The Internet, Construals, and Binary Reality
are symbols the new real?
Posted May 25, 07:43 pm in epistemology, human nature, hyperreality
This year marks the 16th year I’ve been using the internet. During this time, I’ve seen it grow from a very obscure resource that only weirdos and college students used to something that nearly everyone uses, and on a daily basis. It’s been one of the most remarkable shifts in our technological lives, and it has proven itself to have facilitated some of the greatest shifts in our inner lives as well.
One of the biggest revelations of the internet for me is the concept of construals. And though it’s certainly not unique to the internet, I’ll explain it via an example that relates to the internet. Here is a process I’ve witnessed hundreds of times:
1) Someone on a discussion forum (message board) makes some kind of comment.
2) A number of people take issue with the comment.
3) People who either disagree with the comment or otherwise don’t like the commenter dissect the comment, and the person who made the comment.
4) They cast all kinds of aspersions about the individual, his personal and political beliefs, and what kind of person he is, extrapolating all kinds of information from the short passage the OP (original poster) wrote.
5) A giant flame war/train wreck ensues.
This process may not seem all that remarkable to you, but I find it very interesting because it demonstrates that words someone types on the internet, perhaps quite casually, creates to third-parties what appears to them to be critical insights into the writer’s mind. The analysis of words has a tendency to take on a highly deconstructionist approach that attempts to profile the individual in question in a manner that reads too much into words that were either carelessly penned or which were written in a conversational manner that didn’t really imply a fully developed argument. The interpretation of these words comes to conclusions that while they may literally match with the words stated, usually denies the writer the benefit of any contextual meaning, complexity of thought, and expects complete resolution of all internal intellectual conflict or attitudes. This problem is further exacerbated by the general dearth of words that an individual typically writes online compared with the number of words the same individual would speak in a typical conversation in order to convey the same message, and the lack of a developmental dialogue between the speaker and the listener that clears up questions about the speaker’s comments; therefore, fewer words are being used as the basis for interpretive conclusions by third-parties.
As such, I’ve noticed that often these third-party analyses come to the conclusion that the person in question— who in real life is probably not a particularly controversial figure— is prejudiced, a bigot, a racist, an ideologue, a moron, irresponsible, etc. But it’s not the off-the-wall character assessments that I find curious so much as it is the idea that something very large, complex, and with serious implications gets fashioned out of something— a simple message board comment— that is typically very small and rather insubstantial. The few words that someone says are used by outsiders to construct that person’s entire personality and worldview.
This highly limited simulcrum of the poster is considered by the third-party who created it to be an accurate representation of the real person behind it. Implicit in this is that there is absolutely no divide between the corporeal world and the condensation of it into representative symbols (words); here is a world where people take symbols as more than just vague indicators of reality, and instead expand them to be just as whole and real as the real thing. This is a construal.
Though this concept became apparent to me through the internet, in reality this behavior is not really a function of technological change. As humans, we often use small pieces of information to inform our behavioral heuristics, and we always have. If someone’s resume says they are highly educated, we may be more likely to higher them for a job that we perceive as demanding a higher intellectual reserve— even if their degree has nothing to do with the job. We set floors on educational backgrounds, effectively screening out those who don’t have a piece of paper saying they have a degree. We assume, inaccurately, that educational background proves the intellectual qualification of an individual; it is, however, an informed guess that more often than not is a winning strategy.
Evolutionary psychology suggests that we need to constantly calculate ‘most likely’ scenarios from the least possible amount of available information; it helps us make decisions quickly. Otherwise, we might be putting ourselves at potential risk while we amass enough evidence to make completely informed decisions. This preserves our well-being in hostile, unpredictable, or uncertain environments— which, if you think about it, pretty much describes any environment in life.
So clearly, construals are not a new phenomenon, but it seems especially salient now given that the written word (internet/email/text messages) is becoming increasingly central as a form of interpersonal communication. Here, it is much easier to lose the context, the tone, the body language, and the personality behind messages; perhaps we might even say that the complexity of sentiments is not present, having been stripped out by technological limitations imposed by the medium.
