ON READING AND LITERACY

 On the occasion of the NYT examining the current controversy over books (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/books/review/book-bans-humanities-ai.html) it might be useful to give some thought to reading as an activity.    Scott begins: "Everyone loves reading. In principle, anyway. Nobody is against it, right? Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a lot of it." This passage reflects the attitude of an educated, literate, urban intelligence, not the opinion of everyone, nor every American.  Literacy in America has evolved.  Though estimated at 80% of male adults in 1776,  this did not include slaves, or women whose rate was not documented.  Estimates claim 80% of adults by 1870 (though again women are not included), but only 20% of blacks were deemed literate in that survey.  This is reported to reach close to 100% by 1980's though it is unlikely that the estimates are correct.  Reading skills were emphasized in basic education during this period, but it is not an inherent human skill.

The evolution of speech is impossible to document precisely, but its presence is pervasive across human societies. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661300014947) Estimates suggest it developed 50 to 100 thousand years ago, but this does not include reading! The ability to combine auditory signals and visual signals requires brain pathways that are not instinctual and estimates suggest that the ability to write and read languages is roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years old, a relatively new capacity!  (Perhaps auditory speech and visual symbols, petroglyphs, etc were combined and selected images linked to concepts (in pictographic languages) or sounds (phonetic ones).  Some ancient scripts persist into contemporary forms as in Chinese, Egyptian to greek, etc; others do not have a known correspondence, as in Mayan.  The importance of written language is the ability to maintain and record records of actions, and transmit information and history across generations without relying on memory-mimetic skills.  The importance of this change is discussed in detail by Abram (THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS).  

Culture is transmitted orally as well as in written form, but great importance attaches to the written as in religious documents.  The "bible" is a canonization of previous manuscripts, as is the "Koran".  Once established as definitive, each becomes the basis for the culture of that religion; this decision was made by a group of "experts" around 2000 years ago for "bible", and 1500 years ago for the "Koran".   A similar role is assigned to texts in other cultures.  These written texts were not universally available to "readers" in these cultures on a personal basis,  only as scarce hand written documents, shared by many users.  Moveable type printing developed in 1455 with Gutenberg's printing of the bible.  Only in the last two centuries has the writing and printing of books of skills, biography, and literature (fantasy) been readily available.  So Scott's assumptions about the universality and importance of reading reflect very recent developments in human history.

Coming from an academic, intellectual background, the importance of literacy and reading are paramount.  And so recent issues raise serious concerns. The teaching of reading in the US has deteriorated.  Students do not read as well as previous generations. This is ascribed variously to poor teaching, teaching non-phonetic methods(in a language that is inconsistently phonetic!), and the expansion of audio-visual sources of information.  Each of these may play a role,  but their significance is masked by a broader issue.  Contemporary culture has a wide range of available sources of auditory-visual information.  And students are able to create this information with or without words to share with others.  The dominance the physical-object-book generating a visual-verbal experience is diminishing.  Almost everywhere in the country,  you can overhear a conversation, often among women, about how their grandchildren are not reading enough, and spending too much time on "social media".  Many of these same women were in the generation that was transformed by radio, movies, and television; but they do not recognize the impact of those media as clearly.  McLuhan did, the cultural prophet who stated that "the medium is the message", or at least influences it.

The paradox of this de-emphasis on reading is the recent focus on restricting what books are retained by libraries and read by young people.   Just when the general youth culture is more focused on audio-visual experience,  parents and politicians are concerned, obsessed really,  about the "danger" of reading this or that book.  The typical concern of the 50s-70s was about the child/teen reading books with passages describing sexual activities in explicit language.(as in https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-21/huntington-beach-will-seek-to-stop-children-from-accessing-library-books-deemed-obscene-or-pornographic)  This is rarely a current concern.  Instead,  the focus is on normative content.  What feelings about oneself and one's gender are appropriate to share with others?  What feelings, attitudes, and historical information are appropriate to share which do not conform to traditional cultural norms about the country?  Elders and politicians are emphasizing the role of written communication in transmitting history, at the time when youth are ignoring it most of the time. These two aren't a coincidence.  It seems that the erosion of emphasis on written communication for a decade or so has weakened the importance of normative history in the society,  and now those who viewed that history as their history,  are shocked that others now claim a different history for the United States.  Which books are allowed becomes the basis for certifying what is the "real history".  The goal is "a campaign to win the hearts and minds of America's youth", and the supposed future history of the country.  In a time when different news media report "the facts" of an event in incompatible terms,  and a candidate and followers claim they did not lose an election despite the calculations,  defining which books "tell the true story" and are allowed, and which do not, and are prohibited, takes on a new urgency.

