Pay close attention now
GATEKEEPING
regulate the flow of information
History and Orientation
Kurt Lewin was apparently the first one to use the term “gatekeeping,” which he used to describe a wife or mother as the person who decides which foods end up on the family’s dinner table. (Lewin, 1947). The gatekeeper is the person who decides what shall pass through each gate section, of which, in any process, there are several. Although he applied it originally to the food chain, he then added that the gating process can include a news item winding through communication channels in a group. This is the point from which most gatekeeper studies in communication are launched. White (1961) was the person who seized upon Lewin’s comments and turned it solidly toward journalism in 1950. In the 1970s McCombs and Shaw took a different direction when they looked at the effects of gatekeepers’ decisions. They found the audience learns how much importance to attach to a news item from the emphasis the media place on it. McCombs and Shaw pointed out that the gatekeeping concept is related to the newer concept, agenda-setting. (McCombs et al, 1976). The gatekeeper concept is now 50 years old and has slipped into the language of many disciplines, including gatekeeping in organizations.
Core Assumptions and Statements
The gatekeeper decides which information will go forward, and which will not. In other words a gatekeeper in a social system decides which of a certain commodity – materials, goods, and information – may enter the system. Important to realize is that gatekeepers are able to control the public’s knowledge of the actual events by letting some stories pass through the system but keeping others out. Gatekeepers can also be seen as institutions or organizations. In a political system there are gatekeepers, individuals or institutions which control access to positions of power and regulate the flow of information and political influence. Gatekeepers exist in many jobs, and their choices hold the potential to color mental pictures that are subsequently created in people’s understanding of what is happening in the world around them. Media gatekeeping showed that decision making is based on principles of news values, organizational routines, input structure and common sense. Gatekeeping is vital in communication planning and almost al communication planning roles include some aspect of gatekeeping.
The gatekeeper’s choices are a complex web of influences, preferences, motives and common values. Gatekeeping is inevitable and in some circumstances it can be useful. Gatekeeping can also be dangerous, since it can lead to an abuse of power by deciding what information to discard and what to let pass. Nevertheless, gatekeeping is often a routine, guided by some set of standard questions.
Conceptual Model
Source: White (1964)
Related to gatekeeping in media. For gatekeeping in organizations this model is not recommended.
Favorite Methods
Interviews, surveys, networkanalysis.
Scope and Application
This theory is related to the mass media and organizations. In the mass media the focus is on the organizational structure of newsrooms and events. Gatekeeping is also an important in organizations, since employees and management are using ways of influence.
Example
A wire service editor decides alone what news audiences will receive from another continent. The idea is that if the gatekeeper’s selections are biased, the readers’ understanding will therefore be a little biased.
True Enough
Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).
Downward Causation
| all processes at the lower level of a hierarchy are restrained by and act in conformity to the laws of the higher level
|
This is how Donald T. Campbell (1974) originally formulated the principle of downward causation. Let us try to clarify what this means. Reductionism can be defined as the belief that the behavior of a whole or system is completely determined by the behavior of the parts, elements or subsystems. In other words, if you know the laws governing the behavior of the parts, you should be able to deduce the laws governing the behavior of the whole.
Systems theory has always taken an anti-reductionist stance, noting that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. In other words, the whole has “emergent properties” which cannot be reduced to properties of the parts. Since emergence is a rather slippery concept, which has been defined in many different ways, most of which are highly ambiguous or fuzzy, I prefer to express this idea with the more precise concept of downward causation.
Downward causation can be defined as a converse of the reductionist principle above: the behavior of the parts (down) is determined by the behavior of the whole (up), so determination moves downward instead of upward. The difference is that determination is not complete. This makes it possible to formulate a clear systemic stance, without lapsing into either the extremes of reductionism or of holism:
| the whole is to some degree constrained by the parts (upward causation), but at the same time the parts are to some degree constrained by the whole (downward causation). |
Let me illustrate this with an example. It is well-known that snow crystals have a strict 6-fold symmetry, but at the same time that each crystal has a unique symmetric shape. The symmetry of the crystal (whole) is clearly determined by the physico-chemical properties of the water molecules which constitute it. But on the other hand, the shape of the complete crystal is not determined by the molecules. Once a shape has been formed, though, the molecules in the crystal are constrained: they can only be present at particular places allowed in the symmetric crystalline shape. The whole (crystal) constrains or “causes” the positions of the parts (molecules).
