Archive for January 7th, 2012
Our yearning for The Absolute survived Temples and religions?
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 7, 2012
Our yearning for The Absolute survived Temples and religions?
The French author Cioran said to late famous Argentine author Ernesto Sabato: “We can snuff out almost everything in mankind, except the yearning for The Absolute. This need in man will survive Temples and religions…” I think that religions were instituted and their sort of temples were beautifully erected since time immemorial in order to respond to man’s yearning for The absolute. ” In sadness, anything is transformed into a soul”
The poet Cesar Vallejo wrote something to this effect: “Life is a series of cruel and harsh blows: God’ Hate striking again and again…” I think this most determined power has learned from mankind’s behaviors and feedback that the only way to retain man’s attention is to reach him through personal calamities
The poet clergyman Hugo Mujica wrote: “In the deepest of our emotions there are no roots: Simply totally uprooted and torn off feelings…” I guess that’s the case of people verging into senility: They tend to return to locations where they first and sincerely asked themselves agonizing questions on the existence…
The painter Goya wrote: “The dreams of reason generate monsters…” Our back to the wall in this difficult decade, where objective reasoning, sciences, (and technologies put on the market without prior evaluation and testing for the health, safety, and mental consequences to users) are unable to respond adequately to the growing stagnated decisions for resolving mankind and nature survival, we keep wondering: “How can we overcome those multiple problems that require international cooperation and serious communication of our anxieties?
The successive genocides perpetrated by almost every society in the last century, and still going on in many part around the world, confirm Elie Wisel claim: “Genocides do not just physical kill people, but mainly the Idea of Humanity…” Perpetual genocide tendencies let us start doubting Goethe statement: “Humanity will finally triumph…” That was a plausibility in the 18th romantic century: Can it be believable in this totally materialistic, “just me”, liberal capitalism ideology and system?
In his book “Before the End”, Ernesto Sabato recounted this event: “I took the train, and a thin and frail woman sat and started playing a mournful melody on her accordion. She was one of these Romanian refugees; she could be from Albania, Serbia…: No homeland, no family, no relatives…One of the millions in errancy around the world, kicked out of their lands, villages, culture, roots…These refugees know without any doubt that they are not counted in history, they are not even included in statistics or falling within an ideological slot…The skinny woman stepped down to hop into another train, and I noticed the baby-girl on her back, looking at me with the saddest of eyes…”
All these indigenous Indians in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile…), the outcast who had no other recourse but to flock to major cities, uprooted from their natural environment, living in favella and shanty-towns, victims of recurring genocides, epidemics…Those outcast of captives in cities, barely surviving, having lost their former dignity and rituals…The harmony between mankind and the cosmos has been broken down. To be replaced by what? Industrial agribusinesses? Technologies of the new barbarians?
Outcasts around the world who can no longer hope for protection in the justice systems: Police forces breaking sit-ins and dumping the workers’ hot soup in the street on cold nights…
How can we improve Truth, Transparency, Ethical and Moral incentives in News Media?
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 7, 2012
How can we improve Truth, Transparency, Ethical and Moral incentives in News Media?
Are financial and economic interests of news companies the right incentives to generate truthful news?
Should transparent news media engage in criticizing the elite political class?
Doesn´t society deserves Non-Profit-Foundations media system built on ethical and moral incentives?
Do we need a new Media-Reformed system if a more sustainable and peaceful global world is to be built? Do we need a Media-Reform as we need a Banking-Reform?
How can Social Media improve Truth in the News?
Is Policy Action needed to stop the Media System of Murdoch or Berlusconi?
What are the risks in building transparency in news media?
My concern is: How could social news media successfully counter the traditional big news media support of government preemptive war schemes for the benefit of the elite richest class?
Paul Lewis vouched for the benefits of citizen reporters providing independent reality bytes to his newspaper. Lewis could create a new picture of reality which was closer to truth than the police stories using the technical opportunities of Social Media: His newspaper had an interest to publish the social-media-reality.
