Digital Engagement: America’s Use (and Misuse) of Marshall McLuhan
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In recent years the United States has turned to digital technologies to buoy its response to anti-Americanism in the so-called “Muslim world.” At least three concepts appear to be shaping this effort. The first is a marketing-based strategy called “engagement.” The other two are derivations of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” and his aphorism that “the medium is the message.” This article focuses on the uses and misuses of McLuhan’s work by foreign policy officials in Washington. It argues that their stated purpose—to empower people and further inter-cultural understanding through dialogue—is dubious. Indeed, pronouncements regarding these potentials now sit uncomfortably alongside Washington’s use of these same technologies to manage dissent. By assessing digital engagement and a more general initiative called “internet freedom” (both in the light of what McLuhan, in fact, says), American aspirations involving digital communications are shown to be more than just contradictory; they are dangerously misguided.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it