From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 18:29:08 MDT
Harvey Newstrom
> On Saturday, July 13, 2002, at 01:07 am, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> > Ah! CNN skewing and slanting reality to fit their world-view? How
> > utterly, surprising, not. It is also the primary reason they have lost
> > out to Fox News, and MSNBC.
>
> But I find Fox and MSNBC to also be extremely slanted. Is there any
> objective source of news? People sometimes bash one source or another
> as if they are unreliable, but where do such people get their news
> instead?
>
This is something I wonder about. In a world awash with data, how do you get
any slant on the facts? There is s small ray of hope. I recently found that
(unlike me) my children have had media training at school. They looked at
newsprint, TV, magazines, Radio and were asked to critically appraise the
material (from advertisements to editorial). They had to look at the
meta-level messaging (although they didn't call it that). What I find is an
automatic skepticism in their approach - an automatic tendency to look for
the motives behind what they see.
My kids are post-Y++ (? is there any list of these labels?) generation and I
can tell you they won't take crap from anyone. I'm a mid-teen taxi driver
and I see this similarity in all of them as I truck them from one river of
data to another. These kids know no different. Older folks will see it as an
erosion, over time, of the quality of the data. My kids just see data that's
always been there and with content that is sampled like in a supermarket
with labels they are trained to see.
So I guess Harvey's question "where do such people get their news instead?"
has an answer of sorts, which seems to be that the oracles you need are
still there, but the signal to noise ratio is low and there's also a kind of
encoding scheme. You've got to switch that post-Y++ data filter on and
somehow not feel like you're in a world delusion factory. Not particularly
easy, but I know my kids don't even think about it, so it's possible.
Colin Hales
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