It's the Information, Stupid
blog.mojeek.com
blog.mojeek.com
Rather than directly engaging with our local (and immediate but non-local) community to learn about its needs and support its health, we've increasingly oriented ourselves almost exclusively towards abstract regional, national, and international concerns that we might only experience through some media intermediary.
We invite ourselves to develop anger or pity or righteousness towards figures that enter our lives through the same channels and with the same illistration techniques of theatrical characters while barely knowing the names of our neighbors let alone the challenges that they're facing this week or this month.
An simple off-ramp is to stop doing that, taking a stroll around the block to see if somebody needs help or company instead of scrolling through social media or watching TV news for the latest recounting of some faraway and universally misrepresented drama.
As citizens in regional and national democracies, it's important for us to be informed about issues at those scales but becoming sufficiently informed about those issues requires no more than an occasional exercise in research when it's approaching time to make a vote or when someone we're personally connected to asks us to contribute concretely towards a cause.
Removing bias and manipulation from the media and technology platforms is a Sisyphian task, but disempowering biased media and technology platforms only requires ignoring them.
And once you do so, you get a lot of energy back for supporting individuals you actually know and who can support you in return.
I don't think it's simple at all. Kinda like saying "It's simple, stop doing crack" or "Stop caffeine" or whatever.
The problem is 'local' is boring in general in most places in the world (maybe unless you live in downtown NYC or something). I'm from nowhere in the midwest in the days before the internet. Other than the 3 channels on TV, or going down to the library, the world was a tiny place. After experiencing the connectedness of the modern world, you're going to have to drag most people kicking and screaming back to those days gone by. People aren't going to ignore the addiction feed, much in the same way they aren't ignoring meth, pills, and whatever else they can get high on.
Local politics is what decides your school board, police, and zoning regulations. There may be small time corruption and things often get heated.
Maybe the reason local politics seems boring is because local media is largely hollowed out and acquired by huge national corporations like Grey Media Group. Local TV news has become sports, weather and crime mostly.
> It’s not unusual for a local candidate to win by a handful of votes
Where about 10-20% of the population is voting at all. This is because the 'average' person isn't politically connected to these local events, and mostly never has been in the US. The first moment anything else interesting showed up. And with TV/internet/mass global communication that constant feed is here. Hell, it started showing up decades ago with the advent of 24/7 news.
Your local media simply can't drive a torrent of 30 second clips like tik-toc can. Your local populace just isn't that interesting. No matter how much they try to complete, there is orders of magnitude of difference in scale between them.
Correct. But you can use techniques, to reduce bias. And not use others, notably tracking, so eliminating what can be bias or perhaps better put influence.
Besides that the bias of publishers and platforms matters less the more diversity we have. We have many news publishers for example, but in search the dominance of Google means we have little diversity.
I don't think big companies do such "deliberately" (in the sense that a human made the explicit decision to do it). But when there is a certain behavior that performs better in practice, then such behavior will proliferate.
I say, that when the effect is known, and the company chooses not to reduce it, they are acting deliberately. The purpose of a system is what it does.
I agree, that the relation between the effect and the specific behavior may not be obvious, as you pointed out ("Managing bias is a wildly difficult..."). But it seems that google does not even acknowledge, that this effect exists [1].
Beside the intention, I think the more interesting questions would be:
Do the induce such a bias (deliberately or not)? Do the induce any bias at all?
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-...
> Is Mojeek just another Bing or Google syndicate?
> No. Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms.
My question: how do they expect to make money?
However, even in the worst case, assuming everyone just uses Google and Google continues their path of political activism ... this is still an almost incomprehensible improvement over the absolute disaster that has been the mainstream media over identifiable history.
It is interesting to look at something like the Trump presidency in the US and compare how effectively it would have been buried by the media in ages past vs today where they just can't shut a vocal minority up. We'll see the same effect across every other minority group too - on topics that a significant number of people care about it is nigh impossible to kill off a message and marginalise the messenger these days. Things like Assange and Snowden, Epstein, the Panama papers, or the various other political scandals that break are harder to clamp down on. The fake consensus on how great all the wars are is also under constant pressure and getting harder to maintain.
It doesn't really matter if a group like Google puts their thumb on the scale, they can't control the pressure that all the free speech is bringing to bear in any sort of half-free market for search even with the benefits of incumbency.
Unless you are a major internet personality, few people will see your posts. The scale of your reach will be too small to matter, or only filtered back to those who already agree with you, producing little social change from the dialogue.