So long as the past and the present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the problems of the present. But suppose the past lives on in the present; suppose, though incapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active; then the historian may very well be related to the non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. ‘Nothing here but trees and grass’, thinks the traveller, and marches on. 'Look’, says the woodsman, 'there is a tiger in that grass’.
more on Facebook
What we do know is that Facebook, like many social media platforms, is an experiment engine: a machine for making A/B tests and algorithmic adjustments, fueled by our every keystroke. This has been used as a justification for this study, and all studies like it: Why object to this when you are always being messed with? If there is no ‘natural’ News Feed, or search result or trending topic, what difference does it make if you experience A or B?The difference, for [Edward] Shils and others, comes down to power, deception and autonomy. Academics and medical researchers have spent decades addressing these issues through ethical codes of conduct and review boards, which were created to respond to damaging and inhumane experiments, from the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to Milgram’s electric shocks. These review boards act as checks on the validity and possible harms of a study, with varying degrees of effectiveness, and they seek to establish traditions of ethical research. But what about when platforms are conducting experiments outside of an academic context, in the course of everyday business? How do you develop ethical practices for perpetual experiment engines?
There is no easy answer to this, but we could do worse than begin by asking the questions that Shils struggled with: What kinds of power are at work? What are the dynamics of trust, consent and deception? Who or what is at risk? While academic research is framed in the context of having a wider social responsibility, we can consider the ways the technology sector also has a social responsibility. To date, Silicon Valley has not done well in thinking about its own power and privilege, or what it owes to others. But this is an essential step if platforms are to understand their obligation to the communities of people who provide them with content, value and meaning.
What we do know is that Facebook, like many social media platforms, is an experiment engine: a machine for making A/B tests and algorithmic adjustments, fueled by our every keystroke. This has been used as a justification for this study, and all studies like it: Why object to this when you are always being messed with? If there is no ‘natural’ News Feed, or search result or trending topic, what difference does it make if you experience A or B?The difference, for [Edward] Shils and others, comes down to power, deception and autonomy. Academics and medical researchers have spent decades addressing these issues through ethical codes of conduct and review boards, which were created to respond to damaging and inhumane experiments, from the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to Milgram’s electric shocks. These review boards act as checks on the validity and possible harms of a study, with varying degrees of effectiveness, and they seek to establish traditions of ethical research. But what about when platforms are conducting experiments outside of an academic context, in the course of everyday business? How do you develop ethical practices for perpetual experiment engines?
It is a failure of imagination and methodology to claim that it is necessary to experiment on millions of people without their consent. There is no easy answer to this, but we could do worse than begin by asking the questions that Shils struggled with: What kinds of power are at work? What are the dynamics of trust, consent and deception? Who or what is at risk? While academic research is framed in the context of having a wider social responsibility, we can consider the ways the technology sector also has a social responsibility. To date, Silicon Valley has not done well in thinking about its own power and privilege, or what it owes to others. But this is an essential step if platforms are to understand their obligation to the communities of people who provide them with content, value and meaning.
Edna Lewis and the Café Nicholson
“I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left unnamed. Because I knew a bit about the history of Café Nicholson and the role that Edna Lewis, the African-American cookery writer and chef, played there, and because my eyesight isn’t so great, I wondered, perversely, whether the black woman ferrying what appears to be a pot of tea to the table was Lewis.” — John T. Edge
a world of books — but no modern ones
I memorised Tennyson, and read Homer in prose and Dante in verse; I shed half my childhood tears at The Mill on the Floss. I slept with Sherlock Holmes beside my pillow, and lay behind the sofa reading Roget. It was as though publication a century before made a book suitable – never was I told I ought not to read this or that until I was older. To my teacher’s horror my father gave me Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was still at primary school, and I was simply left to wander from Thornfield to Agincourt to the tent of sulking Achilles, making my own way.One beloved novel was Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii – I had no idea no one reads him now, or that he’s accused of being the worst novelist to ever have disgraced the page. I simply was content to dwell in his Victorian ideal of a mythic past, safe at a double distance from the confusion of the world outside my door….
Above all – committed to memory, read aloud at mealtimes and prettily framed on the dining-room wall – was the King James Bible. It was as constant as the air, and felt just as necessary, and I think I know its cadences as well as my own voice.
The effect on my writing has been profound, and inescapable: I soaked it all up, and now I’m wringing it out. My obsession with rhythm and beauty comes, I’m sure, from memorising the King James Bible’s peerless prose, and having grown up in the shade of sin and the light of redemption I suppose it’s no surprise that my debut novel After Me Comes the Flood has been called uncanny, sinister, strange (though I never intended to write that way – it’s just how my eyes were put in).
[gallery] “I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left unnamed. Because I knew a bit about the history of Café Nicholson and the role that Edna Lewis, the African-American cookery writer and chef, played there, and because my eyesight isn’t so great, I wondered, perversely, whether the black woman ferrying what appears to be a pot of tea to the table was Lewis.” — John T. Edge
I memorised Tennyson, and read Homer in prose and Dante in verse; I shed half my childhood tears at The Mill on the Floss. I slept with Sherlock Holmes beside my pillow, and lay behind the sofa reading Roget. It was as though publication a century before made a book suitable – never was I told I ought not to read this or that until I was older. To my teacher’s horror my father gave me Tess of the D'Urbervilles when I was still at primary school, and I was simply left to wander from Thornfield to Agincourt to the tent of sulking Achilles, making my own way.One beloved novel was Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii – I had no idea no one reads him now, or that he’s accused of being the worst novelist to ever have disgraced the page. I simply was content to dwell in his Victorian ideal of a mythic past, safe at a double distance from the confusion of the world outside my door….
Above all – committed to memory, read aloud at mealtimes and prettily framed on the dining-room wall – was the King James Bible. It was as constant as the air, and felt just as necessary, and I think I know its cadences as well as my own voice.
The effect on my writing has been profound, and inescapable: I soaked it all up, and now I’m wringing it out. My obsession with rhythm and beauty comes, I’m sure, from memorising the King James Bible’s peerless prose, and having grown up in the shade of sin and the light of redemption I suppose it’s no surprise that my debut novel After Me Comes the Flood has been called uncanny, sinister, strange (though I never intended to write that way – it’s just how my eyes were put in).
[gallery] rollership:
zombiegraycat: soviet-era sci fi art is one of the few things humans have done right.