Think about how this chain of events might affect perception of a message you write. Imagine, for example, that something you send jokingly to a friend is retrieved by an unintended party at a later time than when it was sent. Depending on what you wrote, the results could range from humorous to potentially devastating to the perception of your character. Likewise, something that someone wrote online years ago without much thought can now be retrieved for eternity, and can come to negatively define an individual because of the ‘set in stone’ quality of online writing, where the exact same thoughts stated out loud in a conversation would not create much controversy or elicit so much scrutiny. As my friend Dominik once quipped, “the internet never forgets.” But more than that, it also has a way of distorting.
Following this? Let’s make it even more tangible. Say you are applying for a job. You put in an application, they seem interested, and everything looks good. Then, someone from the company starts searching around the internet and finds your Facebook page. On it, there’s a picture of you drinking beer and looking inebriated. Also you use an expletive in a comment to someone.
You discover later that you didn’t get the job. You find out somehow that it’s because of the Facebook page. Okay, so now the company representative is no longer interacting with you or directly interpreting your character through personal interaction with you. The context is gone, the tone of your character is gone, they have no idea what you’re like in person. All they are doing is reconstructing a ‘you’ out of fragments of conversation and snippets of speech which have themselves been condensed down from real life into brief snapshots (words, photos, emoticons), and placed online. These snapshots represent mere seconds in time, yet they now define you despite the fact that they are but tiny, tiny fractions of your life.
The employers are now taking those snapshots and building 3D models out of them about who you are and what you’re like. They are not interacting with you, but instead with some simulacrum of you, believing that this simulacrum is equivalent to, or highly likely to be faithfully representative of you.
But it’s more than likely not.
Of course, the more evidence one has, the more easily one could make some sort of conclusion about who you are. But according to Nicholas Carr’s argument in his troubling article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” (synopsis here) the internet has been reshaping our minds to avoid drawing thoughtful conclusions. Instead, he argues, it encourages us to come to conclusions quickly so we can move on to some other distractions.
Data, data, everywhere...
why we should reject extreme views about data source validity in constructing knowledge
Posted Apr 16, 01:03 pm in epistemology, research
Some academics are not secure about knowledge without having reams of “data” about it. But what exactly is data? To many people, it just means numbers that somehow tells us something about something else. Often, data is a proxy for information we can’t really get directly. If you ask someone how much they would pay for something, you’re trying to gain access to a hidden piece of information that you can’t access directly. You would like to be able to reach into someone’s head and grab the number, but you can’t. Instead, you have to ask. The problem with asking, however, is that the person may not really know how much they would pay. What they tell you and what they might actually do could be two very different things. Many researchers have issues with this, but I want to explain here why I think it’s misguided to categorically dismiss certain forms data.
Okay, truthfully, I wouldn’t place a tremendous amount of stock in survey data. Often if you ask people about things that intimately relate to them, they have little insight or even self-awareness. This creates a problem in data accuracy. I once read a paper in which respondents were asked, among other things, how neurotic they considered themselves. What person is going to be able to answer this accurately? People have a vested interest in believing that they are not neurotic and are likely motivated to have an overly positive view of themselves; moreover, they probably don’t have any awareness of how neurotic they are. You could get this information much more reliably from asking the people who have to spend extended amounts of time with them. But beyond that, it gets even more complicated once you realize that people have different scales. A 7 to one person is a 9 to another. Over a group of people, these numbers end up muddled because of intersubjectivity. But often, it’s the best we have, and we have to make do with it. And generally, if you take the time to control for variables, you can minimize uncertainty.
Nevertheless, there are those who argue that “factual” data is the only way to go. This is stuff like scanner data (quantitative information about sales, for example— with no room for “interpretation”). This information, it is argued, consist of “facts.” They are not debatable, touchy-feely constructs dealing with emotions and nebulous latent thought patterns. Yet, in my opinion, numbers only tell part of the story. You can get a what from that sort of data, but it’s much harder to get a why. You can speculate, but speculation only gets you so far. Some might argue that getting a why from interviewing doesn’t work either. I can see why they might say that (perceived lack of generalizability), but nevertheless, one can still gain some valuable insights, especially over large sample sizes.
