My Irony Detector Just Overheated.

First, watch this:



Now, watch this:



The first video, found here, is a piece directed by Bucknell English/Film prof Eric Faden, cosponsored by the Media Education Foundation and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project. The second is a short student film co-directed by friends of a friend and released on Youtube over a year ago. Cory Doctorow is hailing Faden's piece as "the most amazing video mashup I've ever seen," but the similarities to the earlier film are too striking to ignore. Even the names are nearly identical—"A Fair(y) Use Tale" vs. "Fairy Use." Doctorow's post makes it sound like the Faden is of relatively recent vintage. I'll look into this further and post updates if I find any clarifying information.

Better Dead Than Politically Inconvenient

File this one under "if you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention":

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.

I don't have any hard data to back up this assumption, but it's probably pretty rare that such a blatant indicator of regulatory capture would actually see the light of day. Kudos to the insider that notified senator Boxer—the FCC's been backsliding for years now (from allowing the pet peeves of one special-interest group to drive much of its punitive behavior to punting on investigating the NSA wiretapping situation to dragging its feet on VNR enforcement) and the American public need to understand how its failures affect their media options.

Open Secrets of Chinese Mind Control

The Chinese government's propaganda artifacts have never needed to incorporate much subtlety—after all, when you exercise complete control over most forms of media, as the state did until recently, there's not much need to camouflage your intentions. Still, I couldn't help but be taken aback by this recent report:

BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.

Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950’s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s economic and political goals.

[ . . . ]

“Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity,” said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University. “The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today.”

It's interesting to me that although most educated Americans, if pressed, would admit that our public-school history curricula serve a similar purpose, it'd be tough to find anyone trumpeting that fact to major news outlets in national education articles. We prefer to operate under the fiction that the histories we learn in school are technocratically detached from political imperatives, or at least to keep quiet about it in polite conversation, while the Chinese have no problem owning up to their intentions. The policy itself is a problem, since controlling what constitutes people's stock of background knowledge is a time-honored propaganda technique in authoritarian states (it's tougher in the US, since the state doesn't control the media and "free speech" is, though expensive, still technically free). However, the fact that the authorities are so up-front about what they're doing makes it that much easier to expose and oppose.

There are at least two conditions that must obtain to prevent governments from secretly or openly foreclosing political alternatives in the minds of their peoples: 1) alternative media sources must be allowed to promulgate ideas without fear of prior restraint, and 2) the people must never under any circumstances be allowed to forget the failures, transgressions, atrocities, and falsehoods of the powers-that-be. China's matter-of-factness about the reasons behind its efforts to mutilate its own national history betrays a utilitarian view of human beings as mere means, and the relative lack of sanctioned information alternatives makes the situation even worse. We can only hope that the Internet's inherent tendencies toward knowledge-promiscuity will continue to outflank the elite censors and plant the seeds of communication policy liberalization.

A Basic Taxonomy of Spin

Not that I have the scientific data to back this assertion up, but at least Geoffrey Nunberg agrees with me that people are generally pretty good at detecting when someone's trying to spin them. Phrases such as "friendly fire" and "death tax" unapologetically advertise their whitewashing functions, and whether audiences agree with the underlying issue positions or not, they can tell persuasive maneuvers are afoot.

Or are they?

Look at those two phrases again—do they really serve the same function? Let's consider "friendly fire" first. One of its more obvious functions is to try to soften the emotional impact of soldier(s) accidentally wounding or killing their comrades, insofar as words can accomplish such a task. But a brief examination of the phrase's orgins reveals that it also marks a very technical distinction as well: "friendly fire," defined in opposition to "enemy fire," serves to indicate the origins of the attack. The euphemistic dirty work the term performs is clear, as is the fact that it makes no attempt to convince listeners that its referent is in any way acceptable. "Friendly fire" does sound less blameworthy than its opposite, but this is appropriate given the act's accidental nature. None of this is to say that the term doesn't perform a perception management function—it certainly does, but the function is anesthetic rather than persuasive. When people fully understand the nature of a sufficiently egregious referent, no amount of lexical legerdemain can stem the inevitable torrent of condemnation.

We might call talking points of this type "low-controversy" spin, because the fact that no one disputes the referent's atrocity means that all that's left for the message to do is palliate the mind. "Ethnic cleansing" is a similar example, one which Steven Poole examines at length in his recent book Unspeak. Much of Poole's analysis focuses on the phrase's diplomatic consequences, such as the fact that applying the more precise and visceral term "genocide" to what was going on in the Balkans during the mid-90s would have enjoined Western signatories to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention to intervene. He laces the entire discussion with a moralistic disgust over the metaphorical equation of ethnically-targeted massacre with "cleansing," as though the victims were nothing more than germs to be blithely scrubbed away. However, as is perhaps understandable in a non-academic work, Poole fails to investigate empirically the question of the phrase's effect on public-opinion: does it in and of itself make people less likely to condemn an act than the label "genocide"? I would hypothesize that "ethnic cleansing" would only be able to do so to the extent that it can ambiguate its referent acts. If "ethnic cleansing" is popularly understood as a catchall that may in any given instance refer to displacement, imprisonment, abduction, and/or mass murder, the resulting ambiguity might very well make crimes so designated appear less serious than those called "genocide." On the other hand, if most people interpret it as a mere synonym or euphemism for "genocide," it probably won't do much to modulate their perceptions one way or the other (aside from continuing to incense those like Poole who find semantic attempts to ameliorate crimes against humanity reprehensible). Until someone does the data collection, we'll never know which is the case.

