Thang Nguyen 555

Of course I want to know what’s going on, where to find fish and where to avoid the lions. Thanks to those cave-paintings. It must have been painstaking to carve into rocks for instructions’ sakes.

From oral tradition to print tradition (Silk-Road written contracts), from electronics communication to digital communication, we want to get out of the box and the cave.

We are both nomads and settlers, both social distancing and social butterflies (the worst punishment in prison is isolation).

People pick up on and monetize on the fact we are creatures of conformity; social animals with awareness of social status.

I spent my first 4 years alone, most of the time.

Then on my first day at school, I was left in a room full of crying kids. I too cried, not realizing what I was into. Later, at a stern-looking pediatric’s office, I again joined other kids who cried in the waiting room (his hand felt extremely cold as his instrument was poking on my chest).

Along with conformity, we have our bias. We mis-perceived (read into) communication as illustrated by a Vietnamese tale.

Once upon the time, an army man came home from a distant war. Wife and a kid he never saw greeted him (his wife was pregnant when he left for war). Right off, the kid said “You are not my Dad; my Dad only comes in the night”. Of course, he exploded. His wife jumped to her death. Then our newly minted single-parent burned a flickering candle bright enough to cast a shadow on the wall. “There he is, my Dad”.

Message intent never equates message perceived. Along the way via a medium, on which it is encoded, it encounters noise, breakdown, signal jam and lag to finally be decoded into some resemblance of what had originally been intended (no wonder in the old days, they sent multiple pigeons and horsemen for redundancy).

People in propaganda know this. They can parley, distort and destroy an otherwise good message. Conversely, even with the best of intentions, we still fail (total vaccination, for instance). Jack Ellul in Propaganda says, ” the strength of propaganda reveals one of the most dangerous flaws of democracy”.

Then comes the money part. Some time back in the 60’s, we watched the Evening News over TV dinner, and flipped the VHF channels, from 2 to 4 to 7, just to end up with roughly the same commercials (blitz) on all three networks. At least, in between, we can still have a conversation, a common culture, and a consensus e.g. a far-away land, a controversial war (norm).

Then Cable afforded us more choices. VHS recording (not Betamax) gave us the liberty to skip ads (time shift).

While broadcasting becomes narrow-casting, still under FCC regulations e.g. rebuttal and retraction….or else, license revoked.

Nielsen audience ratings are KPI’s to price out ads rates, Gallup poll and Pew Research for political opinion. Marketers often lamented that they were paying for half of the household TV’s that nobody were watching, but no one knows which half….

Precious spectrums were auctioned up with limits on ownership concentration in one market. 1984 saw Anti-trust Law in full force with the break-up of Ma Bell. Media are required to serve the public interests e.g. children programming, PSA’s and Fairness Doctrine/Equal Time, Letters to the Editors and anti-libel.

Broadcast stations can only run a certain amount of ads per hour while DJ’s cannot take bribes (payola). Truth in Advertising was enforced. So was Communication Decency Act (=PG-13) within the Communication Acts of 1996 (section 230). (Tipper Gore, remember?)

In between literacy (print culture 1517) and the airwaves (mass culture 1920,1950) we had evolved from being citizens of a nation to being consumers of news. The press and the politicians operated (used to) on a symbiotic mode i.e. scratch my back, I scratch yours. Newsroom was completely partitioned from their marketing/business side. Katherine Graham, after inherited the Post from her husband, allowed Ben Bradlee to have full reign, hence, the Pentagon Papers and ensued lawsuits.

Then big boys e.g. Time Warner, Disney, News Corp etc.. threw good money to buy up media outlets, consolidate them as conglomerates.

With digital transformation and social networks, everything changes ( I- tunes for 99 cents, New York Times, also 99 cents per month). While broadcast stations are still required to test their Emergency Broadcast System, the APARNET, once invented for communication continuity in the event of a nuclear strike, has been commercialized. No longer one-to-one as in telephony, or one-to-many as in Radio/TV, the internet allows (many-to-many, and some day, South-to-South information flow e.g. S Africa to S America) to upload and mesh up. Gigs can code, hack and share (MP3 &4) across geographical boundaries. The results? Culture shock and cultural imperialism if not blocked outright by state-enforced firewalls. In short, society and politics are upending.

