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| | -- ConnorHudson - 27 Apr 2022 |
| | -- ConnorHudson - 27 Apr 2022 |
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< | Hope Pervades Domestically Apolitical Violence
When you have nothing to fight for politically, you begin to think. Domestically apolitical violence demonstrates that our seizure of behavioralism to drive agendas amidst a mundane world has not completely eviscerated the presence of a social conscience capable of free thought.
To be comprehensible, this paragraph needed to be concrete, Whose "apolitical violence" results from "social conscience capable of free thought"?
The End of History in Skinner’s World
Following the “End of History,” the United States wrestled with the implications of a world devoid of a universal justification for action in the form of an existential ideological conflict. In the fourth decade of globalized liberalism as the default social order, this lack of justification feeds a bureaucratic malaise.
in whom? Those of us who never believed in the existential conflict with "Godless Communism" as a motivation for anything were never motivated at all?
As it turns out, the fight to survive is a more animating prospect than the maintenance of a status quo hard won.
How do we know thus it turns out? Dices that mean thus it always turns out, or that in this instance it has thus turned out, according to evidence we can weigh?
In the absence of a higher alignment, industry has found ways to weaponize our obsession with conflict and need for stimuli towards a profit motive to an extent which would make Skinner blush.
For what shameful relationship to this would Skinner be blushing? Is he to be shamed for being, supposedly, right?
With behaviorism undermining individual rationality, the polity has become susceptible to a life unobserved.
How does surveillance capitalism lead to a life that is unobserved? Surely that is the reverse of true?
In tandem, this sovereign malaise and mechanization of agency has led institutional actors to catastrophize contextually minor differences and current events to achieve political and financial objectives. This intersection is most evident in the polarization and depersonalization of modern media.
When you say something is evident, use material nouns and verbs to show this evidence. Abstractions are not evident, hence the problem of the enslaver Thomas Jefferson experiencing the self-evidence of liberty for all.
When the economics of media are driven largely by the intermediation of our attention, those purporting to engage in the free exchange of ideas are incentivized to shift discourse towards sensationalism. Simultaneously, the eroticization of conformist “individualism” by social media causes a heightened awareness of where the tainted spotlight of society is focused. The implications of this shift are a change in social cognition, imposing an intellectual inertia which mollifies individual inquiry by conditioning individuals towards being told what to think and inducing a misplaced detrimental reliance, framing knowing the script of the moment as the proper grounds for social judgment. |
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> | The Perception of Violence in Skinner's World |
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Even I, who write about this subject all the time, cannot understand what this last sentence means.
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> | Will Smith's slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars and Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine together highlight an avenue for inquiry into how the technologization of society has affected individuals' perception of violence in the United States. In tandem, the events presented the American public with examples of consummatory/reactive and instrumental violence, which were largely insulated from partisan, sensationalist framing. |
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< | This status quo imposes a moral imperative for the future of free thought. We must seek to ascertain how to shake a decisive plurality from our collective stupor and return us to an earnest search for domains and manners of incremental progress. Beginning this search for a pragmatic theory, it is necessary to reflect on two moments of violence in the past year that have spurred independent thought. In doing so, we must move past their relative extremity and mundanity and explore what they reveal about how we can habitually foment inquiry. |
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> | The Social Psychology of Violence |
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< | Contemplating the Sovereigns |
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> | Across sociological studies of violence, academics broadly agree that the determinants of collective (unorganized) violence are a combination of Value Deprivation, Communication and Learning, and the Balance of Power. Within this taxonomy, present communications and past response learning influence the imitative or inhibitive propensity of each perceived violent act, affecting aggression resulting therefrom. This time-related social learning is a driving mechanism of why collective violence follows a sigmoid curve in its diffusion throughout society, an occurrence that we have been unfortunately reminded of amidst the current contagion of mass shootings. Accordingly, understanding the process of perception of violence and which neurocognitive pathways are controlling that inquiry is key to understanding its manifestation in modern life. |
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< | The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a bellwether of uncertainty, challenging the thought that the tendrils of globalized economics created deterrent interdependencies of mutually assured economic destruction. While the conflict triggered heady colloquoys, the subtler effects on the collective conscience indicate a glimmer of hope for freedom of thought. |
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> | Shifting Avenues of Communication |
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< | The invasion drew us out of ourselves. The gravity of the actions served a healthy dose of contextualization to the catastrophization of minor differences concerning the direction and velocity of a relatively stable liberal democracy. This absolute threat to sovereign autonomy, in a people who we perceive as closer to “us,” served as a stark reminder that the status quo we take for granted is not preordained. |
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> | Vicarious learning about violence normally is based on news media reports of violence and its consequences occurring in other parts of the nation or the world. While this premise likely remains valid, the foundational studies of violence occurred in a simpler media ecosystem. |
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< | Additionally, the inefficacy of fringe opinions aimed at polarizing the discourse allowed for discussion to proceed toward nuance, requiring higher information and contemplation than the false dichotomy of right and wrong. The denial of this binary, fueled by general moral alignment, led to more individualistic considerations of how normative theories and potential higher order consequences contributed to the justifiability of US involvement, novelly bringing discussions of international relations and economic sanctions into the zeitgeist. The contemplation by the average American of an issue beyond a chyron is a consequence of this global tragedy that must be studied with care and acted on accordingly. |
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> | In the intervening forty-plus years, regardless of attribution, political polarization has manifested in and is perpetuated in the current state of mass media. Simultaneously, the confluence of communicative technologies becoming a part of our lived environment, fragmenting centralized audiences, and business models premised on the continued intermediation of attention affected the manner and substance in which mass media communicates with the public, and the public’s ability to process information. |
