• The medium may not be the message ...
• ... but it is certainly embedded in the structure of the message
• We invent our media in five distinct spheres of invention:
• Characteristics enable uses
• but use in the face of characteristics creates problems
• that are resolved in practices like
  • "identification/recognition"
  • handles
  • from fields
• This paper is exploring this path from characteristics to practice

Why Wiki Works

Davis Foulger

I am currently a Visiting Professor at Oswego State University: http://www.oswego.edu/~dfoulger, where I teach human communication. This year, my teaching focus is Interpersonal Communication and Communication Ethics. I'm broadly knowledgeable in the field, however, and if I'd taught at the University of Maryland this year (an option), I would have taught Communication Theory, Research Methodology, and Interpersonal Communication. My real interests (currently) are "Computer-Mediated Communication Systems" and the "Invention and Evolution of Communication Media".

I have a business, too: http://www.evolutionarymedia.com. It is not a coincidence that my business focuses on the things I am most interested in.

Of course, if you just want to know some random thing about me, you can always visit my home page: http://www.davis.foulger.net (a pointer to http://davis.foulger.info). Heck, you'll even find a little Java game there.

Davis Foulger

mailto:davis@foulger.info

Moral Question In Media

Note: This page was started with just the simple case and two questions as a demo of how a Wiki worked. The intent was to sell the idea of starting a seperate Wiki site for these kinds of cases. That sell job is still underway, and I've left the page here until I can get my own Wiki going. Unfortunately, this page has started a small furor on this Wiki because it is viewed as off topic and pedantic. Since I put it here, at least three other people appear to have added comments. That actually makes the demo better, and the comments are interesting, so I've left them. It remains my intent to move this page after I have my own wiki going.'' -- DavisFoulger

Demo: Suppose I post a simple ethics case. A television station is experiencing declining ratings in a competitive market. One day, by accident, the female anchor of the six o'clock news moves the wrong way, exposing a breast. Ratings go up, and the producers, catching on to the apparent correlation, encourage the newscaster to have more such accidents.

Questions:

     1 - How appropriate is it to try to improve the ratings of a news show
         by encouraging salacious content that has nothing to do with

         the news that is being reported?

I'm sorry, but what do you have against breasts? News shows are mindless pablum served to drooling thralls by the ?BrainlessBroadcastMedia. A bit of tit is much less salacious than endless film loops of religious loonies destroying great works of engineering, don't you think?

Remember, these folks are hired on the basis of their looks and voice. Their sole function is to deliver what is written by (one would hope) professionals. At least the BBC are honest about this and refer to their studio talent as "news readers." This may be true today, but there are still many people in the industry who entered the industry before this was true; e.g. the cast of 60 Minutes (?AmericanCulturalAssumption alert).

Personally, nothing, but different people have different ways of thinking about different things, and some of those opinions are important enough to pay attention to. That doesn't take anything away from the question of film loops of religious loonies. That is simply a different case with another set of questions.

All cases are independent in your mind? Nice set of compartments in there, must make morality very easy to discuss.

Certainly one discusses cases separately. Each case has a variety of issues associated with it, but the case is not the object, but rather a vehicle for exploring the issues and the ways in which different people can make different decisions based on how they prioritize those issues. The goal is to get people to do complex thinking, and the range of issues that can be applied to any given case are complex enough without complicating things still further with case collisions. That is not to say that case collisions don't happen in the real world or that you can't do colliding cases as well. I do. But the first problem is to encourage complex thinking and tolerant expression.

Next time you take a shower, look in the mirror. This is what incites you to moral outrage? A billion people on the planet can't read and don't have easy access to fresh water or a telephone, species extinctions are proceeding at 10,000 times the rate of a century ago, and you're up in arms about a picture of a nipple? What the hell is wrong with you? Different people are outraged by different things. What is the problem with that? Vive le difference, even when the things that other people are outraged over seem trivial to me. The problem is that television continues to focus the minds of the people on trivialities while the real threats to their existence are paltrified via praise by faint damnattion(http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PraiseByFaintDamnation).

Television is simply a mass entertainment media. People had the same complaints about Broadway shows 100 years ago. I understand the point, but I don't really believe the sky is falling.

 2 - How should the news anchor respond in this situation? What effect 
      will various choices have for her career

"News anchor"s will do anything for a buck. And what authority except for an old-lady's knitting circle will give a damn?

Perhaps some news anchors will do anything for a buck. I'm sure that's not a universal, and that it need not remain one to the extent that it is. The same goes for old-lady's knitting circles (and investment clubs).

