McLuhan Told You So!

 The NY Times has a piece from some Harvard Professor bemoaning episteme and social media. First, one must understand episteme and gnossos, both Greek for knowledge, but both a challenge in the Kantian sense for what we know from external world and from what we know internally. Namely the phenomenon of things outside ourselves and the connections of our limbic system.

Now some thirty years ago I wrote about multimedia communications, having spent the prior decade enmeshed in it. Therein I quote McLuhan:

To quote Drucker, who paraphrased McLuhan;

"Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors in the audience, "that you think that printing influenced the courses that the university taught and the role of university all together." "No sir," said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed printing determined what henceforth was going to be considered knowledge."

Thus this led to McLuhan's famous phrase that the medium is the message. Specifically, as we developed a new medium for human communications, we dramatically altered the nature of the information that was transferred and the way in which the human perceived what was "truth" and what was not. The television generation of the 1960's was an clear example of the impact of television versus film in portraying the war in Vietnam as compared to the Second World War. The perception of these two events was determined by the difference of the two media that displayed them to the pubic masses. Television allowed for a portrayal that molded more closely to the individual humans impact of the events as compared to films overview of the groups involvement's. Both media deal with the same senses but they are different enough to have determined two different outcomes of the wars. This conclusion is a  cLuhanesque conclusion but is consistent with the changes that McLuhan was recounting in the 1960's in his publications.

 

When we add social media we now have a powerful medium which creates knowledge, the writers episteme,  and with the feedback and manipulation provided in social media we also can impact gnossos. Namely in an interactive medium like a Twitter, one can psychologically profile a single individual. From that profile one can then influence, motivate, and even control that individual. Nothing new here folks, that was the intent! 

The NY Times author notes:

The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.

 

The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.

 

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. 

 

The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.

 

In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

 Frankly this is in my opinion and my experience a bit sophomoric. It is frankly much worse in that the medium changes not only knowledge but truth, it destroys trust, and it enables third parties to manipulate individuals to do what they end up doing. Worse, the manipulator is a hombre de umbta, a man in the shadows, whose reasons for manipulation may be the antithesis of a free society.

The reality is not a mass assault on the Capitol, but an ongoing manipulation of citizens by the power of the social media. This power is placed in the hands of people we have no knowledge of and in algorithms we have no access to. It is not the simple issue of privacy or surveillance, it is not changing the episteme but altering the gnossos. The true defect caused by social media is the loss of trust...trust in our Government and our institutions. 

The real question is; who is doing this and why? It is clear that there is social media profiling, manipulation and targeting. But who and why? It is not the mob, it is the clearly nefarious clique behind this that we should worry about.

In 2002 I wrote about Privacy and the Internet. Yes, that was two decades before this Times/Harvard observer seems to have caught on to reality. I had just finished building out fiber and Internet in Central and Eastern Europe and also finished a Presidential Commission report on the Internet with the soon to be Chair of Google. Nothing like keen insight into the obvious. I recalled Justice Brandeis and his papers on privacy, also on anonymity. He called it a "right to be left alone". I believe in such a right, but it is a right in Natural and Common Law and unfortunately not in our Constitution. But the social media companies have gone beyond privacy, they now play with influencing and training people to react a certain way.