The sad truth is that books or written texts do not have this intrinsic validity.  Just as there are many variations of religious texts, and even several variations of the "bible" and its translations, there are many books and papers that claim to document the "truth" of the country, and its origins and current norms.  Fighting for a particular version of this "truth" and eliminating the voice of others is a necessary step in political control.  And attacking political norms is a basic technique to undermine the establishment.   Books have been swept into the political maelstrom because their writing and authors have been. Fighting for your version of the culture and the reality of a society only assures that another person will challenge this and try to oppose your views.  This is, of course, not about books, or reading, but power politics at a time when cultural norms are in transition.

Is California different? California doubles down on inclusive education as red states ban books in classrooms          Is this the future? 

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-21/california-doubles-down-on-diverse-lessons-in-schools-as-book-bans-happen-across-u-s

FIXING THE INTERNET 3 Misinformation

The 2020 election and aftermath have intensified the conflicts over biased information.  People are concerned that distorted or false information have a negative impact on the integrity of the society itself  There are congressional hearings,  and innumerable articles in print media and online media,  and recently a documentary  SOCIAL DILEMMA, that review the situation.  (The film, a mixture of interview, narrative, and dramatization,  illustrates how easy it is to confuse the three!) It presents a dramatized family whose teen struggles with "internet addiction",  and imaginary characters representing the AI inside search engines.  There are focused interviews from previous employees of Google and other internet companies,  including Jarrod Lanier, who has written a book WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?  about this.   The interviewees as insiders make several important points, which clarify the problem and define it in a different way:  The model of the social media companies is selling you/users/your information to advertisers. Personal information is the commodity.  Facebook/Instagram collects this directly,  Google collects it by search activities, Twitter collects it by tweets and re-tweets.  The goal of all of these companies is increasing your screen time to get more of you to sell.  The more time you spend selecting on screen,  the more information about you they acquire.  Algorithms are designed to identify what is important to you, the user, and sell it.

The goal of advertisers is to sell their product to likely buyers as carefully as possible in selected users/groups.  The internet companies try to define groups with maximum value to advertisers using AI algorithms.  The core model is making money by selling user information and targeting ad/info to defined users.  This is a financial model, and cannot be reversed except by changing the financial incentives or penalties.  Lanier has proposed along with others,  that users/us share in the revenue of the use of information about ourselves.  This is one solution to the incentive model,  but hard to ensure the companies would do it equitably,  and it doesn't address several other issues.  California has instituted an "opt out" control by users,  which must be user initiated.  

When translated into the political arena, another kind of marketing emerges.  Russians, Chinese, and other information sources do not “hack” Facebook.  They pay to be advertisers hiding their identity,  or they create “bot” sites to spread information, as fake "personal sources".  Facebook and other site algorithms identify user preferences for these sources and feed users, and user/groups, the data users select.  Instead of targeted advertising for products or businesses,  they market/ target political influence.  This is not fundamentally different from other political advertising on television at election time,  but social media algorithm methods are more efficient at targeting viewers.  (This is a mixed benefit, since they do not always target "swing voters".)  The idea of “editorial control” concept borrowed from newspaper/TV media makes no sense because the management of distribution of this data by algorithm is precisely controlled.  Users select what they wish by clicking, and get what they want and more of the same.  THAT is the problem.  If users do not select certain media,  the AI quickly diminishes its presentation.  When users continue to select it,  it is expanded.  This is how the system is designed and the user plays a basic role in the outcome.  This is widely misunderstood in congress.  Introducing government control authorizes whatever group is in power to totally control the distribution of information of a very powerful medium.  This is the Liberal answer that reflects the persistence of the belief that the editorial control in newspapers and network TV "protected" viewers from "wrong information". Conservatives object to control fearing that their sources would be the first to be suppressed.  Both sides favor restricting expression of information, because the selective choice of information reinforces the other side's bias!

The problem for society is a secondary effect of the process. Targeting information and advertising to users means that subgroups self select to get more information supporting their views, differentiating themselves from other users/groups.  The algorithm  inherently separates information delivery by the selection of individuals, producing a division in "consensus reality".  Previous media, including newspapers and network TV, aggregated the public into a small number of large subgroups by editorial policy.  This is more fragmented in social media (and talk radio and blogs), and less obviously under anyone's control.

The French are attempting to address this by educating the user,  especially children and teens, to understand the selection process and protect themselves by critically evaluating messages. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/technology/france-internet-literacy-school.html) The US has resisted this because exploiting children and teens economically has been pervasive for two generations.  Any effort to educate consumers to resist the promotional distortion of advertising undermines the economic premise of social media.  And some studies suggest that rational thinking does not reduce the divide.(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/opinion/sunday/fake-news.html) Other factors play an important role in two recent books (The Misinformation Age How False Beliefs Spread, By Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall; Down to Earth Politics in the New Climatic Regime By Bruno Latour).  A study about the public opinion of the Trump tax cuts casts doubt on the publics' inability to understand the issues. (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/fighting-fake-news-is-not-the-solution)  The user does have power to control the process.  My own strategy has been to use FACEBOOK, but  limit my feed by deleting ads and information that are not desirable.  This results in a highly focused, satisfactory experience for me, with limited marketing value, which makes me a user of little value to FACEBOOK.  During the last election, I got almost no political ads or promotions except re-posts by friends.   The user can interact with the algorithm to shape the experience,  that is how the algorithm is designed.  But the user must do this mindfully and intentionally to block undesired information.  This process does not address the biasing of information,  it just lets the user select his or her preferred bias.