The appearance of this “two way causation” can be explained in the following way. Imagine a complex dynamic system. The trajectories of the system through its state space are constrained by the “laws” of the dynamics. These dynamics in general determine a set of “attractors“: regions in the state space the system can enter but not leave. However, the initial state of the system, and thus the attractor the system will eventually reach is not determined. The smallest fluctuations can push the system either in the one attractor regime or the other. However, once an attractor is reached, the system loses its freedom to go outside the attractor, and its state is strongly constrained.
Now equate the dynamics with the rules governing the molecules, and the attractor with the eventual crystal shape. The dynamics to some degree determines the possible attractors (e.g. you cannot have a crystal with a 7-fold symmetry), but which attractor will be eventually reached is totally unpredictable from the point of view of the molecules. It rather depends on uncontrollable outside influences. But once the attractor is reached, it strictly governs the further movement of the molecules.
The same principle applies to less rigid, mechanistic systems such as living organisms. You cannot have organisms whose internal functioning flouts the rules of physics and chemistry. However, the laws of physics are completely insufficient to determine which shapes or organizations will evolve in the living world. Once a particular biological organization has emerged, it will strongly constrain the behavior of its components.
For example, the coding of amino acids by specific triplets of bases in the DNA is not determined by any physical law. A given triplet might as well be translated into a multitude of other amino acids than the one chosen in the organisms we know. But evolution happens to have selected one specific “attractor” regime where the coding relation is unambiguously fixed, and transgressions of that coding will be treated as translation errors and therefore eliminated by the cell’s repair mechanisms.
A final example from the cultural sphere. Although our basic measuring units (e.g. second or meter) are defined by physical means (e.g. through the invariant length of a particular wave length of a particular type of electromagnetic radiation), the specific choice of unit is wholly arbitrary. The laws of physics impose theconstraint that the wave lenght of light emitted by a particular quantum transition as measured in the units we choose must always be the same. However, the choice of a particular unit is not determined by those laws of physics. It is the result of a complex socio-cultural evolution in which different units are proposed for the most diverse reasons, after which one unit is eventually selected, perhaps because it has been used a little bit more frequently by slightly more authoritative sources than the other ones. Once the standard gets established, it becomes a constraint which everybody is supposed to follow. The whole (the socio-cultural system with its standards) determines the behavior of the parts (the measurements made by individuals).
Best Goal Call EVER!
The Great Unreasoning
Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we find ourselves surrounded by a variety of human and animal noises:
“Woof!”—”Meow!”—”Moo!”—”Baah!”—”Tweet!”—”How about them Red Sox!”
And, naturally, we find ourselves wondering, What are they all saying? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all, or is it just a lot of meaningless background noise?
To be sure, sometimes it is just noise. But it seems that while animals use just one or two utterances (bark, growl, whimper) to convey an entire range of meanings, humans use a vast, seemingly infinite array of utterances to convey just one meaning: “Me! Me! Look at me! I am important! My opinions matter!” How is it that animals, with their restricted vocal repertoire, nevertheless manage to convey thoughts such as “Let’s all fly south now!” or “Tiger on the prowl! Form an orderly stampede!” while we, with our virtual symphony orchestra of linguistic means at our disposal, never seem to manage anything better than the weak and ineffectual “What I think we should all do is… baah!”
Recently, science has started to shed light on the phenomenon. In one experiment, dogs were given bones to gnaw while two different kinds of prerecorded growls were played to them: playful growls and defensive growls. To the human ear, the growls are almost indistinguishable. However, it was observed that a statistically significant number of dogs would leave the bone alone whenever a defensive growl was played to them. In another experiment, human infants were instrumented with electrodes and two types of prerecorded human voices were played to them: calm, soothing voices and angry voices. The infants were observed to remain calm when hearing calm, soothing voices and to become agitated when hearing angry ones. “It is uncanny!” said Doctor Obvious, a Behavioral Scientist at Johns Hopkins University (no relation to the famous Captain Obvious). “It is as if there exists some innate, private channel of communication that we cannot directly observe.” How is it that a mere infant, incapable of even parsing the sentence “I am feeling very angry right now!” is nevertheless able to sense anger? To an Asperger Syndrome sufferer such as Doctor Obvious, this appears as a great mystery.
