Interested in stretching your brain this afternoon? Try to wrap your brain around this – Computer modeling (at least in this study) indicates that totalitarian states like the USSR, China, and increasingly W’s America have got it wrong: beyond a certain point, the mighty Wurlitzer of the mass media fails, and actually creates diversity of viewpoints, even if everyone is constantly being bombarded intensely with the same message.
More below the fold…
I guess we’re all “living experimental proof” of that, but if the results hold up, it is a hopeful idea, as it implies that all totalitarian systems (governments, churches, big businesses, etc.) contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Or, in layperson’s language, Princess Leia got it right and Orwell’s O’Brien in 1984 got it wrong:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. … How does one man assert his power over another … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. … A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. … If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–for ever.”
Governor Tarkin: You don’t know how hard I found it, signing the order to terminate your life.
Princess Leia: I’m surprised that you had the courage to take the responsibility yourself.
Governor Tarkin: Princess Leia, before your execution, you will join me at a ceremony that will make this battle station operational. No star system will dare oppose the Emperor now.
Princess Leia: The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Here’s the abstract; the full paper is short (5 pages, including footnotes), but not for the faint of heart. If you’re into research on nonlinear system, chaos theory and their potential applications to the social sciences you might enjoy it, though.
Nonequilibrium transition induced by mass media in a model for social influence
Authors: J. C. González-Avella, M. G. Cosenza, K. Tucci
We study the effect of mass media, modeled as an applied external field, on a social system based on Axelrod’s model for the dissemination of culture. The numerical simulations show that the system undergoes a nonequilibrium phase transition between an ordered phase (homogeneous culture) specified by the mass media and a disordered (culturally fragmented) one. The critical boundary separating these phases is calculated on the parameter space of the system, given by the intensity of the mass media influence and the number of options per cultural attribute. Counterintuitively, mass media can induce cultural diversity when its intensity is above some threshold value. The nature of the phase transition changes from continuous to discontinuous at some critical value of the number of options.
I had a thought the other day (yeah frightening) that normally when you are in school doing a research paper first thing you go to is the news papers. Our media has been outright lying the last 5 years… who has kept a written history of the truth?
This is like to old joke in the Soviet Union of their two major papers “Truth” and “News” the saying goes there is no Truth in the News nor News in the Truth
Awesome. See, this is what they get for mocking Foucault. He knew the use of Bentham’s panopticon would diversify sites of resistance and thus lead to increased revolutionary potential.
We should also save .38 Special a seat in the gifted class:
Hold on loosely
but don’t let go
if you cling too tightly
you’re gonna lose control…
I think this result follows from many point of view. From a simple economic view, the more uniform you make your product, the more people you will find whose needs it does not meet, and who will search for or create alternative products.
From an information theory view, the cost of censoring alternative points of view winds up being strictly larger than the cost of disseminating those points of view. In plain English, a censorship regime always has to spend more energy to censor someone than she does to say something. (In the long term; as with most cases, this can be reversed in the short term at a high long term cost)
From a computational view, these models all require some strong central organization running everything. And strong central organizations do not scale well, and they react to change disastrously.
So, to oversimplify, conformity ultimately breeds nonconformity. And Rush (the group, not the lying broadcaster), when stating conform or be cast out, was only echoing the long ago, in a galaxy far, far away utterance of the Grand Moff so coveniently posted in my sig line. Okay, I’m done now.
I voted for “Interesting Meme” … under protest as I don’t much like the whole meme thing.
Interesting paper. Thank you very much for letting me know about its existence.
What the devil, BTW, is “lanl.gov?”
lanl.gov = website of los alamos national laboratory
(They do nuclear weapons research there, but also have a fair amount of other topics–I know someone who used to work on computational models of HIV/AIDS using their supercomputers, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they provided some hardware and/or manpower for this study.)
Thanks froggywomp (good handle, BTW) I should have figured that out (being from NM and all….grumble, grumble, grumble)