Media

 

 "Equally shallow counter-narratives reinforce preexisting bias."

What the fuck does that mean. Let me explain, or at least, let me try. 

 

A is good. B is bad.

B is good. A is bad.

Conventional wisdom would tell us that someone is lying. It could be. That some of those perspectives have an agenda. Maybe a bias they might be or now aware of. That those confronting positions about the world are the result of a misunderstanding, of polarization. Reasonable points could be made into the suggestion that the truth is somehow in some middle ground. Some will say that we can inform ourselves about the actual situation if only we hear both sides and made an educated assessment of more objective facts, and if we adjust for potential misinformation or skewed perspective and bias.

These are fools.

Why? The simple statements of A-versus-B is an endless ocean of assumptions. Assumptions we can't even understand fully and see the depths of. It's not even about A or B being good or bad. Beneath those surface-level narratives lie the very foundation of cognitive processes and language that conform our perception of reality. It's the same with any form of communication. Let me list a few of the assumptions only so you can see what I am saying.

The first assumption inherent in these dueling narratives is the oversimplification of complex issues. When A labels B as 'bad' and B reciprocates, they effectively reduce multifaceted issues to black and white terms. This simplification obscures the nuances, context, and underlying causes of a problem. The media often prefers sensationalism and simplification over depth and context, as it tends to garner more attention and elicit stronger emotional responses. We are familiar with most of the consequences of this one-dimensional problem: polarization, populism, stratification, identity politics, straw-men rhetoric (where one argues not against the opponent view but against a designed representation of it). Another is the narrowing of the discourse. Where A and B are the possible options, the existence of A and B limits the conception of how far in one direction or the other a real open discourse would go, because they are labeled as extremists by both sides. Both counter-narratives (no matter how antagonistic in principle) enforce with one another a common ground for reality. A bit like the artificial creation of the socialist party in Spain just prior to democratization as a way to narrow the political space of the left, so communists wouldn't occupy their rightful seat in the side of the political spectrum opposed to the remnants of fascism.

The A-versus-B assumption often overlooks the human tendency to perceive 'the other' as a monolithic entity. People are diverse and complex, and painting any group with a single brushstroke oversimplifies the reality. In the realm of media, this leads to harmful stereotypes and reinforces biases against certain communities, races, or ideologies. It is essential to recognize that within any group, there is a spectrum of perspectives and experiences that are not adequately represented in a binary narrative. From the moment they are uttered, both statements solidify the "form" of A and B as valid entities that can engage in a conflict or a moral relation of good and bad. The simple fact that they are mentionable makes them exist as something that is. The most clear example is perhaps in the case of nations. Where A and B are nations, is understood in principle that the notion of them as nations, unifying almost absolute agents of power within a territory exist and can be treated as such; no matter the real functioning, insanely complex ecosystem of decision making agents that is comprised of and if they even see themselves as that, and in what way, and the differences in cultural background that goes with that identification. The ramifications and consequences of such action are huge. Not only about A and B themselves, but how that legitimizes the understood common ground between media and listener of that "form" of agent as valid, labeling as the type of being that constitutes the political landscape. Has anyone complained about the disappearance of Russia Today in the West, the stewards of free press? No, because their mere existence would expand the spectrum of ideas in the one-dimensional landscape. I am not saying that they speak the truth or not, the question is beyond that. The question is about how through not censorship but how political-economical decisions have made the media companies take care of the problem themselves eliminating it from the list of available channels. How easily we have accepted that our propaganda doesn't admit competition in the white sanitized term of "misinformation" and how natural is at that task the force of the market.

Also obvious is the false dichotomy of good and bad. Someone should write a book about that assumption, I'm sure it doesn't have a deep moral and religious idea behind it. There's also the presumption, anxiety of complexity that translated into a need to position yourself when two perspectives are conflicted, no matter how far or irrelevant to your life.

