for - definition - the spectacle - context - the society of the spectacle - cacooning - the spectacle - social media - the spectacle

definition - the spectacle - context - the society of the spectacle - A society where images presented by mass media / mass entertainment not only dominate - but replaces real experiences with a superficial reality that is - focused on appearances designed primarily to distract people from reality - This ultimately disconnects them from - themselves and - those around them

comment - How much does our interaction with virtual reality of - written symbols - audio - video - two dimensional images - derived from our screens both large and small affect our direct experience of life? - When people are distracted by such manufactured entertainment, they have less time to devote to important issues and connecting with real people - We can sit for hours in social isolation, ignoring our bodies need for exercise and our emotional need for real social connection - We can ignore the real crisis going on in the world and instead numb ourselves out with contrived entertainment

American AI researcher and humanities professor known for critiques of technology.

refers to how social theories and scientific approaches can enhance one another, leading to a more nuanced understanding of both.

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.

Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

Evershed, N. (n.d.). The simple numbers every government should use to fight anti-vaccine misinformation. The Guardian. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/ng-interactive/2022/jan/28/the-simple-numbers-every-government-should-use-to-fight-anti-vaccine-misinformation

Nast, C. (2022, January 15). Do the Omicron Numbers Mean What We Think They Mean? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/do-the-omicron-numbers-mean-what-we-think-they-mean

The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.

This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

‘Error in judgement’: CBC Edmonton regrets mannequin’s use in COVID-19 news report | National Post. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/error-in-judgement-cbc-edmonton-regrets-mannequins-use-in-covid-19-news-report?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1634226060-1

Had I known about Hypothesis at the time of my collaboration with Ilaria Forte, I likely would have suggested this as a tool for documenting the stream of consciousness, collecting stories in the context of the media that people are experiencing on the web.

Buckee, C., Noor, A., & Sattenspiel, L. (2021). Thinking clearly about social aspects of infectious disease transmission. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03694-x

Moscrop, A., Ziebland, S., Bloch, G., & Iraola, J. R. (2020). If social determinants of health are so important, shouldn’t we ask patients about them? BMJ, 371, m4150. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4150

Too much of modern social networking suffers from this fabric of trust and rampant context collapse. How can we improve on these looking forward?

These are pieces which the IndieWeb should endeavor to experiment in and attempt to fix. Though I will admit that pieces of the IndieWeb layers on top of platforms like WordPress can help to mitigate some context collapse and aggregate social interactions better. (eg: reply context and POSSE)

Fareri, Dominic S., Joanne Stasiak, and Peter Sokol-Hessner. ‘Choosing for Another: Social Context Changes Dissociable Computational Mechanisms of Risky Decision-Making’, 21 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dr42a.

Krueger, D., Uhlig, H., & Xie, T. (2020). Macroeconomic Dynamics and Reallocation in an Epidemic (Working Paper No. 27047; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27047

Lagnado, D. (2020 April 27). What if.... Changing Minds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W11CRLjRgo&app=desktop

This is a valid concern that needs to be addressed. While some engineers certainly do use IRB for their projects, it is not nearly as common as it should be.

The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.

I find that using Webmentions on my site adds a lot of value because it brings all the conversation back to my site, where it really should be for more context.