Bibliographic record
Abstract
Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska & Jan Garlicki (eds.) Political Communication in the Era of New Technologies Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2013I worked as a volunteer in a political election campaign for the first time in 1965. I had already had some experience using the silkscreen method to produce road signs in the Traffic Engineering Department in my local municipality where I painted fire hydrants on pleasant days but worked in the sign shop when the weather was especially inclement. In those days, aspirant elected officials were pretty much restricted to spreading their message by: placing colourful signs at traffic intersections, in store windows and on the lawns of willing supporters; appearing in person at staged community events and debates with other candidates; distributing brochures and knocking on people's doors hoping to encourage support in brief conversations; and currying favour with the local press. All those methods are still employed, but a multi-layered process has been added. We now see politicians engage citizens using the social media. From YouTube videos to Internet postings and from annoying and unsolicited emails to even more annoying and unsolicited robocalls, potential leaders try everything from the dissemination of slogans and unflattering images of their opponents to capture our votes and to win our financial contributions to their campaigns.The methods used by politicians, of course, only amount to a portion of the wider influence of communications technology and the stealthy intrusion of data collection, analysis, storage and retrieval into our public lives. The thoughts and habits of voters are monitored in the cloud and political activities are crowdfunded. Barack Obama managed to finance two presidential campaigns by raising $1.4 billion from small donors using the Internet. Demonstrators from Tunis to Tehran to Tokyo to Toronto have brought tens of thousands to protest political tyranny and economic corruption by posting messages on social media. And, of course, elections themselves are increasingly being conducted electronically as people cast votes online.What this portends is anybody's guess. Some see the current trends as just one more step toward a kind of inverted totalitarianism in which nefarious agencies of the state will be able to collect data-often in freely posted opinions in the social media and blogs-on individual citizens as grounds for literally or figuratively deploying the thought police. Others imagine that it opens up a whole new scenario for direct democracy as electronic plebiscites and recall petitions for errant representatives can be conducted with no more effort than a few strokes on a keyboard. Technology can therefore be seen as an instrument to degrade or to enhance democratic practices.It shouldn't come as a surprise in this most surprising of times that new technologies are profoundly affecting political communication. Politics, after all, is just one element in our complex lives and technology is insinuating itself into all of them.Not only are we relentlessly inundated with a spate of new consumer products which probably shouldn't be mentioned by brand name since they'll likely be obsolete before this is printed or, perhaps more accurately, pixelized, but revolutionary technologies have already gone far beyond what was contemplated a scant decade or two ago when personal computers were introduced and soon afterward were accompanied and complemented by the invention of the world-wide-web. The web, in turn, almost immediately spawned utopian/dystopian applications including online commerce, music and film downloading and an arresting array of surveillance options adequate to the (un)expressed needs and desires of espionage agents, secret police forces, tax collectors, insurance companies and dystopian fantasists of all kinds.We are now promised that soon we will have almost all the books in the world uploaded to virtual libraries where, we should understand, there will also be a tremendous temptation for the more pathological authorities to push the delete key and set civilization back more dramatically than the consumption by fire of all the scrolls in Alexandria. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".