I know of a few researchers in marketing who do, almost exclusively, ethnographic studies. This means that they interview a usually small number of people and perform something akin to psychoanalysis to make sense of their comments, from which they extract broader level understandings about people and culture. This is a method that many people apparently view with skepticism and scorn. “How do we know that this stuff is true, and that it’s generalizable?” a colleague once asked me. This, to me, invites the question of how we “know” anything.
Knowledge is a strange thing. What does it mean to “know” something, anyway? The best explanation of knowledge that I’ve ever heard was featured in Michael Shermer’s excellent book Why People Believe Weird Things. In it, he offers a thought experiment.
There are a number of people who are vehement Holocaust deniers. They claim that this genocide never happened, and people who believe it did are ignoring mountains of evidence showing that it didn’t happen. These people then present certain pieces of evidence that they have collected that indicate that they are correct. A piece of evidence Shermer received from one denier was a photograph of a gas chamber that showed that the gas lines weren’t hooked up properly. Therefore they could not have been used. This was at one of the concentration camps with the most supposed casualties. The denier had numerous other similar forms of ‘proof’ as well.
So what are we to make of this?
Shermer’s response is rather remarkable for its simple but profound intuition: he states that knowledge is not produced from isolated pieces of evidence. It is based on a convergence of evidence from may different areas. It’s not just the millions of bodies found, it’s not just the thousands of witnesses, it’s not just the trove of photographs, it’s not just the millions of pages of documentation. It’s all of these things together that all point towards the same thing, which is that the Holocaust happened.
Isolated photographs don’t prove anything; human interpretation of knowledge is based on our assessment of what is most likely true based on all information available. One photograph of a disconnected gas chamber does not disconfirm all the aforementioned evidence, and to think that it does suggests the presence of motivated reasoning more than anything else. Even a hundred such photographs don’t show much— because the relative amount of evidence between the it happened group and the denier group is at such a disparity that it’s virtually impossible for an unbiased party looking at all the evidence to arrive at the conclusion that it didn’t happen.
Likewise, I think it’s very important for researchers to have a somewhat contemplative view of data. Despite the presence of “definitive” journal articles about certain subjects, one sample of data and its interpretation is not definitive; more important is the convergence of many different types of data onto one most likely truth. More data from more diverse sources ensures that any one piece is not biased, and isn’t misleading you in a certain direction. However, as anyone who has been collecting data for any amount of time will tell you, it isn’t easy to get data, much less many different forms of data that relate to the same constructs. But if you ask me, from an epistemological point of view, it’s the only way to establish knowledge; the more data you have that all point at the same thing, the more you can be certain about something. It’s a rather simple concept that forms the basis of the scientific method.
Even if some people find certain forms of data less reliable than others, all data collected in a responsible fashion can be useful in constructing truth— especially when combined with other relevant data. Every piece can play a role, just as each brick plays a role in building a house. True, not all data is perfect; in fact, very little of it is. But it is not productive to dismiss entire categories of data simply because it came from a survey or it is based on ethnographic information. It is a grievous research error, in my opinion, to make the perfect the enemy of the good; it undermines the role of information diversity in arriving at truth.
The Business of the Hyperreal
the ubiquity of imaginary places
Posted Apr 13, 06:18 pm in branding, epistemology, experiences, hyperreality, postmodernism
At one of the big casinos in Las Vegas, you’ll find an elaborate scene that perfectly captures the beauty of Venice. There, you can sit aboard a slow-moving gondola with your sweetheart, while a mustachioed Italian man quietly ferries you from dock to dock. All the while, the gentle aroma of Ciabatta bread wafts through the air, and the warm sound of a concertina drifts through the background. The entire experience is one that perfectly reconstructs the feel of Venice.
The only thing is, if you went to the actual Venice, you would never have an experience like this. You can ride a boat in the real Venice, but it won’t be romantically quiet, there won’t be the smell of Ciabatta bread, and Rossini won’t be playing. Instead, it would smell like bilge, the ferryman will be hurrying to get you to your destination because he can make more money if he gets more passengers, and the only sound you’ll hear is the sound of water splashing all over your clothes.
