40-50 Years ago you had so search hard to find really stupid people in the media, now they pop up all the time. What happened ?
The Badger - WUWT comment
If anything happened then perhaps it was inevitable. Many of us will know what an availability cascade is, but
for those who don’t this is how University of Chicago Law School explains it.
An availability
cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which
an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception
increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.
For an example of availability, suppose you are asked ‘who
is the most beautiful woman in the world?’ It is likely that a range of celebrity
candidates will come to mind and this is what is meant by ‘availability’. Our responses
tend to cluster around what is publicly available.
A cascade is obvious, so an availability cascade occurs when
an issue hits the headlines, becomes available to a large number of people and gains
self-reinforcing traction. We select from what is available and the media
create both the availability and the cascades because it is their business to do
so.
Obviously availability cascades are an unreliable window on
the real world but they dominate the media for equally obvious reasons - to
have public debates we must direct our attention to the same issues.
Unfortunately that requirement is wide open to manipulation and is bound to
limit the range and quality of any public debate. Also obvious.
For example - as the BBC produces daily news shows
it has to use availability cascades. Not entirely because it can slip in stories about shortages of elk meat in Siberia or a unicycling plumber, but in
the main its news has to be drawn from what is available and currently
cascading. Apart from a few exclusives it cannot report major news items which avoid
availability cascades because to a large extent availability cascades are the news.
Whatever the BBC adopts as its ethical pretensions, this is
bound to lead to biased reporting and worse. Availability cascades do not do nuances,
uncertainty or detail because that would interfere with the cascade. Even basic
veracity may interfere. News outlets are biased because they have to
be, because bias is a feature of the game, because it embodies an aspect of
what we are when we go public.
3 comments:
The Mendicant Orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans were very good at this. As were the Premonstratensians in France, and I once went to a European Conference at one of their old places. Sadly, we have the media and celebrities today, nowhere near as good or reliable.
It's much easier to live a pleasant life by avoiding the 'media' for as long as possible.
Luckily I'm old enough to care very little for celebrity deployment, and while it is necessary occasionally to catch up on the news, unfortunately live from the BBC but from more enlightening websites etc., I really wander as a cloud most days...
Demetrius - the media and celebrities today have the exposure though, the drip, drip, drip of endless repetition.
Scrobs - I think you are right. I like keeping tabs on the news but often wonder if I'd be better off ignoring it. A habit I suppose.
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