We are also somewhat fluent on some forms of obvious intentional and unintentional propaganda, and we accept them to some degree. Selection and omission of some information. The customs and norms of information sharing shape the content's structure, tone, and narrative, further influencing how the audience perceives the information. That bias is inherent and often unavoidable. Every individual and media outlet carries a set of biases shaped by their experiences, beliefs, and affiliations.

But all of this, all of this, is nothing.

To continue we have to talk first about extra dimensions.

I hope I don't have to say it, but there is no neutral reference point in the universe. The positions in a two dimensional space (or any dimensional space) are defined solely by what you agree to be the zero point. Even when you define a zero point as the geometric median, then it's only defined by the points themselves, and different populations of them can have widely different medians, each one convinced on their own. Ask a Mongolian tribe from the eight century and see what their political compass is. And doing such thing also carries the fact that the power of a particular idiosyncrasy is almost in practice in the modern world just the number of population with access and clout in that time media to make visible and add weight to their point; and not whether if the ideas that constitute that particular zeitgeist is "functional" or "coherent" or god-forbid me for using this term "true". Some kind of signals can still be seen in ideology, like in white or black questions about clear economic policies, but those get increasingly masked between layers and layers of politics that not only make them into just vague tendencies, but also arise the point of who is actually in charge (if anyone) of money, the state or a transnational bank. So it becomes just a matter of identification. Would a political party or individual that identifies itself as right-wing, making all the possible to be identified that way, but that at it's core holds left-wing values but never implement them in any noticeable way, would be one or the other? Yes, both, neither. There's no ideology in the sense of deep foundational non-negotiable ideas. Only market gaps in the hyperspace of identity politics that need to be filled to move the reference point or way or another.

Up until now, we have only talked about the hyperspace of ideas and points of view and narratives and ideologies as if they were one-dimensional. Every single mention and categorization of ideas reinforce the idea of a linear spectrum. In reality, complex issues exist in a multidimensional space. An apt illustration of this is the oversimplification of political ideologies into the left-right spectrum. This flattens the multifaceted nature of ideologies, projecting them onto a one-dimensional line. Just as a two-dimensional plane can represent a point as (2, 1) or (-2, 7), a two-dimensional space can offer a more accurate representation of the nuances in ideology. An idea located at (-2, 1) aligns more closely with the first point, but due to the reduction into a one-dimensional axis, it is often represented as merely (-2), thereby grouping it with the second point. This limitation is a pervasive issue in various fields where multidimensional concepts are oversimplified into linear representations, diminishing our understanding of the world's intricacies. And this is not solved by adding a vertical axis. And this is not solved by developing more sophisticated ways to "project" or categorize things in our comfortable one-dimensional line. It's unsolvable. Simplification is loss of information. It's the prize we pay to be able to say things at all. We are reductionists at heart.

Media itself can be the message. The way information is presented, prioritized, or omitted can carry a narrative of its own. When media outlets prioritize sensationalism, conflict, or polarizing stories, they shape public perception, often at the expense of comprehensive and in-depth reporting. They create language, symbolism, they induce, seduce. Thus, the media is not just a neutral conveyor of information but an active influencer of public opinion and societal values, mainly by perpetuating it's own through a sensation of normalcy. It has to satisfy an audience, it has to satisfy publishers, it has to satisfy it's writer. It has a whole agenda before any agenda it's directly submitted to it. The form of content that satisfies the media it's in, morphs accordingly. Censorship is no longer necessary in media (also because nothing is subversive) the same way violence is no longer necessary in the presence of internalized deterrence: the pressure of economic forces and political correctness understood as an apolitical force of nature.

It's curated, fine-tuned, devoid of reality the same moment a camera started to film. An spectacle.

This family (talking about the first TV reality show) was already hyperreal by the very nature of its selection: a typical ideal American family, California home, three garages, five children, assured social and professional status, decorative housewife, upper-middle-class standing. In a way it is this statistical perfection that dooms it to death. Ideal heroine of the American way of life, it is, as in ancient sacrifices, chosen in order to be glorified and to die beneath the flames of the medium, a modern fatum. Because heavenly fire no longer falls on corrupted cities, it is the camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to death. "The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television, and to die by it," the director will say. Thus it is a question of a sacrificial process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to twenty million Americans. The liturgical drama of a mass society.