It appears that animals, human infants and, to a lesser extent, adult humans have the uncanny ability to read minds. It is not a pure sort of telepathy; for instance, it is of no use when trying to figure out what random number your dog or someone happens to be thinking of. (If a mind is sufficiently simple, it is sometimes possible to sense what dollar amount it is thinking of.) It is also not a pure sort of telepathy because it generally doesn’t work over distance. A lot of it depends on physical proximity, and on synesthetic perception, which combines sight, sound, smell, touch and other senses into a single perceptual bundle. It is a sort of communication that arises spontaneously out of shared experience, and cannot be simulated or reconstituted in its absence.
Animals can be taught to make all sort of noises, but they can rarely be taught to associate them with specific meanings. For instance, I taught our cat to whisper when meowing, to avoid waking up my wife. Now I can say “Shhh!” and the cat will meow silently. She will only do this in my wife’s is absence. It doesn’t matter whether my wife is sleeping or out for a walk or in France: the cat doesn’t distinguish between different kinds of absence. She doesn’t mean anything specific by her silent meowing, except “Fine, I’ll be quiet if I must.” I know this because, after years of study, I have learned to read her simple cat mind.
It is rather similar with us humans. We can learn to say all sorts of things and sound quite educated and intelligent, but of course it all still boils down to one thing: “Me! I am well-spoken, well-read and well-informed! My opinion matters! Listen to meeeeee!” To which I say, “Shhh!” Just as songbirds learn their specific birdsong to fit into bird society, we try to learn the dominant dialect—be it posh or jargon-laden or bad-ass or pseudo-folksy or crazy mumbling—so that we can say what that those around us want to hear. Just as with birdsong, human speech is mostly not about communication but about demonstrating one’s fitness. The actual communication happens along other channels: subtleties of voice, body language, sight, touch, smell and other sense-data, which I hesitate to call data since they cannot be usefully observed and recorded.
To be sure, we humans do have some communication strategies up our sleeves that give a major advantage over other animals. These boil down to our ability to use what linguists call “wh” words (what, when, where and so on) along with their corresponding “th” words (that, then, there, etc.) which linguists call deictic terms, from the Greek δεῖξις (point of reference). We also have ways of indicating entities that aren’t immediately present or visible (“the big rock on the other side of that hill”) or not even directly observable (electrons, black holes) or that are never actually observable (angels, elves, pixies, etc.) This is all either useful or entertaining, or both, but we also have the strange ability to play a sort of mental puppet theater with entities that we can’t directly observe, or can only observe under special, staged circumstances (“Behold, the Wizard of Oz!” or “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States!”) and it is here that we tend to get into an awful lot of mental difficulty that other animals seem to be able to avoid.
Our species’ hypertrophied linguistic abilities have allowed us to create entire systems composed of elements that we either cannot directly observe or cannot observe at all: mathematics, physics, ideologies, theologies, economies, democracies, technocracies and the like, which manipulate abstractions—symbols and relationships between symbols—rather than the concrete, messy, non-atomistic entities that have specific spacial and temporal extents and that constitute reality for all species. There is a continuum between products of pure thought, such as chess or mathematics, sciences which produce theories that can be tested by repeatable direct experiment, such as physics and chemistry, and the rest—political science, economics, sociology and the like—which are a hodgepodge of iffy assumptions and similarly iffy statistical techniques. Perfectly formal systems of thought, such as logic and mathematics, seem the most rigorous, and have served as the guiding light for all other forms of thinking. But there’s a problem.
The problem is that formal systems don’t work. They have internal consistency, to be sure, and they can do all sorts of amusing tricks, but they don’t map onto reality in a way that isn’t essentially an act of violence. When mapped onto real life, formal systems of thought self-destruct, destroy nature, or, most commonly, both. Wherever we look, we see systems that we have contrived run against limits of their own making: burning fossil fuels causes global warming, plastics decay and produce endocrine disruptors, industrial agriculture depletes aquifers and destroys topsoil, and so on. We are already sitting on a mountain of guaranteed negative outcomes—political, environmental, ecological, economic—and every day those of us who still have a job go to work to pile that mountain a little bit higher.
