Categories
culture

Misinformation: Partisan Enigmas

We have inadvertently painted ourselves into an unexpected corner here. I admire any and all attempts to ameliorate the parlous situation that contemporary media and communication networks find themselves in but there is something of an irreducible enigma of dissonant complexity that we are as yet unable to unambiguously identify, let alone resolve by seeding […]

Categories
Philosophy

War

Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]

Categories
technology

Information Technology is Implicitly Insecure

The discussion that no one appears willing to have is that from the very inception of these information technologies, doubt and uncertainty has been endemic and irreducible. Turing’s proof of the implicit undecidability of computation took its recursive cues from Gödel’s prime number shenanigans in the Incompleteness proof. These systems are first and foremost open […]

Categories
Philosophy

Facebook is Dangerous

Context: Facebook blocks Australian users from viewing or sharing news I have not used Facebook for years and it is not at all missed. It says a lot for just how rapidly and reflexively people come to depend on the integrated communications systems of “social networks” that the threat of removing access to algorithmically-shaped biases […]

Categories
Philosophy

Digital Media: It was Never about Truth…

These information environments are biased towards the accelerated throughput and bandwidth of data, largely blind to truth values. The self-propagating gestalt of integrated digital information systems appear to require this constant throughput to avoid over-extension and self-gravitational collapse. It is something of a constant back-filling and hyper-inflating referential effervescence of naked data, sans semantics or […]

Categories
Philosophy

Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution

Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems: • social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels – not to mention governments – are forced to contort themselves and their narratives […]

Categories
culture narrative Psychology

The Psychological Vacuum of Games

I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the […]

Categories
communication culture technology

Engaging Fake News: Information Security, Journalism and Artificial Intelligence

Here is some interesting content on the topic of identifying fake news and media content Verifying online information: The absolute essentials. Related to this – AI is rapidly becoming proficient at generating compelling, targeted falsehoods and dissimulating sources across diverse media artefacts, channels and contexts.  In information security there is a turn towards entirely automated […]

Categories
culture

Keeping it Simple: Communication Breakdown

In the sphere of information replication and mass communication, those messages which most succinctly and concisely convey meaning tend to be those which are most successful in self-propagation, regardless of the relationship of those messages to truth or fact.