This answers one issue of the internet: who controls what information I can receive?  But it does not answer what veracity that information carries?  Is it true or false?  This will be addressed in another musing of OBIRON.

WHATS THE MATTER WITH MEN?

Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. His latest book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It” argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men)  This analysis seems to forget many other features of "male insecurity" that have been documented in the past.  An example is the book DELIVERANCE (also made into a movie of the same name) in which a group of "urban" men go on a canoeing trip in the "wild" where each is trying to prove his manliness to the other.  The story culminates in outsiders committing homosexual rape on some of the group until one manages to kill the attacker with a crossbow (the true weapon of archaic manhood!).  Reeves doesn't emphasize homosexuality as a threat to modern males, perhaps because of the changing culture, but his British heritage includes strict laws prohibiting the behavior,  which persists anyway (perhaps learned by isolation in same sex boarding schools).   Homosexuality is an ambivalent dilemma of males seeking to define their "masculinity" in the absence of available women.  The transition from the 50s, which made short military haircuts the sign of masculinity, to the 60s when "independent males" let their hair grow long "like women" is highlighted in the movie EASY RIDER when the motorcycle guys with long hair and their buddy get attacked while camping out.

Earnest Hemingway provides a most interesting story of 20th century "manliness".  Most of his writing describes activities in the outdoors and military adventures.  He participated in a few as a journalist,  though biographies suggest that his involvement was more limited than the writing suggests.  He was famous for challenging others to fist fights in bars, etc, and wrote a book about the masculine courage of bullfighters.  But his mother dressed him as a girl until mid childhood,  his relationship to his father, who emphasized hunting and fishing, was conflicted, and the father eventually committed suicide.  Hemingway had difficulty maintaining relationships with women,  and was partly supported by his wives until his writing became successful.  FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS is a masterpiece of masculine wartime adventure,  but after writing it,  Hemingway's later years were mostly dissipated in fun adventures, before his own suicide. His books suggest a standard of masculinity he could not fulfill, as in "The short happy life of Francis Macomber".

In contrast,  a long history of successful powerful men not involved in specific "masculine activities" occurs in many cultures.  Leadership, cultural sophistication, financial acumen, and other skills result in successful men who are political figures, traders, etc.  The European/British tradition of martial "lords" remains a fantasy of that culture,  while the majority of their descendants have assimilated into bourgeois society and its roles.  In other words,  "macho males" have been transforming into more socially complex individuals for hundreds of years.  Why the sudden concern about the current changes?

Some of this is probably an American phenomenon.  We are a new country and culture,  whose settlement required significant physical capabilities.  The last state was incorporated in 1959, less than a century ago.  Much of the settlement of the western states still requires physically active jobs,  though less than in the last century.  The country is transitioning from a settlers' culture to an urban culture, to a mega-urban culture in some areas.  The role for men is changing and some men have more aptitude for the changes.  This leaves some men confused about how to fit into the society,  and changes the work tasks but does not "threaten masculinity".  Reeve's view that there are particular skills (hunting, exploration, etc) that are more significantly male is a typically upperclass British, not wrong, but culturally narrow.

Some of this may also be a result of #METOO culture.  The assumption that a woman without an escort is fair game for sexual advances is not a universal human cultural assumption.  It is not even a universal American cultural assumption.  The cultural value that respects the personal physical space of a woman continues to be present in much of America, including legal standards.  The increasing role of women outside the home in the workplace may contribute to an increase in attempts at exploitation.  But many instances of women exploited by famous or powerful men do not occur in the immediate workplace,  and suggest that these are characteristics of specific men, with specific attitudes about women, and should not be generalized to changes in all men.  And not being able to exploit women does not threaten "masculinity" any more than it threatens a woman's ability to be sexually attractive to others.

The more significant change in gender role is the expanding option of LGBT+, the possibility of choosing one's gender role in disregard of your genetic/anatomical basis.  These changes reject the notion of any absolute gender determination, and offer the option that the individual chooses their social-gender-presentation, and disregards the reproductive aspect.  This does not just threaten "masculinity" it challenges the definition of gender as a predetermined genetic-anatomical feature,  and substitutes social presentation as an alternative.  

Many features of modern society are in transition.  The role of men, women, and their gender identities are all being reassessed.  It is a mistake to make this a sign of problems in "masculinity"  though some men may experience it in that way.  And some women may experience a de-valuation of emphasizing "femininity" as well.  It is a characteristic of elders to sometimes see changes as problems,  and a characteristic of younger members of society to not anticipate  potential dangers in the changes.