Although this phenomenon can be observed by anyone who cares to see it, those who have observed it have always laid blame for it on the limitations and the flaws of the systems, never on the limitations and the flaws of the human ability to think and to reason. For some un-reason, we feel that our ability to reason is limitless and infinitely perfectable. Nobody has voiced the idea that the exercise of our ability to think can reach the point of diminishing, then negative, returns. It is yet to be persuasively argued that the human propensity for abstract reasoning is a defect of breeding that leads to collective insanity. Perhaps the argument would have to be made recursively: the faculty in question is so flawed that it is incapable of seeing its own flaws.
Or we can argue that argument itself is perhaps not the right approach, and instead rely on direct observation. Formal systems and languages can be taught to machines, but natural human languages cannot. Observe that there aren’t any robots that can speak a language—any non-formal language—with any degree of mental adequacy. This is not for lack of trying: there have been many large, ambitious efforts to capture all aspects of human language, including semantic models of the “real world”—all to no avail. As far as robotic technology, artificial intelligence and the like, all we can do is breed autistic savants. Lock some high-functioning autistic people in a room with some expensive computer equipment, and eventually they manage to reproduce, electronically if not biologically.
Humans lack the ability to make machines human, but they certainly do have the ability to make themselves machine-like, and some of us have formed a subspecies that mostly interacts with machines, and with other machine-like humans. There are now hordes of humans running around compulsively diddling their electronic life support units. Why do we need to design and manufacture robots when we can just breed them? When it comes to making machines that work and play well with other species, our record is no better. Yes, there are documented cases of cats that ride around on Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, but we are decades away from engineering a Roomba that could successfully fetch a ride on a cat. Yes, it certainly is possible to condition animals to behave in a machine-like fashion, but people who do so stand to be accused of cruelty to animals. They should stick to experimenting on humans.
Another approach to take toward dislodging the strange notion that human ability to think knows no bounds is to put it down to an innate fault of human language (well, almost every human language): the arbitrary distinction it draws between being and doing, or between state and action. For no adequately explored reason, being is grammatically more often a state than an act. Is it easy to be you, or is it hard work? If so, how do you do it—be, that is? If you not so much act as happen or occur, then everything you do is the result of everything that you’ve done and that’s happened to you over your entire life. If you speak a language, it is just your being acting itself out. There is, then, no language that can be abstracted away from your entire existence, any more than a meow can be meaningfully abstracted away from a given physical cat: you have to be there to hear it, or it’s just not the same. Those who are interested in this train of thought should look up Phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is my particular favorite.
If making machines into humans runs into difficulties with how well humans are able to think about machines, then what about the converse? How well can we fashion humans into machines, and where does that begin to break down? Making humans into machines (aside from direct human-machine interaction) commonly goes under the names of politics, political science and social engineering. The most advanced model of social organization we have attained is known as representative democracy, where all sorts of different people can make their opinions heard by voting, and their elected representatives then see to it that the majority opinion prevails on a wide array of public policy decisions.
Modern society is highly specialized, and so there are all sorts of different people, who know a whole lot about certain things and next to nothing about everything else. Suppose we have a society that consists of dogs, cats and sheep. You wouldn’t want to take a sheep hunting with you, dogs are useless at trimming a lawn or rodent control, and cats… well, you get the picture. But they can still form opinions on all these things that they know nothing about, can’t they? And then they can periodically go and cast a vote, to give voice to their opinions. Usually the “Baahs” carry the vote. When their elected representatives can’t tell their constituents’ opinions from their votes alone (this is the part that always makes me laugh) they have to look to opinion polls to find out what the populace is thinking at the moment; that is, what the sheep think of duck hunting and rodent control, and what sort of grass dogs and cats should have to eat. Alternatively, the different animals can form special interest groups, to lobby the government and to counter the prevailing majority opinion. But the politicians don’t like to be seen as “caving in” to the special interests. And so either you have a corruption of the democratic process by the undue influence of special interests, or the “Baahs” prevail. And that is the best the world of politics has to offer, because alternative political arrangements are commonly viewed as being even worse.