Delayed “narrow-cast” can now be viewed on facebook and youtube, with Web 2.0-enabled viewer’s comments…NOT subjected to FCC mentioned rules and regulations (un-regulated). Bad news travel. Fake news travel 6 times faster than real news. “Tech” companies, not ” media” companies, touted zero-tolerance on pornography, hate speech and school-bullies, can barely cope with Russian interferences in 2016 and 2020 elections’ protests.

Not only consumers of news, we are also cogs or co-producers – of an user-generated content and machine-generated ads apparatus. No longer do we have to wait for the Evening News. The news cycle is 24/7 accessible from anywhere. Mobile technology opens the flood gate for both mis- information and “dis” information. Propaganda is sugar-coated and unrestrained. Social networks become social MEDIA, while unburdened by FCC regulations. A match made in heaven: consumers’ attention for ad dollars, and consumer’s time to augment bots’ (machine) learning. Algorithms rule. Soft wares eat your lunch.

We no longer are in the flesh (off line) but exist only as data points (online).

The death of expertise (foreign correspondents & Editorial Board) and the cult of amateurs i.e. no more guard-rails and speed bumps.

Inadvertently, we help “bots” complete those captchas, auto-completion, translation and transmission of fake news. Our “volunteering act” both reduces product-development cost (we do ghost work for free) and helps Social Media capture ad revenue via evolving smart algorithms . This new micro-targeting: what we click, how long we stay on an article, what we share and re-tweet … helps capture higher returns on otherwise wasted marketing dollars.

Meanwhile, feed and friends recommendations walled us in our echo chamber and digital sweat-shop, to enrich Mark (fb) and Jack (Twitter): click, re-tweet, rinse, repeat..

Add an I-phone into the mix, social media could now “ping” us, like an Amber Alert, demand our attention, which then be auctioned as commodity to ad sponsors (many of whom have to do-it-yourself ads). With scroll feature, a powerful “mainframe” in our pocket enables a digital deluge that flushes our brain at the touch of an app (the chips are ever smaller and always-on). It’s a new symbiotic relationship, this time, not the Media vs Politics, but Big Tech and us (Big Audience/Producer), endorphin pusher and users of virtual drugs (no beef, still salivate).

Before we know it, Web 2.0 has become an instrument of exploitation and extraction if we let them ( Harvard’s drop-outs have become digital colonialists, botnets our lords. Robot, the name for slave, now our master, seduces us and uses our “reputation” as influencer to spread fake news). Netizens (people and bots) now number in 4 to 5 billions, all function as news editors and distributors.

What to do? Boycotting and missing out? rationing our use and access? Calling out and contributing positive content to balance out addictive and toxic ” social “media”? Or becoming a Luddite?

With its speed, scale and scope, Facebook Nation is 2.5 Billion strong (equal to China and India combined). It is the news aggregator monopoly, richest in data-collection and manipulation. Memories from past posts, our quantified and edited selves all sorted, analyzed and stored in the cloud….this virtuous cycle keeps feeding itself propelled by Network Effect, pumping dopamine right into our neurons with positive reinforcement from “friends” and “bots” – knowing we’re social animals with soft spots for “fat and sugar” in our digital diet.

How come those Macedonia kids got so rich – 2016 Election, who enrich Ryan’s World with a hefty $30 Million in 2020?. Currently, Newsmax and Fox News anchors retracted their slandering of Dominion Voting Software (per anti-libel act). Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Apple and Amazon took a sharp turn by cutting off the Commander-in-Chief’s account and cohorts’ Parler.

Now I wish we were back in the cave, reading (or braille-reading) those paintings. Forget the “good” times in between. Those TV dinners tasted no good anyway. And did we really have a conversation in front of the tube? (think Rob Reiner and his father-in-law, Archie). We always succumb to selective memories (that radio days were the best – “FDR’s fire-side chat” during Pearl Harbor brought the country together against enemies, foreign or domestic i.e. Japanese-American.

We succumb to conformity ( that everyone watched M*A*S*H* and our friends share this, then it must be true) e.g. Gab and Telegram. We, to a final analysis, are our worst self-propagandist and self-hypnotist. We belong to a generation of narcissists, prisoners of our own device, whose glass cage is an equivalent of Narcissist’s reflecting pond. A young author even coined the term “trick mirror” to depict her growing-up digital.

I think the future is better, only if man and machine got along. But then, any choice we make comes at a price. Our first news carrier, a runner, paid for it dearly with his life as he delivered the news at the foot steps of Marathon.