One must think instead of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other micromolecular code controls the passage from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic one of the programmed signal.

Baudrillard 

Bias is not merely "often unavoidable." Bias can't be "solved" because bias implies that "nonbias" is possible and that there's an objective viewpoint void of presuppositions, almost transcendental. But that doesn't exist, language is defined though language use, and it's meaning are relations between different functional representations of reality. Cognition is not a logical process with errors, logical though is an emergent bubble from a deeper level of relationism and though-patterns (do you hear me, stupid AI journalists?). The heart of the matter is that information cannot exist free of bias because the very structure of information inherently carries subjective meaning. Striving for complete objectivity, even if it were possible, might not be desirable as it can perpetuate the illusion of impartiality. The use of words, sentence structures, and even images inherently contains bias. Sentence contain itself the idea of ordinance, of separation of subject and object, of action and being. By stating "A and B are in conflict" you are not only saying that, but also not saying everything else you could communicate in the world. Inherently "this is important". This subject is worth talking. This is a relevant piece of information towards understanding the world, which I promise is totally a thing.

Consider, for instance, describing World War II as a "conflict" between Germans and Jews. Technically, it's not false, but the statement hides a multitude of critical nuances and biases. The choice of words, the narrative's focus, and the elements omitted are all steeped in bias, influencing our understanding of the historical event. From the simple obvious sterilization of a fucking massacre to the delicate concept of what constitutes a cultural entity. By simply saying conflict (or any other word) we limit the dimensionality of the possible interactions between the agents; the possibility of "conflict" is now how we interpret similar ones.

Counter-media, or revolutionary media, can hardly ever (if ever) be truly subversive. As simply saying "no, it's not B who is bad, it's A" can't escape from the invisible constrictions of frame imposed by "A is good, B is bad", it just reinforces them. And the same happens even if your propose C (although it's a start, I guess). We become pathologically contrarian. Each ideological position is defined more by their relative position to others than by it's almost irrelevant content, and can't exist without something to negate, subvert or antagonize. Even this article is an sterile counter-narrative itself; with one side interpreting the world in terms of good and bad but reinforcing the preexisting idea that problems arise from intentional systems of oppression and power, and the other side saying that's an absurd simplification and therefore, bad.

Perhaps the deepest manipulation information engages on is precisely by the suggestion (through the pursue by it by its own language) that itself can be impartial —or that trying to pursue it as an ideal is desirable—, that truth can be accessed through it and exists in a definite form; that impurities are only caused by the middle man. But is precisely when a certain coherent representation of the world can disguise himself as neutral or logically arising from self-evident principles when it's more dangerous. And that happens without a guiding hand, just as the result of the will to communicate. First, propaganda was an idea someone was trying to convince or told you. Second, propaganda was in the optimal resolution of situation that enfolded and revealed itself as the solution. Third, propaganda was in the context itself as given from granted. Fourth, propaganda is the medium itself, the functioning mechanisms in which the medium thrives, that self-give them through fine-tuning into the underlying idea. In advertising, the message is not only (ever) just "buy my product", but also "commodities are how one experiences identity, solves problems and reaches happiness". Who knows what else are saying, the infinite number of cultural assumptions that go into an ad for new electronics. Not even they know the emergent effects of a world where content and ads are not distinguishable from each other; functional information is an ad about a whole representation of the world. Itself, the word "media" that just means "middle", reinforces the structure of communication of information-medium-receiver. But we know that to be a simplification. Information in not pure, it's indistinguishable from noise if not passed through the appropriate decoder; the DNA structure lacks meaning if not in the specific context and the cellular automaton, radio transmissions mean nothing without the decoder in the receiver. And that does not mean that "you just need a proper decoder", it means that information itself is in the whole system and cannot be separated from intentionality or independent interpretation. It's the same principle that in the Chinese room, with the same solution: the whole system understands Chinese and it's indivisible. We, as humans, come with a truckload of preexisting notion. If not, communication would be impossible. Words just activate those. In the simple sentence "A and B are in conflict." that exact word, just "conflict", is an abyss of connotations and presuppositions we can't think of consciously if not with great effort (and even then, we are just touching the surface). A dictionary won't help. The dictionary itself it's a lie that tries to hide the fact that there's nothing behind it. The fact itself of "conflict" being a word that tries to denaturalize, to abstract at the maximum until the point of almost no essence the situation, is an incredibly deep unaware manipulation towards the denaturalization of the conflict itself. A deep political position and propaganda of the particular worldview in which exists that tries to pose itself as unbiased. The consistent representation of an average that doesn't exist, or of the different postures in their simulacrum form. All together orchestrates not a representation, information, or characterization of reality; but configurates reality itself, through the replication of the initial perception. When media says something, it's mainly about media itself. It just don't have the guts to turn the camera a hundred eighty degrees.