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< | Contemplating Individual Action |
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> | Extending from BJ Fogg and the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, the birthplace of Instagram (among others), the result has been that the behaviorist psychobiology of Skinner has been designed into the communicative and social technologies that comprise the majority of American news consumption. |
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< | As Americans were forced to consider the global actions of sovereigns, they were also presented with the fundamental humanity of those adorned in cultural reverence and the justifiability of violence on a more intimate scale. |
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> | Inherent to the concepts of “hook” and “nudge” essential to the design of the social technologies, from where 71% of Americans receive news input, is the observation that anger and increasingly sensational coverage fuel repeat viewership. In practice, this incentivizes technology and media companies to embrace polarized framings of current events, creating siloed and self-reinforcing media echo chambers. Theorists have hypothesized that the consequences of these practices include changes in social cognition by decreasing depth of processing, impeding freedom of thought, and shifting the shared premises of public discourse. |
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< | Seconds before Will Smith struck Chris Rock on national television for a joke relating to his wife’s alopecia, the woman sitting next to me at the Oscars asked what the most exciting thing that had happened to me at past Oscars was. The unfortunate truth, I told her, was that the pageantry, pomp, and circumstance tend to mitigate any genuine excitement. In the moment, the punch was so out of place as to be interpreted as satire until the circumstances proved otherwise. Intrapersonal violence which was at once so mundane in the world, yet alien to its environment, discombobulated the audience, requiring later contemplation rather than immediate reactivity. |
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> | These shifts in social cognition hold the potential to impact our perception of violence, implicating the diffusion of collective violence throughout society. Within this observation, the circumstances surrounding Oscars and Ukraine present a unique opportunity to investigate the current status of Communication and Learning about violence, by implicating the process for seeking and perceiving the information concerning violence necessary to render judgment, relatively free from market-incentivized framing. |
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< | Upon recoherence, the event demonstrated itself as a unique cultural moment. Due to the isolated and self-congratulatory extent of the Oscars and the lack of interracial violence, the event proved so politically unimportant that it was reported as mere fact. As this did not satisfy the public desire to envelop themselves in the moment, individuals began to independently seek information in pursuit of forming an opinion. The public proceeded to engage in the investigation of the particulars, a discussion on the justifiable extent of humor to intrude on privacy, the propriety of the response, the resultant culpability, and the proper remediation. |
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> | Public Opinion of Unframed Violence |
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< | In comparison to more pressing issues, the depth of this reaction may be viewed as disconcerting. Yet, the reaction of the collective conscience demonstrated that our innate predisposition towards inquiry is still there to be saved. |
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> | While different in scale and in-kind, the violence at the Oscars and in Ukraine were both variations from legitimate, institutionalized behaviors. Yet, the two events were united by an important strand, each held little potential for gains in power through contrarian framings, and instead provoked free thought on displays of violent intolerance in the public conscience. |
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> | Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock received insulation from political framing as a mere spectacle of cultural interest. In the context of a polarized media ecosystem, this lack of framing necessitated independent information gathering to arrive at an opinion. This manifested in a variety of opinions on the justification of violence, faith-based and academic understandings, and a reactive discourse. Without monolithic responses seeking to capitalize on individual worldviews in pursuit of political or profit motives, nuanced opinions resulted from the ensuing pluralism, and assessments of relative fault were not exculpatory in public opinion. |
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< | Conclusion |
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> | Standing in stark contrast, the invasion of Ukraine presented true global violence in a country similar enough to our own that a critical mass of Americans paid close attention. The abhorrent nature of the invasion and the sense of sympathy images of the war invoked in the public nullified the potency of truly contrarian opinions, insulating the events from reductive tribalistic framing. In this environment, public inquiry began from a place of threshold support for Ukraine, but moved beyond simplistic affective responses, culminating in a disparate assessment of appropriate government reaction, with some nearing an effective public consensus, divorced from domestic political implications. |
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< | While it may not be ideal to have to look towards violence, both extreme and mundane, to find occasions of a society spurred towards individual inquiry, Ukraine and the Oscars have demonstrated that the fundamental reservoir of our humanity, our propensity for freedom of thought, persists. Accordingly, we must take notice and engage in further investigation as to what these moments can teach us about the current status of our collective psychology and operationalize those findings. |
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> | The Importance of Studying Public Inquiry |
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Every sentence in this draft should be rewritten for simplicity. The central idea of the draft should be stated clearly in the first paragraph. If this is really an essay about the Ukraine war and a slap at the Oscars, that should be said at the top, so that the reader who finds the comparison jarring can decide whether to skip the experience or read on. (Why is about the only material fact reported in this draft the fact that you attended the Oscars yourself? If that mattered, why be sly about it? If not, wtf?
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> | By presenting the media-consuming public with both instrumental and consummatory acts of violence, which are largely insulated from advantageous framing and polar positioning by the media, the Oscars and Ukraine present two instances of highly visible violence in the modern media ecosystem where arrival at an opinion required individual inquiry and perception. Accordingly, through further study, the events hold the potential for demonstrating how the attention economy has changed the Communication and Learning process affecting the prevalence and diffusion of collective violence throughout society. Understanding the presence or absence of such a shift holds fundamental importance for how we causally attribute the spread of violence in the digital age and can potentially inform a strategic framework to combat collective violence or level a critical appraisal of the culpability of modern media frameworks and technology business models. |
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