The international news media such Murdoch and Berlusconi Type of Media use the same technology to distort reality and to create “their” puzzle of reality which sells best. For example, News Corp. have hacked in mobile phones and even mailboxes of a dead child. Such Media systems have vested interests in Billions per year – it is in their best interest to have news for their best business. News Corp. just lost $738 Million of earnings after the successive scandals.
TED e-book of Laura Miller “Media Makeover: Improving The News One Click At a Time” has generated many responses. People of expressed their interest in having more transparency in the news. People are concerned about who is influencing the news (powerful people and organizations). People are concerned that the news is just one big echo chamber and they are overall less trusting of media.
What would you like to see in a more transparent media? What would you know more about that you don’t know now?
People would like to know more about the background of the reporters telling the stories. Others have mentioned the desire to see more about those quoted in the stories.
Transparency is about understanding where something starts, what are the connections to it, who is influencing it, and how it is evolving.
What are your wishes in order to fulfill transparency in news media?
Since the new technologies enable customers to become producers of news, it is tantamount to develop community-based news media linked to various centers around the globe for instant transmission of community produced news.
Clay Shirky explained the process of this new revolution in social mass media:
First big media change: Many-to-many pattern conversation.
“The tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted. Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we’re all in this together.
The revolution landscape in media history had overcome four periods in the last 500 years: Starting with the printing press, to two-ways conversational media (phone, telegraph…), recorded media (photos, recorded sound, movies…), electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air (radio and television…)
It turned out that the media that is good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. And the media that’s good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations. Clay said: “If you want to have a conversation in this world, you have it with one other person. If you want to address a group, you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group,whether you’re doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press. That was the media landscape as we had it in the twentieth century. The Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern; a media natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations. That’s one of the big changes.
The second big media change: Every medium is right next door to every other medium
As all media gets digitized, the Internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media: Phone calls migrate to the Internet, magazines migrate to the Internet, movies migrate to the Internet. Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination. Groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well.
The third big media change: Audience can be producers and not just consumers.
Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment – phones, computers – let you consume and produce. It’s as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free. It’s like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons.
And it’s not just Internet or no Internet. We’ve had the Internet in its public form for almost 20 years now, and it’s still changing as the media becomes more social. It’s still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the Internet well.
For example, last May, China in the Sichuan province had a 7.9 magnitude earthquake with massive destruction in a wide area. People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of buildings.They were taking videos of buildings shaking. They were uploading it to QQ, China’s largest Internet service. They were Twittering it.
As the quake was happening, the news was reported. And because of the social connections, Chinese students coming elsewhere, and going to school, or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China – there were people listening all over the world, hearing this news. The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter.Twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to read. The last time China had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened.
People began to figure out, in the Sichuan Provence, that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed during this school day, is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those building to be built to less than code. And so they started, the citizen journalists started reporting that as well. A local official literally prostrated himself in the street, in front of these protesters, in order to get them to go away. Essentially to say: “We will do anything to placate you, just please stop protesting in public.”
The Chinese government responded by installing the Great Firewall of China to manage Internet censorship in the world. This Great Firewall of China was successful for a while. Why? This censorship scheme assumes four parameters for its set of observation points: 1) that media is produced by professionals; 2) it mostly comes in from the outside world; 3) it comes in relatively sparse chunks, and 4) it comes in relatively slowly.
This strategy crumbled within a dozen years as a the consumers of news produced their media locally. It was produced by amateurs. It was produced quickly. And it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared. And the Chinese government had no other recourse but to shutting down access to Twitter.
The classic twentieth century media process was: Bundle up the message. Send the same message to everybody. National message. Targeted individuals. Relatively sparse number of producers. Very expensive process to allow vigorous many competitors. All of that is on the verge to be over.
We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. The audience can talk back. And that’s a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do.
There is this new set of facts: 1) People are no longer disconnected from each other, 2) former consumers are now producers, 3) the audience can talk directly to one another. Consequently, there is a lot more amateurs than professionals, and the size of the network is huge and since the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants then, the people’s network is growing very large.
As consumers/producers of news media become more professionals, it is unlikely that a superpower will blackmail major traditional news media into cowering to government preemptive war schemes for the benefit of the elite richest class.
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