviated as TMI). You make a mental note to not ever ask this person how their operation went.

As H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) is said to have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”  It’s acerbic but it’s wrong; it is not inclusive enough --- it should include, to some extent, everyone.. We all have been taken in one time or another because we are ruled by our emotions first, reason second. To be fair, there are other theories that claim emotion is not necessarily the enemy of reason but complements it.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/09/18/emotion-is-not-the-enemy-of-reason/ 

However, for the purposes of this column, I will be  assuming that emotions and reason are mostly antagonists.

Many of the Iowa Caucus voters admitted that even on the day of voting their final decision was not yet formed but would probably be based on a last minute gut feeling about the candidate. If he or she doesn’t feel right about a candidate then that’s a deal breaker; emotions trump reason.  Reason, however, gets its chance after the gut has voted and is very, very good at rationalizing our choices.

So the question becomes whom do you trust? Trust of information is usually based on a gut feeling you experience towards the source of that information. The longer you feel that the source has worked for you over a long enough period of time, the greater the trust grows ( the New York Times was founded 170 years ago and I trust its reporting second only to the Christian Science Monitor), On the other hand if you believe the source to be biased, your trust is, at best, a maybe. We have evolved to  trust members of our clan more than outsiders. This is not necessarily a bad thing because this trait is more likely to get our genes into the next generation and it will contribute to our clan’s long-term survival.

Before newspapers were widespread, before radio and television began to saturate the airwaves and before  the Internet connected everyone to everyone, folks turned to friends, colleagues, neighbors and relatives to help them make up their minds about who to vote for and who to vote against. Why?  Simply because they trusted them. Our new technologies, especially the Internet, have added a vast amount of data and information to help us make useful decisions. (the short answer to your question is: Data is unorganized facts that are not useful in and of themselves --- but after the data is organized by some rule or classification system, it can become useful  Information). But the fact is that we are drowning in data that are not even facttual so that even if they become organized we cannot call it information, it is actually disinformation and we cannot really trust it.

So the problem becomes TMD (too much disinformation) because we have no precise way to disentangle disinformation from information, Even if we could disentangle the actual information from the disinformation  we will still have the problem raised by Groucho Marx, “ “Who you gonna’ believe --- Me,, or your own eyes?’” which is a comical way of saying that reason will always be trumped by emotion at least in the short run. Sometimes we are saved by Reason finally returning after a bad decision based on a gut feeling and changing course accordingly.  

This process is particularly evident during election campaigns. Since shortly after the dawn of time, lawyers and politicians have been distrusted.Most all politicians have studied law Shakespeare put it best when he wrote in his play, King Henry V1

“Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man?”

In modern English he is saying what Dickens said a couple cenuries later,“the law is an ass” so watch out for lawyers. He  goes on to have one of his characters utter the well-known phrase, “First we kill all the Lawyers”. Most readerss analyze this as ridding soiety of leaches who prey on ouur misfortunes There are however those who have a radically differnt interpretion: In order for the character to overtrurnand take ovet  command of the ccountry th he would have to abolish the current laws and the lawyers with them.

In  our current situation where disinformation seems to rule the line would have to be updateed  to : “First we kill all the compter folks” and that would eventually bring down the internet and ,as a result much disinformatioin will not be spreae.==d. Unfortuantely, much useful info would all be lost --- like throwing the baby out with the bathwat3r

So, what to do, what to do? Well, a drastic remedy would be to follow a modified version of what Shakespeare wrote a couple of centuries ago:

“Whatever you do, don’t shoot me --- I’m just the messenger.”

The Internet and the Pandemic 

First an update to my previous column, “Monopoly just a Game?”. I used the early http://www.weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/graph/12901railroad industry  as an example of a monopoly but neglected to mention a more current example: 

Microsoft was  prosecuted as a monopoly in the late nineties. The accusation was that they deliberately exercised control of the computer market which was unfair to their competitors as well as causing consumers to pay more for their product. They had combined their operating system with their browser, “Internet Explorer” in such a way that it was nearly impossible for users to deploy other existing browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Firefox.  Microsoft countered that all they were doing was throwing in a free browser with their operating system. 

“The ruling on April 3, 2000, called for Microsoft to divide the company in half, creating two companies that were to be called "baby bills." The operating system would make up one half of the company and the software arm would make up the other.

Before this could be achieved, however, the fangs were removed from the ruling during the appeals process. However, rather than being broken by the antitrust ruling, Microsoft saw its once invincible market share erode due to the old-fashioned competition. As a result, many now wonder if bringing antitrust cases against non-coercive monopolies is merely a costly redundancy of work the free market can do at no charge.” 

The reader should keep in mind that this is an opinion from a website devoted to investors. (https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/microsoft-antitrust.asp)

During those times,  Bill Gates was viewed, (primarily by academics) as a bad guy because their social agenda was slanted more towards sharing (e.g. Information should be Free) than profiteering.

Nowadays, as most everyone knows, Gates is viewed as an enlightened philanthropist guiding the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which is fighting hunger and poverty in less-developed countries. Is this an example of maturation or guilt? 

