Posts tagged context

mysteriouslyunlikelycloud:

kinsey3furry300:

prokopetz:

An incomplete taxonomy of esoteric texts:

1. This text is discussing esoteric subject matter
   
2. This text is being deliberately obscure because its author knows they don’t have a coherent thesis and they’re blowing smoke
   
3. This text is written in earnest, but its author has very poor communication skills
   
4. This text’s translator has misunderstood something that was meant completely literally as a complex metaphor
   
5. This text is actually perfectly straightforward in its native language, but every available translation fucking sucks

6. The author is a troll, and is fucking with a very specific target audience, who would have been well aware they are being fucked with.

You are not the target audience, and thus are missing the joke.

7. This text was reasonably accessible in the context it was written in. It has been removed from that context and is now completely impossible to understand.

The book you are advised to read to understand what this book is going on about has not been digitised. There is a reference copy available at a library 800 miles away. An eBay seller based in Russia is selling a copy for £300, there is no picture of the book included in the listing.

There’s a joke from Ancient Sumeria 4,000 years ago that goes, “A dog walked into a tavern and said, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.” We don’t know what it means.

A woman goes into the woods. She encounters a man and a bear. The man is actually cake. The bear has two wolves inside it. The wolves want to know if you would love them if they were a worm

in today’s edition of “adulting is hard” meets “automated puritanism”

“Every photograph is an act amid a complex structure of choices. These choices, which extend beyond the time of the photograph, influence the photograph before, during and after its instant. Reading photographs in context is a participation in this complex”

– Between The Eyes. Essays on Photography and Politics. David Levi Strauss

Foresight is, of course, more than single step. As part of a well-rounded analysis of possible futures, the step of mapping context is critical and why we give it the attention it deserves as part of a broader curriculum. Pairing powerful sensemaking tools with ways of bringing future concepts to life are the core of what Future Design provides. Beyond providing a platform to learn about emerging drivers of change, Future Design can equip students with tools to:

• Identify possibilities and risks upstream, before an innovation lands,
• Understand the impacts and connections between issues and innovations,
• Uncover surprising future issues that point toward challenges in the present; and
• Futureproof design by anticipating change in different contexts and scenarios.

via https://medium.com/@changeist/imagining-not-just-technology-but-the-world-it-will-live-in–21806ca1ec48

Facebook’s Mission Statement states that your objective is to “make the world more open and connected”. In reality you are doing this in a totally superficial sense. 

If you will not distinguish between child pornography and documentary photographs from a war, this will simply promote stupidity and fail to bring human beings closer to each other.

To pretend that it is possible to create common, global rules for what may and what may not be published, only throws dust into peoples’ eyes.

– Espen Egil Hansen (Editor-in-chief and CEO Aftenposten)

Building and maintaining a n-to-n communications platform for over a billion *daily* active users across multiple access platforms *is* difficult and *is* hard and you’ve done it and congratulations, that was lots of work and effort. You - and your Valley compatriots - talk excitedly and breathlessly about solving Hard Problems and Disrupting Things, but in other areas - other areas that are *also* legitimate hard problems like content moderation and community moderation and abuse (which isn’t even a new thing!) - do not appear to interest you. They appear to interest you to such a little degree that it looks like you’ve given up *compared to* the effort that’s put into other hard problems.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t use rhetoric to say that your people - not just engineers - are the best and the brightest working to solve humanity’s problems without also including the asterisk that says “Actually, *not all hard problems*. Not all difficult problems. Just some. Just the engineering ones, for example." 

What you’re doing right now - with your inflexible process that’s designed to be efficient and work at scale without critically being able to deal *at scale* with nuance and context (which, I’d say, is your difficult problem and a challenge you should *relish* - how do you deal with nuance at scale in a positive manner?!) smacks of algorithmic and system-reductionism. 

–Dan Hon, s3e27: It’s Difficult 

It is tempting to make every fiasco at Facebook about the power (and the abuse of power) of the algorithm. The "napalm girl” controversy does not neatly fit that storyline. A little-known team of humans at Facebook decided to remove the iconic photo from the site this week.

That move revealed, in a klutzy way, just how much the company is struggling internally to exercise the most basic editorial judgment, despite claims by senior leadership that the system is working.

–Aarti Shahani, With ‘Napalm Girl,’ Facebook Humans (Not Algorithms) Struggle To Be Editor

The same week Nick Ut’s picture didn’t make it, the small town East Liverpool (Ohio) posted two photographs of a couple that had overdosed in their car, with a small child sitting right behind them. Addiction experts were quick to point out that public shaming would very likely be counter productive. In this case, it was reported, “a Facebook spokesperson said the photos did not violate the company’s community standards.”

As in the case of Ut’s picture, the decision over whether or not to publicly share photographs like the two East Liverpool ones ought to be in the hands of highly trained photo editors, people who not only have the knowledge to understand the “news value” of the photographs, but who have also wrestled with the different underlying ethical problems.

However much any editor’s decisions might be flawed at times, at the very least we can be certain that they have thought about the underlying problems, that, in other words, we’re looking at the end result of an educated process (regardless of whether or not we end up agreeing with it or not). The world of Facebook does away with this.

– Jörg M. Colberg,The Facebook Problem

So here we have a partial answer to why experts aren’t trusted. They aren’t trusted by people who feel alienated from them. My reading of this study would be that it isn’t that we live in a ‘post-fact’ political climate. Rather it is that attempts to take facts out of their social context won’t work. For me and my friends it seems incomprehensible to ignore the facts, whether about the science of vaccination, or the law and economics of leaving the EU. But me and my friends do very well from the status quo - the Treasury, the Bar, the University work well for us. We know who these people are, we know how they work, and we trust them because we feel they are working for us, in some wider sense. People who voted Leave do suffer from a lack of trust, and my best guess is that this is a reflection of a belief that most authorities aren’t on their side, not because they necessarily reject their status as experts.

via http://www.tomstafford.staff.shef.ac.uk/?p=447

(via http://flic.kr/p/GSPGTe )

(via http://flic.kr/p/Bgx7TY )

This fracturing of context is, I suspect, peculiar to these early decades of online writing. It’s possible that, in the future, webmentions and the like may heal that up to some extent. But everything from the 90s to today is going to remain mostly broken in that respect. Most of what we said and did had ephemerality long before apps started selling us ephemeral nature as a positive advertising point. Possibly no other generation threw so many words at such velocity into a deep dark well of ghosts.

http://morning.computer/2014/10/the-online-memory/

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency

I was biasing the results by using full-text search to explore my email. I would look for the things I found interesting that day—searching on terms like “Google” or “literature” or “e-reader”—and see a chronological list of exactly what I said about those very terms. The pattern-seeking engine in my brain would fire on all cylinders and make a story of the searches, creating an unintentional email-chrestomathy, a greatest-hits collection of ideas I’d had around a single word or phrase. The results seemed weirdly definitive. I thought I was doing history in a mirror, but because the emails were pure matches for key terms, devoid of all but a little context, I fell for the historical fallacy

http://www.ftrain.com/times-inverted-index.html