"When social media users do encounter misinformation, they largely follow accounts with whom they are likely to agree and consume outlets that reflect their perspectives. As a result, digital misinformation generally preaches to the choir, potentially making attitudes or behaviors more extreme but not acting as vectors of mass influence or persuasion. If anything, the causal arrows may face in the opposite directions: beliefs may explain digital misinformation consumption more than the other way around." (Source)

Connected to yesterday's post on one-sided conversations. This is an interesting article exploring the overall failure in how we've handled misinformation. Basically we understand what misinformation is, how it spreads, and who is most susceptible; but attempts to fact check it have been futile. The article suggests that this is due to a failure to fully and properly understand the role of this sort of communication. Rather than thinking of this as a problem between true and false, we need to be understanding how communication more broadly impacts identity, trust, and polarization.

It's a good article that touches on several things I've been thinking about lately, including what the role of helpful communication needs to be moving forward. Check it out.

Places are not discovered, they're built.

I've been working through Logan and Molotch's 'Urban Fortunes: the Political Economy of Place' over the last couple weeks. It's been a bit slow (partially because I'm also reading through the Wheel of Time in my third attempt to get through the massive 13 book series); but I'm making progress.

One argument that they are making in the book is that how we define a place, how it comes to be, is a social construction largely based upon a tension between use and exchange values. Use values are all the ways the place you live in impacts your daily life, while exchange values is what that place is worth as a commodity. These values come about through all sorts of human efforts and activities, but the main point is that what makes a place a place is a constantly evolving thing driven by social action. It is through this social action that inequalities in class are both created and maintained.

"High status within the social hierarchy can bring access to the most desirable places (for residence or investment) and a guarantee of a rewarding future for whatever place one controls. At the same time a high status for one's geographical place means the availability of resources (rents, urban services, prestige) that enhance life chances generally."

You can really get a sense of how this all works out when you look at things through the lens of raising kids in a particular locale. Home values end up being directly tied to the quality of other aspects of society (better and more available green space, school sizes and quality, daycare, proximity to pollution, etc). Your income defines your ability to afford the place you raise your kids which has an impact on the resources available to your kids to help them lead healthier, happier, and more possible lives.

While none of this is a new idea, I think what matters here is to keep Logan and Molotch's argument in front of us: this is all made through social action. And as such, can be unmade.

I've been doing this self-guided urban theory reading course over the last little while (with a few intermissions) and this week's reading is from Jane Jacobs. I've read The Death and Life of Great American Cities before, but it's nice to revisit it. This morning I was reading from the chapter on the role of city sidewalks in assimilating kids into public life and was wondering if this is true anymore.

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn—if they learn at all—the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public responsibility for you."

Granted, I don't live in a large city, but it seems to me that the notion of public responsibility has so eroded that I'm not sure there's much left to be assimilated into. Something I write about often here is the dynamic between public and private life and the sort of collapsing of the two into each other. A big fan of Hannah Arendt, I like her idea that the public realm has become primarily about protecting private interests. This gives me a helpful way of understanding the loss of public responsibility for one another.

A while back I noted this idea of collective, or shared, responsibility in keeping kids safe; but it's interesting to also think about this as Jacobs did on the shared responsibility of helping kids learn public responsibility. Specifically, how this can't really be taught. It needs to be seen and experienced. But how can kids learn something that they can no longer see?

“The ideal of universal small property held those without property in collective check while it lured them on as individuals. They would fight alongside those who already had it, joining with them in destroying holdovers from the previous epoch which hampered the way up for the small owner.”

I started reading White Collar by C. Wright Mills this weekend, a book I picked up a few years ago and never got to. It's a bit of a social history on the American middle class and the rise of white collar work. I'm only just into it, but there's already some great nuggets in here. This piece (above) is notable to me, as it helps illustrate the myths that have propped up capitalism over here.

There was this emerging narrative in the 19th century that American was the land of small fortunes rather than 'great wealth' and that anyone could achieve this. This note here around the way the seeming accessibility of property ownership put those without property in solidarity with property owners do is a fascinating look at a myth that we are now seeing crumble. As the ideal of property ownership becomes less available to each successive generation and the division of wealth becomes more stark, I wonder if that solidarity will fully collapse.

“The last thing we need is blind optimism about technology. History is rife with innovations that failed to being shared prosperity… Nothing says that tech progress will automatically benefit everyone... That depends on the choices we make as a society, and those choices have moral aspects we can’t sidestep.”

Bregman talks about the need for a cyclical relationship between tech/science and activism. He notes that science has saved more lives than all the most famous activists combined. Yet, activism is still needed to give tech a moral centre.

AI is a perfect example of this.

Are there real, life saving opportunities with AI? Of course. Everything from medical scans to climate change mitigation can be possible with well deployed AI. But we also cannot ignore the ethical arguments against AI. The energy and water use, the loss of jobs, and the cognitive decline associated with it are all legitimate concerns that need to be taken seriously. And, let's be honest, not every company investing in AI is making the world a better place. Most are seeing it as a way to increase profits.

So yes, advancement in technology is necessary; but without moral guidance we can do more harm than good.