Of course it's universal. They read what they're given to read by their producers. Their producers do what they're told to do by their management. And their management are running a corpocratic business the same as any other business. You sit in your ivory tower and imagine that things are otherwise. You claim to be a serious researcher into these matters - why can't you present some evidence instead of this pusillanimous "perhaps"?

I don't think you have any more evidence than I do, but I do in fact know of cases of journalists moving on instead of giving in. It is not unheard of. Unfortunately, perhsps, nobody keeps statistics on such things. And actually, I don't claim to be a serious researcher on such matters. I am simply acting, based on 18 years of computer industry experience and additional experience in research design and statistics, as a consultant to a group that is serious about their research on such matters. My serious research is on computer-mediated systems and the ways in which media are invented and evolved. The quality of that research is up to others to evaluate, but I've been happy with the feedback so far. I'd prefer to stick with issues of reason rather than personalities.

Why don't you try turning off your TV and making a genuine moral inquiry for a change? This page is simply more evidence that ?VideoAddiction attacks the viewer's faculty of critical thought.

I get so tired of seeing the word addiction applied to things that it has absolutely no relationship to. Saying a person is video addicted is like saying they are sex addicted or food addicted or work addicted or face-to-face interaction addicted (I've never heard this one, but we spend more time in this medium than any other, so why not). Yes, most of us mix face-to-face communication, food, sex, work, and entertainment (often via video) in creating the tapestry of our lives). Some people may overdo one or another of these, but most mix all in moderation, and even those who overdo one or another can (and often do, at least for short periods) change to a different pattern without going into clinical withdrawl. Sometimes metaphors are complete crap. Most addiction metaphors fall in that category.

You can't argue the point seriously, so you simply call the argument "crap"? A TV professor indeed. Addiction is a self-reinforcing behavior with harmful side effects. The physical effects of video addiction (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PhysicalEffectsOfVideoAddiction) are quite obvious, but plainly TV is psychologically addictive as well. TV stultifies its addicts' ability to relate directly to others and to think clearly for themselves. Simultaneously it consumes the time they could spend remediating this damage, while supplementing their psyches with corporate-sponsored porridge. The result is individuals who create nothing novel, families who relate to one another at only the most superfluous level, and cultures with an inability to support diversity of opinion. And, perhaps, academics who become unable to discuss anything except such imaginary boojums as the moral dimension of a nipple ...

What was there to respond to. I do have my television off almost all the time. Some weeks my viewing goes all the way to four hours, and I am almost always doing something else (surfing, reading, doing research, writing, grading papers, holding significant others) when I do so. You didn't know that, but made other assumptions anyway. I decided that I would respond to your your use of flawed addiction metaphors rather than respond to your erroneous assumptions about me.

I have read much of the work on the effects of television, at least in summary form. Much of that work has appeared first in Journal of Communication (and almost all shows up in summary form there). I've been a subscriber and/or regular reader for over 25 years now. I've talked to George Gerbner (probably the leading light in television effects research over the last 40 years and a long running editor of JofC), among others, about that work. I can't disagree with many of the findings, but often find that the findings are based on inadequate controls and inadequate consideration of obviously parallel situations.

Children under two probably are damaged when overexposed to television. They are probably similarly damaged by overexposure to empty cribs in empty rooms. The real issue, one suspects, is inadequate attention from adults, but this, while obviously as true to the situations reported as overexposure to television, is not tested or mentioned in these studies, even when a huge control population of crib damaged children can be found in parts of Eastern Europe.

People who spend an excessive number of hours watching TV (and not exercising) are prone to overweight. But I didn't get my overweight watching TV. I got mine programming for a living (which also entails spending excessive hours sitting, usually surrounded by nothing better to eat than candy bars and soda). A fair number of pre-television scholars got their overweight from spending excessive hours sitting in libraries reading. And one suspects that excessive numbers of hours sitting in cars driving is at least as an important contributor to adult obesity as television viewing is. Oddly, I don't see CDC campaigns against programming or excessive driving. I also don't see historical comparisons to the comparable effects associated with "excessive reading" (and I know there is really no such thing; that the real issue is excessive sitting).

TV has recently been joined by another major locus of context-free research, cell phone use while driving. I don't disagree that talking on a cell phone may be a distraction to drivers. I just don't see how it is any bigger a distraction than talking to a passenger sitting next to you is. Odd that I don't see any research being done on the dangers of talkative passengers or any laws being drafted to make it illegal for drivers to talk to their passengers.

