Narrowcasting And The Internet

Narrowcasting can be defined as the process of aiming a radio or TV program or programming at a specific, limited audience or consumer market. While it is a term that is applied to traditional media, Noah Richler suggests in an interesting article in today's Star that increasingly, the Internet, by the choices people make, is quickly becoming a medium that is narrowing, not expanding, our capacity for critical thought.

While his article perhaps does not constitute a fresh insight, Richler points out that we are becoming increasingly susceptible to what he calls the tyranny of measurement, our propensity toward counting hits and likes as the barometer of just about everything we do now. In other words, we are letting what we read, and the sites we visit, be inordinately influenced by how many 'likes' a Facebook posting may have, how many 'hits' an article gets, etc., thereby reducing the marketplace of ideas to, well, a marketplace driven by the force of popularity.

Richler points out that the arbiters of ideas worth pursuing formerly had certain criteria by which things were evaluated and deemed worthy. Although now the process may be much more democratic in a sense, choices are now influenced by what he calls a pendulum of approval that has swung extremely towards that which is vindicated by the masses.

We are living in a period of gross aberration marked by a giddy counting that has seen us forget other ways to calibrate our common sense. We post a picture to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, and count the number of “Likes” and “Retweets” and “Comments” and compare.

The barometer is instant, just as it is for companies evaluating the content of their websites with their own easily tabulated scale of hits, or for political parties reneging on a lot of good ideas that, not so easily enumerated, are of less worth in the pursuit of power.

Such a trend can have insidious effects:

When it comes to the news, a smaller number of stories garner ever more massive amounts of attention before the reverb to which our own viral sharing pushes us to forget them. And, in the political sphere, the web’s herding of us into like-minded crowds means that we ignore even the smallest of contradictory arguments and conduct ourselves as ideologues.

Richler links the tyranny of numbers to something that we are all familiar with:

This tyranny of numbers, distracting from more far-sighted views, goes hand in hand with the “selective exposure” that the Internet encourages.

The Internet’s illusion of proximity to the like-minded, no matter how dispersed — the fellowship it creates in the virtual sphere that affects our behaviour in the real one — is one of its most distinctive properties. In the digital age, we gather all too easily alongside those whose messages are consonant with our own.

I think we all know how the verification and validation of our own views and philosophies is made easy by the Internet. For example, while I read a number of progressive blogs, it is rare for me to seek out a conservative one, although I justify it to myself by asserting that there are very few of the latter worth reading, given their proclivity for screeds, rants, and character denigration. But is that simply a comforting excuse for me to be less expansive in my perspectives?

Richler has much more to say in this provocative article; you can read it in full here.

Domestic Abuse?

Anyone who has experience with the elderly, be they grandparents, parents, or extended family members, knows that their medical needs are often complex, and their isolation profound. As we age, there is no assurance that despite our best efforts to keep healthy and vigorous, we will not find ourselves in the position of needing a great deal of help someday.

During my mother's protracted final illness, the last two years of which were spent at home under the loving ministrations of my father, home care became an essential part of their daily routine. For about an hour-and-a-half both in the morning and the evening, a personal support worker (PSW) tended to my mother's needs. Whenever I was there during one of her visits, I couldn't help but notice the grace, kindness and patience with which she carried out her duties. It is a job few would envy.

And yet, despite the vital role such personnel play in the lives of so many, they are woefully underpaid and unappreciated by the Ontario government, which is responsible for setting their rates of remuneration. Like so much else, it would seem that their promotion of home care as a viable alternative to hospitalization and long-term care of the elderly is so much blather and rhetoric, given their reluctance to properly fund and remunerate the workers who, in a non-unionized environment, make a minimum wage of 12.50 an hour, a rate the government established in 2006. Many such workers receive no benefits and are employed only part-time.

To get a better picture of what many would consider an exploited class of worker, I strongly encourage you to take a look at an article written by a PSW, Charmaine Kelegan, in today's Star.

After reading the piece, I suspect most would agree that it is an underpaid and underappreciated job, but one vital to our society.

So Much For Academic Freedom

You only have to watch the first two minutes of this video to see the unhealthy and evil influence of the Koch brothers. The video also helps demonstrate why I love Rachel Maddow.

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I Think We Saw This Coming

Given the severity of this winter season, it was only a matter of time before the usual right-wing blowhards weighed in with their 'wisdom.' Led by Donald Trump, they are all reassuring us that the cold, wind, and snow many of us are contending with definitively prove climate change to be a hoax.

Here is the latest declaration from the great deluded one:

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice

I find myself nostalgic for the time when the public strutting of ignorance and stupidity was something to be embarrassed about, not trumpeted.

A Friday Evening Reflection

Hmmm. I can think of some who might resist this perspective:

“God reveals himself not as one who stands above and who dominates the universe, but as He who lowers himself. It means that to be like Him, we do not have to place ourselves above the others, but come down, come down and serve them, become small among the small, and poor among the poor.”

- Pope Francis, December 2013

Harper's New Year's Resolution?

Thanks to the Salamander for alerting me to this tweet from Stephen Lautens:

Mandatory Voting And Social Cohesion

The Toronto Star recently featured the 2013 Atkinson Series: Me, You, Us, journalist and author Michael Valpy’s investigation into social cohesion in Canada — what binds us together, what pulls us apart.

In its final installment, given the decline in voter turnout, one of the suggestions put forth to advance the cause of social cohesion was mandatory voting. It is a notion that I don't personally favour, my reasoning being perhaps reductionist and simplistic: in a mandatory system, the element of resentment would be strong, and some would blithely check off the first name on the ballot just to get out of the polling station. An uninformed vote (and yes,I know there are all ready a lot of them) is worse than no vote, in my view.

Two letters from Star readers offer some interesting perspective on the problems extant in today's democracies:


Fixing the tears in our social fabric, Dec. 22

It isn’t young people not voting that’s pushing democratic legitimacy to a crisis stage, it’s the systemic failure of the political class to address our problems.

Since the triumph of global capital after the fall of the Soviet Union, all political parties fell in line with the neoliberal narrative. Free trade (really a bill of rights for corporations), privatization, offshoring, destruction of the social safety net, ad nauseam, became the bedrock of every political party.
It’s almost funny watching the Liberals and NDP desperately trying to find an issue they disagree with the Tories on. It’s a class consensus. By its nature it excludes an increasing majority.

Michael Valpy’s “solution” of mandatory voting is a pathetic attempt to ignore the cause of this democratic crisis and shoot the messengers. We should be demanding that our political class give us something substantive to vote for.

John Williams, Toronto

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The following letter makes reference to a piece that George Monbiot wrote for The Guardian. If interested, you can read it here.

Voting is not the root cause of our crisis, but out of control corporate power may well be. George Monbiot, in the Guardian, makes this case in, “Nothing will change until we confront the real sources of power.”

Monbiot begins, “It’s the reason for the collapse of democratic choice. It’s the source of our growing disillusionment with politics. It’s the great unmentionable. Corporate Power. The media will scarcely whisper its name. It is howlingly absent from parliamentary debates.

“Until we name it and confront it, politics is a waste of time. The political role of corporation is generally interpreted as that of lobbyists, seeking to influence government policy. In reality they belong on the inside. They are part of the nexus of power that creates policy. They face no significant resistance from either the government or opposition, as their interests have been woven into the fabric of all three main parties.”

Monbiot describes the U.K. situation and supports his views with 15 listed references. He ends with, “So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics,” and “when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the three main parties stand and watch as public services are divided up by a grubby cabal privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”

The U.K. situation described by Monbiot is not unique; it is the same for most countries.

Frank Panetta, Welland