Now, back to the issue raised by the title of this piece. It’s pretty clear to me that, yes, the Internet like other modes of communication such as Newspaper, TV and Radio, by overwhelming us with information may have done more harm than good. (I’m undecided on that one)          

 One cannot help but notice the similarities between the Internet and the virus spreading like a meme or a tweet where they proliferate very, very quickly. Without knowing whom to trust, they can cause a very large commotion before it dies down.

So, is it possible to quarantine a website that is clearly infected with false information? Right now that is an issue that social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google are currently struggling with. Given the estimated number of 

Internet users (there are about 4 billion active social media users (statista.com) it is close to impossible to address this problem in the same way a newspaper  can vet letters to the editor. A proposed solution to this problem is to harness AI to do the job for us. Clearly there will be those who object to an “artificially” intelligent agent making what are essentially human decisions for.us. It is hard not to develop a , “How dare you!?!?” attitude.

However, the other side of the argument is similar to that used by advocates of self-driving cars: Look, it’s not going to be perfect but neither will human decisions be perfect plus the AI doesn’t sleep, go for coffee breaks or have a bad day. And perhaps most importantly, the AI learns from experience --- something in short supply these days. Finding and removing trolls ( people who want to provoke and upset others online for their own amusement (howtogeek.com)). is more complicated as it is easy to create a fake username making it difficult to trace. One approach is to let the AI do the quarantining subject allowing  the offender to defend/challenge their submission similar to the your antivirus program quarantines potentially dangerous websites or downloads.Then you, the user, can decide later whether or not to lift the quarantine.

With regard to people, a quarantine is effective in that it contains the virus to a circumscribed area and even though the people inside that area are unlucky ,it stops the spread of the virus to the general population. Being only human, people become contentious when in quarantine while the programs your antivirus captives are quite docile.  

                                                                                         

Although I use this World Wide Web for most of the research I do for this column,

 I am beginning to think that the Internet, and social media in particular, may be, or certainly have the capacity to create more problems than it solves. If nothing else, the current pandemic has reminded us that we are indeed, all connected.

                       

Pros and Cons of Social Media Part 2

What do we really mean when we use the phrase, “social media”?  Of course, we know what “social” means and we know what “media” does. So we can deduce that “social media” is media like books, TV and internet websites that connect people to other people to pass information back and forth without having to be physically present as we do in conversation. After smoke signals,  perhaps the first social medium was realized through the telephone which made it possible to have conversations over long distances instead of face-to-face. A pessimist would conclude that we have accepted physical separation at the price of lost intimacy.

Next, consider the following two quotes:

 “A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under                                                                                                                                                                                             2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page. Life, it seems, begins not at birth but with online conception. And a child’s name is the link to that permanent record.” --- Allen Salkin, New York Times, Nov 27, 2011

"One particular advantage of social media is that they help a reporter see the intellectual and social network of a source. For example, in Twitter I can see whom you are following and who is following you. I can see what you have re-tweeted and what links you have selected. Therefore, I can understand more fully your social context." -- Jerry Zurek, professor of English and communication department chair at Cabrini College

The first quote appears to be a negative assessment of social media while the second a positive one. However, like many of  life’s problems, the pros and cons can be somewhat ambiguous but here is an example that is clearly positive:

“Twitter was so important to the Iranian protests after the Iranian presidential election in June 2009 that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay a scheduled network upgrade that would have taken the website offline at a busy time of day in Iran. Twitter complied and rescheduled the downtime to 1:30 am Tehran time.

Proponents of social networking sites argue that these online communities promote increased communication with friends and family, familiarize people with valuable computer skills, and allow contact with people from around the world.” --- to which I would add the important role that social media played in the 2011 Egyption Revolution.

And here is an assessment that accentuates the negative:
Opponents argue that social networking sites expose children to predators, increase vulnerability to computer viruses, lower worker productivity, and promote narcissism and short attention spans.” (source: http://socialnetworking.procon.org/)

If you were to ask, I would say the strongest and most general arguments pro and con are:

Pro: Social Media contributes to the happiness of both the individual and society.

Con: Social Media contributes to the unhappiness of both the individual and society.

But then  what do we mean by “happiness”. I know that I am happy when I am afforded the pleasure of being able to turn over and get a couple more hours of sleep --- but that’s just me. Someone else may be happy in knocking over little kids blocks or tormenting their cat. And even if we could all agree on a common definition of “happiness” --- how would we go about measuring it? Alas there is no Richter scale for Happiness. Also, the problem might be that there are too many possible ways to measure it.

In either case, the popularity of social websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram continue to grow and appear to be living long and prospering.  And this raises yet another question.

We know that AT&T was broken up by the government into Baby Bells and has never  regained the market share or power it once held. AT&T was a monopoly in telephone production and distribution from its inception in 1882 until 1982. Because, according to Balaji Viswanathan, they grew and grew until they were essentially a monopoly and the government stepped in and shut them down. He goes on to  point out that the larger a company grows the more the government tends to regulate it until the overregulation leads to bankruptcy. He identifies Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft as the social media companies that are most likely to go bankrupt due to increased government regulation. Although I would not categorize Apple, Microsoft and Google as true Social media companies, they all provide a social medium via their email services (iCloud, Outlook and Gmail). He predicts the order from lowest to highest probability of bankruptcy as: Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. His reasoning can be found at: https://www.quora.com/Which-company-will-fall-first-Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-or-Microsoft

So, what do you think are the pros and cons of social media?