An interesting nuance in the history of media is the systematic demonization of highly popular new media for their negative effects (physical, moral, or otherwise). These new media inevitably displace, to some extent, older, once demonized media, that then rise, phoenixlike, to respectability. Movies made live theater respectable. Television made movies respectable. Comic books made juvenile novels respectable. Horror Comics made Superhero comics respectable. Mad Magazine and its clones made horror comics respectable. Rock and Roll made Jazz respectable. Cellular phones are probably making pay phones respectable. Instant messenging will probably make something (maybe straight face-to-face gossip) respectable. The question I ask is "what would make television respectable?" Video games? Holodecks? I'm sure it will be something.

Suicide On Childrens Television

DavisFoulger's CommunicationEthics? class may collaboratively edit a case study here, with work ending no later than Thursday, October 11. The case study involves some newsroom staff at a collection of television stations who interrupted afternoon children's programming to broadcast what turned out to me a nut committing suicide (they didn't know that, of course, until the nut blew his brains out, but its not like he didn't set himself on fire and consider jumping off a bridge first).

Student Work Goes Here

Wiki Community Commentary Goes Here

I was disappointed to find an argument instead of content [on the original Wiki page]. But I agree that it's "off topic" for [the original] wiki. May I suggest posting to http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyClublet? See http://clublet.com/c/c/why?CultureAndPoliticsRoadmap -- ?JeffGrigg

[But that's not a good idea if permanence is not wanted. Could use ?AndStuffWiki, where a page is removed if left empty for a couple of weeks.]

More Background

DavisFoulger has invited (a few of) his students to discuss suicide here. In the spirit of reciprocity I invite all (ok, better just a few) wiki readers to attend his classes and discuss computer programming there. -- ?WardCunningham

Where is his class, and at what time does it meet? Care to provide driving instructions to it?

To clarify Ward's statement. I enabled four students to collaboratively edit a document here. The four students are not my whole class, but fair is fair, and I will certainly try to enable Ward's invitation.

I teach my classes at Oswego State University, located in Oswego, NY (about an hour from Rochester, NY). This particular class meets in Lanigan 208 at 2:20PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Directions and site maps are available on the SUNY Oswego Web site (http://www.oswego.edu). As I have spent more of my life programming than doing anything else but sleep, listen, and perhaps interact interpersonally, I have already discussed programming in this class in a limited way. It has been very limited, as it is a course in "Communication Ethics", but I'm sure there will be no harm in adding some additional discussion on the topic.

If one or more here would like to join that class to discuss programming and/or my faux paux on this Wiki, I might suggest coming on December 6, when we will be discussing Ethics and "new media technology". Perhaps, on that date, you can join us in constructing and discussing a case relating to "the informal rules of collaborative discussion spaces and their inadvertant violation." If you are serious about coming, please e-mail me in advance at mailto:davis@evolutionarymedia.com so I can be sure to have adequate seating. I can probably manage up to about eight guests without changing rooms.

My apologies for violating the rules of this Wiki, Yes, I know that http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks specifically says that there are no rules. I knew better than to believe that statement, but fell into its trap anyway. There are always informal rules in communication media, even when the formal rule is that there are no rules. I learned that when I, like Ward (see http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WardAtIbm ), worked at IBM and was (pretty much as a volunteer) responsible for much of the company's computer-mediated discussion facilities. The problem with unstated rules, usually, is learning them. Call this a crash reminder of what I had observed in previous research.

I had mistakenly thought, after reading the invitations on the WelcomeVisitors and related pages, that it would be OK to experiment a little here while I worked out the mechanics of setting up my own server. I am working on that as time allows, have much enjoyed reading Bo and Ward's "The Wiki Way" as a part of the process, and probably would have it running already if I hadn't hit some minor technical problems with Perl execution on the Sun box my Oswego web materials are located on.

This particular experiment (this page) was a response to an immediate problem four of my students are having. They are having trouble meeting to write their "case study", at least in part because one group member is party to a case that is currently being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court and is therefore constantly out of town. The circumstance is an unusual one, and I thought that Wiki collaborative discussion and composition might help. Hence I created this page here, with absolutely no idea of how offensive the local Wiki community would find the idea. I am actively working on setting up my own Wiki server and promise to go away as quietly as you folks will allow. In the meantime, presuming this discussion hasn't scared them off, I hope you will tolerate my four students in the spirit your welcome pages suggest. Again, I apologize for having violated your community. -- DavisFoulger

You didn't so much violate the community as piss off the http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?RecentChangesJunkies.

[Using the "minor edits" feature was suggested, but it would have been entirely inappropriate. -- ?JeffGrigg]

See also http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CommitSuicide, http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?MoralQuestionInMedia, http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiConsensus, http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?SocialAcceptabilityOfWikiVandalism