Doesn’t it seem laughable that the entire edifice of modern political science rests on mere opinion? Some mornings I entertain up to a dozen mutually contradictory opinions, and that’s before even getting off the toilet! It is a flaw of the English language that when someone is convinced of something, the result is said to be a change of opinion. If one is indeed convinced, wouldn’t that change one’s convictions? But it’s easy to see why nobody bothers to conduct “conviction surveys,” because the results would be quite boring. Convictions hardly ever change, because they are generally not amenable to persuasion or argument. Convictions tend to form as a result of actual experiences, not from listening to pundits or experts or from reading the popular press. They form part of who we are, not what we might be thinking at any given moment.
It is almost impossible to change someone’s convictions through persuasion or argument, and it is equally difficult to cause someone to form convictions through these same means. That is why the most difficult subjects of our time—ones involving hard issues such as overpopulation, natural resource use and depletion, global climate destabilization, looming national bankruptcy and the like—are more or less left out of public discourse. They are of no consequence as matters of opinion, while as matters of conviction they are political dynamite. Plus, just how many people are there whose lives have provided them with the experiences they would need to form convictions on these subjects? These subjects are avoided for the same reason one doesn’t leave coiled hoses lying around a slaughterhouse: the sheep might think that they are seeing snakes, stampede and ruin your whole work-shift. It is much better to just let them move smoothly along and cast their vote for “Baah!”
The relatively few people who do have firm convictions are often regarded as “unreasonable” because their convictions cannot be reasoned away as mere opinions can. That to me seems exactly as it should be. Humanity is in the process of demonstrating that it can successfully reason its way into a cul de sac. But is there any reason to believe that it can also reason its way out of it? Perhaps it is high time to start being unreasonable, to decide for ourselves that we do not like the cul de sac into which our reason has steered us, and to refuse to go into it any deeper. Perhaps we could even find a way out of it. And perhaps a few of those people whose minds you can sometimes almost read will almost be able to read our minds as well, and will choose to follow us out. And the rest will just stand around and argue about it: “Baah!”
by Dmitry Orlov
Operator … locksmith?
Seoul Tower- Locks of love. You write your name and the name of the one you love, put it on the fence and throw away the key
Furthermore…
http://www.eoht.info/page/Human+molecule
Pretty amazing stuff … especially when extrapolating the implications.
Is this something or is this nothing?
WHAT IS INFORMATION?
“The word information is derived from Latin informare which means “give form to”. The etymology thus connotes an imposition of structure upon some indeterminate mass. Allan & Selander (1985) have analysed how the word is used in Swedish language and find that this is probably the most widely used meaning of the word. Most people tend to think of information as disjointed little bundles of “facts”. In the Oxford definition of the word it is connected both to knowledge and communication.
Knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject or event; that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news.
The way the word information is used can refer to both “facts” in themselves and the transmission of the facts.”
Too soon?
Cyborg Rights ‘need debating now’
Cyborgs are alive and well today and asserting their rights, presenting society with a challenge that needs to be met head on, says one Australian expert.
More: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/06/04/2916443.htm
Hiccupy and gassy cat is hiccupy and gassy
(can’t stop laughing … intellect regressing…)
Best and most worrying explanation of BP spill to date
Extraordinary
“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).”
Analemma (not what you think)
“This photo is the result of a series of photographs taken by V. Rumyantsev every 10th day in the Crimea during which he tracked the course of the sun for a year [click on the photo to go to his blog]. The result is proof of the analemma. Considering that I can barely sustain interest in a sitcom for a season, it amazes me that anyone could pursue such a project with the hope of producing one photograph after a year’s work.”
via: http://www.icedteaandsarcasm.com/2009_11_01_archive.html
Wu-Wei
“To allow oneself to “wander without purpose” can be frightening because it challenges some of our most basic assumptions about life, about who we are as humans, and about our role in the world. From a Taoist point of view it is our cherished beliefs – that we exist as separate beings, that we can exercise willful control over all situations, and that our role is to conquer our environment – that lead to a state of disharmony and imbalance. Yet, “the Tao nourishes everything,” Lao Tzu writes. If we can learn to follow the Tao, practicing non-action,” then nothing remains undone. This means trusting our own bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and also believing that the environment will provide support and guidance. Thus the need to develop watchfulness and quietness of mind.”
Time after time
Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
serge 