In contrast to low-controversy spin, words and phrases such as "death tax" and "pro-life" are designed toward very different ends. Their users intend to convince audiences to judge their referents as laudatory, contemptible, innocuous, dangerous, deceptive, or otherwise. The difference between the two types lies in the degree of controversy their referents attract: loaded rhetoric is much more effective when applied to high-controversy topics and occurrences than those upon which there is broad agreement. In those cases in which people are aware they're being spun (i.e. the majority of cases), the language used is only one factor in the appeal's success, but in all events the intentions are transparent. For lack of a better term, let's call this type of spin "high-controversy."

But again, compare "death tax" to "pro-life"—they're both quite tendentiously loaded, but the latter refers to something relatively unambiguous, while the former constitutes a deliberate attempt to obfuscate its far more complex referent. Most people who consider themselves "pro-life" believe on religious grounds that life begins at conception. Such an absolutist formulation doesn't leave a great deal of conceptual wiggle room for spin to exploit: if your denomination places embryos on the same moral footing as fully-formed humans, you are obligated to oppose abortion, and if it doesn't, you're not. What the conservative elite calls the "death tax" is a different story, however: they spent millions of dollars giving their constituents the wrong idea about how the estate tax worked and to whom it applied in their ultimately successful push for repeal (for more detail on just how they did so, see Death By A Thousand Cuts by Graetz and Shapiro). Once again, we see that confusion about the referent greatly expands the power of spin to command attention and secure consent.

So, with our two variables in mind (degree of controversy and degree of ambiguity), we can construct the following basic spin taxonomy:

	Higher Ambiguity	Lower Ambiguity
Higher Controversy	"death tax" "climate change" "WMD" "values"	"pro-life" "pro-choice" "tax relief" "intelligent design" "peacekeeper" (bomb)
Lower Controversy	"ethnic cleansing" "global warming" "peak oil"	"friendly fire" "collateral damage" "terminate with extreme prejudice"

High-controversy high-ambiguity spin is the most insidious, as users skillfully exploit lack of public expertise or consensus on exactly what the referent is with widespread disagreement on the normative issue to help shift undecided parties into their camp. High-controversy low-ambiguity spin includes issues upon which the two sides are clearly defined and firmly entrenched. The items in this category aren't likely to change many minds because the component facts of the debate are fairly easy for the layperson to grasp.

Low-controversy high-ambiguity rhetoric designates issues that everyone agrees are problematic, but that the general public doesn't fully understand. It derives some persuasive power from the complexities, but not as much as the double-high category. Finally, spin's power is at its lowest ebb in the double-low box, because everyone knows exactly what the referents are and everyone agrees that they are repugnant or at least undesirable.

There's probably a million things holes in this conceptual contraption, but it's just a first stab. Comments are welcome.

Remember This Always, pt. 1:

1) All communication is spin. Think of as unambiguous and neutral a statement as you can contrive, perhaps something like the following:

I went to the store this morning.

Now rephrase it in two or three different ways, keeping the essential meaning more or less intact:

I drove to the store this morning.

I walked to the store this morning

I went to Whole Foods this morning.

Are these four statements equivalent? Would you suppose they would call forth the same mental pictures, connotations, assumptions, and understandings in all, or at least most, of their listeners? Does each indicate the same emphases, interests, social prejudices, and political biases in the individuals who might choose it over its competitors? How would you estimate the typical impact of this type of casual word-substitution in terms of the different impressions each permutation would create from mind to mind? Would you guess these effects would be greater or lesser when discussing democratic politics than when recounting one's morning activities?

Is it ever possible to craft a message so perfectly that most of its intended audience would interpret it the same way? (Note that this is not the same thing as a majority agreeing that the statement is "objective," as the word's definition differs according to the individual using it.) If you think it is possible, how often do you think it actually occurs, and how often do you think it happens that people interpret and judge the messages they receive on a gamut from maximally acceptable to maximally unacceptable?

All the communicative tools we have to work with (i.e. images, words and sounds) are fraught with connotation, implication, and association. This follows directly from a) the fundamental imprecision and ambiguity of all human language and b) from the myriad of circumstances under which people become acquainted with the various visual and aural components of non-linguistic communication. Every change in communicative content effects a change in perception in some subset of the population; therefore it is very rarely possible to discuss anything 'objectively.' (In Public Opinion Walter Lippman argues effectively that this rule does not apply as strongly to scientists, who use far more precise and rigorous language than the general population. Specifically, scientists avoid the worst of the language substitution problem detailed above, since many of the terms they use have no synonyms.)

Who Did Dean's Research? (part 2)

The two of you who visit this blog regularly will be pleased to learn that I've found an answer to the question I posed last month about John Dean's research in Conservatives Without Conscience: he does indeed cite at least one of the authors of the lit review I linked to, but the sources of his comment about the "massive study that has really been going on for 50 years now by academics" appear to be Robert Altemeyer's theory of right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and the F-scale. The respective surveys used to measure these three psychological concepts have all been administered repeatedly over the past 50 years (the latter two date back that far; RWA, which was derived from the F-scale, emerged in the 1980s), which lends some credence to Dean's reference to "hundreds of thousands" of subjects. Without plowing into the research myself it's tough to know how credible it is, but now that I've identified the real pith, I don't have to pad JD's pockets to find out.

More on authoritarianism/CWC here and here.

What A Psych BA Is Good For

Jonathan Alter on the animus the netroots are engendering against Lieberman:

But if the blogs aren't a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They're helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call "projection," where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman.

He must have skipped the relevant lecture in Psych 101, because that's not what "projection" is. Projection, in psycholanalysis, is the act of imputing undesirable traits in one's own personality to someone else, such as when conservatives denounce liberals as racist. Alter is thinking of transference, wherein a particular emotion originally felt toward one person is directed toward someone else, usually on the basis of resemblance or convenience. It's always comforting to discover that my six-figure education is good for something.