Screen to screen, word to word, is constructed the monomyth of the persona ─that is, how a person is supposed to be, to feel, to think, to behave. We have only been ourselves, and any other testimony about being is built about what we tell each other, the average of others, the nonexistent nucleus of being. So we coalesce towards it. Naturally.

The narrative aspect of media shapes our perception of reality, often by simplifying complex issues into digestible stories. The primary message conveyed is not always as straightforward as "A is good" or "B is bad," but it extends to the idea that "the world makes sense and can be understood through chains of causes and consequences." Media functions as a storytelling medium, and it caters to human psychology's inclination for narratives that offer a sense of coherence and meaning. The narrative structure allows us to make sense of the world, contextualize events, and discern patterns. And to work, narrative needs of all the paraphernalia that makes it work (heroes, villains, chapters, beginnings, ends, archetypes) that gets recreated from fiction through media towards reality; the other way around you would normally expect. Baudrillard again: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act. No wonder history feels like TV; it is TV. Reality feels like TV. Everything feels like TV. This storytelling approach helps engage audiences and make information more accessible, and "what works" in there is the imperative —and the observer through selective consume appetite selects, and the message is receiver-created. So form becomes also the message. Media is the message. Everything is the message. The message being "the world is what the world needs to be for media to thrive". And that world is our world. It doesn't need an editor. It doesn't need corruption. It doesn't need a minister of propaganda. It's on auto-play.

It's not even about "they all lie" or "this is all fake, an orchestrated pantomime" like conspirationists like to suggest. That would actually be quite reassuringly simple. Deep down, they are trying to preserve the idea of the real by creating an enemy to it. The problem is then not the absence of objective reality, just a matter of saying it's there, just behind the curtain. They are wrong. Naive. It's much more complex (as it often is) than that.

If you haven't noticed, the world is rarely as straightforward as a traditional story arc with clear causes and consequences. Nobody can really predict anything with any degree of certainty anymore. Maybe if they are very isolated stuff, but even then, if they involve people, the information itself becomes part of the the system and makes it chaotic. You can take all the experts you want into your talk-show to try explain things retroactively to give the illusion that it makes sense. But they know nothing. Real-life issues are multifaceted, and their solutions are often elusive. More often than not, not even the dichotomy of problems-solutions makes any sense. No matter how much information is presented, examined, or cross-referenced. No matter how many different perspectives you see. A light-bulb goes bad in Kurdistan and the dollar immediately crashes two points in the stock market. You can't even detect the underlying preconceptions you carry in your representation of the world, because you are a fish swimming in that water and haven't seen or can't think on terms of anything else. You don't know what a country is. You don't know what exactly is money. You don't know what the fuck is going on. But media tells you story. A wonderful story about how the world kind of makes sense and you kind of get it. That the square is a coherent and complete frame to observe the globe. And we buy it. Because we can't even fathom an alternative.

A is good. B is bad.

B is good. A is bad.