Media

“Threads”

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Meta’s new Twitter competitor is called “Threads”, the name deriving from ‘threads of conversation’.   (The use of the term in online discussion systems may owe something to its earlier use in operating system technology)

However, another connotation of the word “threads” seems appropriate for this particular product.   Marionettes–puppets–are manipulated via threads (OK, strings if you want) and controlled by a puppeteer.   They have no autonomy, they do what the puppeteer wants them to do.

Given that a lot of the support for Threads seems based on its promise of a ‘curated’ environment, this other meaning of the term fits quite well.   (See this post  for early examples of this curation in practice)

It has becomes more and more clear how much power devolves to those who control the communications environment, and how difficult it is to overcome this advantage. See my related posts:

Comm Check

The Rage of the Prince-Electors

Book Review: Year of Consent

Society, Social Media, and Human Nature

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The Instagram Panopticon, at Quillette, discusses the way in which social media has encouraged people to carefully curate their self-presentations and to judge the self-presentations of others.

I think it is certainly true that new kinds of media can affect how people think, feel, and interact…and this effect is nothing new. Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, wrote about the impact of radio:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

He didn’t like photography very much, either:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

But the focus on self-presentation and on evaluating the presentations of other goes back much further.   Consider, for example Russia’s ‘paper Facebook’ of the 19th century.   No computers and no telephones, but, among aristocrats and the well-off, visiting cards were   very important…and:

The cards, decorated with vignettes and lettering, were usually piled somewhere in the entrance hall of a rich house either on a coffee table or tucked behind the mirror; so when a guest was coming, while he waited for the servants to tell the host he’s got a visitor, the guest could assess the popularity and social ties of his host by looking at the cards.

The fashion mongers of the era flaunted each other with a set of business cards from famous and popular people, just as some people now flaunt how many Facebook stars they are friends with!

There were even bot-equivalents to increase one’s count of Likes:

Some people even paid the doormen in rich people’s houses for visiting cards of famous persons princes, counts, rich businessmen to tuck these cards behind their mirrors and make their guests believe they are sometimes visited by such ‘posh’ persons.

Going back even further, in one of Fielding’s novels a woman takes great pleasure in going through the visiting cards of people who called on her.   Again, similar to like-collecting on Instagram or Facebook, probably exactly the same dopamine hit.

So yes, changes in media do influence human perception and behavior…but we must be careful not to ascribe things to new media which are really human constants.

Worthwhile Reading

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Cable news…past and future

The Golden Age of Substack.   Basically, a revitalization of long-form blogging.

Earth Day as a formal religious holiday?   (It strikes me that this fits right in with energy secretary Granholm’s call for electrification of all military vehicles by 2030.   This is so disconnected from any military or technical rationale that it can only be religiously motivated)

Absence of maternal warmth in childhood has some serious long-term implications.

The Golden age of Aerospace:

Aerospace is one of the deepest branches of humanity’s technological tree. It is a telling fact that more countries have produced a nuclear bomb than mass-produced a jet engine. Recent history illustrates how hard it is to build these capabilities.  

China is recruiting former air force pilots from the West.   And see this post about Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks), Joe Biden, and China.   More here.

Black Powder.   Still militarily important, though as an initiator for more-powerful explosives rather than as a primary explosive in its own right.   The US was dependent on one.single.factory to manufacture this substance.   It blew up.

Fiction as simulation:

Much like the way a differential equation can summarize the properties of a pendulum, fictional literature abstracts, summarizes, and compresses complex human relations by selecting only the most relevant elements. This abstracted level of comprehension also enables one to see how these principles apply elsewhere and how they may be generalized…Like mathematics, narrative clarifies understandings of certain generalizable principles that underlie an important aspect of human experience, namely intended human action.

Is NPR ‘State Affiliated Media’?

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If you look up National Public Radio on Twitter, you will see that it is now identified as “US state-affiliated media”.   Not surprisingly, officials of NPR are very unhappy about this.   John Lansing, NPR president and CEO, said: “NPR stands for freedom of speech & holding the powerful accountable. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy” and continued:

We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as ‘state-affiliated media,” a description that, per Twitter’s own guidelines, does not apply to NPR. Twitter and its member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide….

Full statement here.

So, where does NPR get its funding?   And is it accurate for it to be labeled ‘state-affiliated media’?   Here is NPR’s own page on Public Radio Finances.   Included are revenues of NPR itself and revenues of its Member Stations.   As far as NPR itself goes, I don’t think you can tell from the information provided how much of it comes from the government, it seems to be included in ‘contributions of cash and other assets’ or ‘other revenues’…but other sources indicate that it is less than 1% of NPR total revenues.

BUT,   at least 31% of NPR revenues come from fees paid by the Member stations.   And of the revenues of those member stations, 8% comes from ‘Federal appropriation via CPB’ and 5% from ‘Federal, state and local governments’.   Seems to me that one has to consider those payments to the local stations as part of the government funding of ‘public radio’…in addition to the program fees that are remitted to the NPR entity, the local stations are themselves the essential component in distribution.   If the government gave a trivial amount of money to McDonald’s Hamburgers….but a considerably greater amount to its franchisees…then wouldn’t we consider both numbers when evaluating the degree to which McD’s was government subsidized?

NPR says on its own website:

Federal funding is  essential  to public radio’s service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.

It’s been argued that NPR is obviously not ‘state-affiliated media’ because it was not supportive of the Trump administration when that administration   was in office…indeed, it was the opposite of supportive   To which my response is: NPR does not represent the elected government, but it represents those who it thinks should be the government.   See my post about the Prince-Electors.

For reference, here is Twitter’s definition of state-affiliated media.