Yet, despite this apparent artifice, you can identify this scene as Venice. It’s impossible to mistake it for anything else. This scene in Las Vegas recreates the idyllic, popular conception of Venice, the Venice that resides in our minds. This Venice is a place that does not exist in real life. It is a composite of pieces of our collective consciousness. It’s all the things we’d expect to see, hear, smell, and sense in Venice, but which don’t really coalesce in this way when you’re actually there.
This concept is known as hyperreality. It’s such a strange concept, but it’s one we’re all intimately familiar with in some way, because hyperreality has been sold to us in so many ways, and on a daily basis. Disney World has been described as the ultimate expression of hyperreality— and it’s one of the first vacation spots that many children around the world go to, and it creates many people’s impressions of other countries. Some of our most enduring perceptions about what romantic relationships are ‘supposed’ to be like and the way we’re ‘supposed’ to act in them stem from the way we’ve seen them in movies. The way we think women are supposed to look (including such things as ideal weight and flawless complexions) are rooted in heavily-touched up photos that have little to do with reality, but everything to do with a reconstructed, idealized reality.
The reason I bring all this up is that the other night, I went to a bar that I had never been to before. The moment I walked in, I felt like I had been transported somewhere else. The decor was somewhat anachronous; there were antique-looking green Victorian style chairs arranged around dark, ovular wooden tables, the walls were filled with bottles of obscure beers and liquors I’d never heard of before, the wood-framed bar looked like it was from another era entirely. The ambiance generally reminded me of what I imagined a somewhat upper-crust English pub would be like in the 1950s, where corpulent, monacled gentlemen might tease their handlebar mustaches and puff away at their tobacco pipes while perusing the Sunday Times.
We see places that try to re-create themes from popular consciousness somewhat frequently. Think of T.G.I. Friday’s, a corporate restaurant chain whose walls are covered from top to bottom in weird, rustic nostalgia that manages to both capture the oddest fringes of Americana while presenting it all as a completely normal and commonplace series of images (when was the last time you ate dinner next to a 20ft long wooden swordfish wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball hat— besides the last time you were at T.G.I. Friday’s, that is?). Oddly, this forced aesthetic of post hoc historification and semiotic mythmaking is comforting for many people. But that’s a particularly extreme example; I’ve been to plenty of Mexican restaurants that try to simulate the experience of being in small-town Mexico with the aid of huge murals; townscapes replete with children playing in the street, lifesized buildings painted on the restaurant walls, and pastel-colored senoritas standing on flowered balconies and under large arched doorways.
But something unsettled me about this bar I was at. There was a shaggy green carpet underfoot (which incidentally is not the type of flooring you typically want in a crowded bar), and the place had the musty smell of genuine antiquity. This place, it seemed, really had been around since at least the 1950s (a notion confirmed by the menu).
And then it struck me what had been bothering me. The sum total of my lifetime experience with these sorts of themed pubs had been with re-creations and remodeled versions— never with the real thing. And now, here I was at the real thing! My impression— and expectations— of what a place like this was supposed to be like was based entirely on hyperreal simulacra of it, pieced together from such places as spy movies, books, television shows, and other themed establishments. When you see the “real” version of a hyperreal place, I tend to think that you’re not really prepared for it because it has a way of defying your rather unrealistic expectations of it— which creates the very bizarre problem of something authentic ostensibly lacking authenticity.
If your image of something is based on an idealization of it, how can the real thing ever hold up? An idealization usually means that the gaps are all filled, the blemishes smoothed away, and the diffuse themes that define a place or idea are effectively condensed into a consistent, concrete, and easily digestible series of images; such simulacra allow you to imbibe prevailing themes very quickly, where by contrast the “real thing” typically takes some time for your mind to synthesize into a overarching gestalt.
The implications of this are curious. What does this mean in a world filled with images— manipulated, editorialized, and spread across the globe through various digital channels? These images will form our impressions of the world around us, whereas in the past, our own experiences were what defined our understandings of the world. Will everything we ever see in real life from here on out be a replication of something we’ve seen in a movie first? Which is the real when the fake is our first experience, and hence the first real to us? And what does all this mean to our interpretations and expectations of reality and our interactions with the world and our peers?
And now that I step back a bit and reflect on my experience at the bar, I have to face an unusual epistemological question: how do I know that this place I was at was a “real” bar that was essentially unchanged from the 1950s?
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