The influencing machine argument. Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine 2022-11-04
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The influencing machine argument, proposed by media scholar Nicholas Carr in his book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," suggests that the internet and other digital technologies have the power to shape and manipulate our thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs. According to Carr, these technologies act as "influencing machines" that alter the way we process information and interact with the world around us.
One of the main ways in which the internet acts as an influencing machine is through the way it structures our attention. The internet is designed to be constantly stimulating, with a never-ending stream of information and distractions at our fingertips. This can lead us to become more shallow in our thinking, skimming over content rather than engaging with it deeply. It can also make it difficult for us to focus on a single task for any length of time, as we are constantly bombarded with notifications and alerts.
Another way in which the internet acts as an influencing machine is through the way it shapes our social connections and relationships. The internet allows us to connect with people all over the world, but it can also lead to a disconnection from our physical communities and a reliance on online social connections. This can lead to a sense of isolation and loneliness, and can also make it more difficult for us to form and maintain close relationships in the real world.
The influencing machine argument also suggests that the internet and other digital technologies have the power to shape our beliefs and values. This is because the information we encounter online is often filtered and personalized based on algorithms that take into account our past behavior and preferences. As a result, we may be more likely to encounter information that confirms our existing beliefs and biases, rather than being exposed to diverse viewpoints that challenge our thinking. This can lead to the formation of echo chambers and the reinforcement of our preexisting beliefs.
Overall, the influencing machine argument highlights the power of the internet and other digital technologies to shape and manipulate our thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs. While these technologies bring many benefits, it is important to be aware of their potential to influence us and to consider the ways in which they may be shaping our attitudes and actions.
Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine
This is a constant battle in our society and technology changes and our use of it increases. Operating as a cipher in culture, a lens through which we scry reality, the media represents the true evil eye. All the magic has to come from the ideas. In 1903 a notorious mystic named Sergei Nilius came into contact with the document, had it translated into Russian, and released it like a plague into the world. This is a cultural exorcism to give you, the lowly consumer, some empowerment where there was none. Naval officers dressed in tutus engage in hypnotic and nonsensical rituals treating machine parts like fetishistic talismans.
The Influencing Machine: A Brief Visual History of the Media
She was twenty-one years old. Gladstone appears here--in cartoon form--in something very like her usual host role, orienting us to the various topics, explaining the background, introducing us to the major figures, and then standing back and letting them say what they have to say. It appears to be the last acceptable zone where we voluntarily play tricks with the mind and the eyes. They feel like a squishy halfway point between the human brain and Internet consciousness. The strength of this room is the intensity of messages and messaging — a symphony of noise.
Every week, the Peabody Award-winning public radio program "On the Media" takes an essential but maddeningly immaterial subject -- how journalism, entertainment, advertising and other communications work -- and makes it graspable, urgent and wryly amusing. In 1613 Barnaby Rich spoke that books overcharged the world to where the information from everyday would not be able to be comprehended. The publication is both an exhibition catalogue and a field guide to tactical media literacy, and it is itself a cultural exorcism: a holistic confrontation. It engages passersby and uninformed publics with experiments in situational media. The media is now a corporate entity owned by telecommunications companies, by oligarchs.
The first Soros Center for Contemporary Art began in Budapest in 1990. And you start to develop a feeling about the Kafkian atmosphere of a structure too randomly oppressive to be understood. What history is about is all vectors, forces in conflicts, global equilibrium, etc. This isn't a sensibility that translates easily to print, but Gladstone has nailed it by opting for a comic-book format for her first book, Modeled on Scott McCloud's classic primer "Understanding Comics," "The Influencing Machine" visits such persistent concerns as freedom of speech, sensationalism, groupthink, information overload and, of course, objectivity and bias. I will hazard to say here that this was not an exhibition but a superstitious ritual to desecrate this power structure for political activism.
We went with a full documentary setup to get her life story on camera. The Moscow New Media Art Lab 1993-94 was a mixed theory and practice course for artists in preparation for the final exhibition New MediaTopia, led by artists and critics from the local SCCA network. In fact, this is the great experiment of saying his name and seeing what it does to people, if they are able to hold a coherent conversation, if they know anything about him or if they revert to superstitious catchphrases. This is also the gallery that brings our story into the present moment. These mental constructs take on a subjective existence of their own, further complicating the situation. The delusion therefore fulfills the patient's need for a causal explanation of otherwise inexplicable events, and indicates that schizophrenia is in an advanced stage of development. Analysis Of Google Making USupid He states how he used to spend hours reading, but his concentration started to drift after two or three pages.
On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia
Cambridge analytica was recent news. The book's title comes from a delusion common in schizophrenics that some terrible outside entity is forcing shameful, unbidden thoughts into their heads when in fact those thoughts originate in their own minds. Take us to our leader. Her work has been featured in Lawfare, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, and CBC. For one thing, the argument that journalism isn't actually in decline, because there was never a more elevated station by which to compare, is not particularly reassuring. There is an artist contract from the SCCA Moldova that stipulates that funding cannot be used for creating political influence, propaganda purposes, for interfering with a democratic election, legal processes, lobbying, or for promoting a particular political agenda. Issues discussed include bias, objectivity, misinformationethics, and a large chapter on war reporting.
The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld
The effect of such a PR campaign has multiple beneficiaries and helps to further a very specific narrative about power structures. Whilst never penetrating any meaningful details of his work, the media leads with this as a way to trigger and short circuit the conversation. We have to zoom way back. Here we see the anomaly, the concept of Point Zero and how this artificially advanced curatorial practice was implemented in an unnaturally synchronized manner. This is the real influencing machine.
The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media.
The American Journal of Psychiatry. Your body, your identity and your mind is a battleground. Historical and cultural monuments are replaced with the ephemeral pop stars of the West, a new church of consumerbased icons of the free market were born. They are of course the tea leaves of modernity. Could one argue that at some point in the mid-1990s, the SCCA Network, with all its facilities, financial power, focused training in avantgarde practices, and network cohesion, might have been more advanced than the organically networked West? I really did contemplate this question to myself, is the internet or even video games actually reprogramming our brains? The through line of this research has spanned my art-world career as an art journalist, gallerist, art historian, curator, and anthropologist. Bringing Neoliberalism to the frontlines of the Culture War, he would take measures to assure that no one could have a greater philanthropic impact than him. She was at the SCCA in Belgrade when the news came in that George Soros had gone on TV to announce that he supported the NATO invasion of Serbia.
Interview: Brooke Gladstone, Author Of 'The Influencing Machine'
. Google may make us seem lazy because we do less reading and physical activity. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, it took me about two decades to finally come to a conclusion about a few things. It was supernatural and supreme. They were describing a prototype for a retrofuturistic computer.
Brooke Gladstone’s Graphic Commentary of Media’s ‘Influencing Machine’
In 1994 in the recently demilitarized zone of Crimea, Alchemic Surrender opened a very special doorway to the weaponization of art and context. A drawing is obviously the creation of some fallible human being. It reveals contemporary art as a true battleground for beta-testing radical ideology. Weaponized Folklore I will tell you now two stories about the history of The Protocols. It encourages artists to work with fringe demographics institutions of interest to the NGO movement such as insane asylums, Roma communities, disabled communities, factory workers, orphanages. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
