Bibliographic record
Abstract
We humans "know" from information mediated through our "natural senses." All outside signals come to us through some medium-sound waves, pressure and touch, light waves, radio and television waves, and so forth. McLuhan's famous mantra "The medium is the message" paradoxically highlighted the critical transformation of meaning when each type of medium-radio, television, drums, hand signals-by its very nature modifies the message it is transmitting. In this month's column Dr. Zingrone brings challenging new ideas to the field of human communication and vividly describes the communication distortions that occur when the overload of increasingly complex modern media results in a paradoxical diminution of meaning itself. He has coined a term for this unintended consequence and given it to his exciting new book, The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos (1). Many of us may recognize the effect created by this accelerating phenomenon-our stupefaction as we experience the onslaught of sound and visual signals produced by a television news screen, where an avalanche of rapidly changing, overlapping, and distorted visual images flash at our eyes while screeching, undulating synthetic "music" crashes about our ears. And in that chaos we struggle to find meaning,Dr. Zingrone, who worked with McLuhan and who has written extensively about his work (2,3), has succeeded in his new book to move the pioneering work of human communication scientists forward and thereby help us all to understand the developing paradox and danger of more communication yet less meaning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.130 | 0.066 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".