Public Audio
Mateus Guzzo
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Is it possible to measure the state of the public sphere of a given country in real time? What are the factors that need to be taken in consideration in order to do so? Inspired by the project CyberSyn developed by the British cybernetician Stafford Beer in 1970, Public Audio proposes a hypothetical model for measuring and monitoring the entire media ecosystem of Brazil. Through the use of variance attenuation and categorical recursivity, each level of the media ecology influences the analysis of the following one, proving a diagrammatic image of the public sphere in real time. What are the levels of misinformation and confusion at this time? Is ownership concentration too high? Is the level of content diversity appropriate? Is the ecosystem offering enough reflexivity to further the public debate? These questions are explored through an interactive diagram that could aid policy makers and civil society actors in making better decisions about the media conditions in real time.
Arising from Media Democracy Movements in Brazil, the project became interested in exploring active online context-aware governance systems. Through six layers of analysis (infrastructure, organization, platform, content, context, and anxiety), Public Audio situates online content moderation at the heart of information organization, circulation, contextualization, and mobilization in networked societies. This arena of internet governance has shifted from traditional gatekeeping practices (should the information be published or not?) to a more hybrid and complicated curatorial, contextual, and algorithmic process of attributing value to content (of everything that is published, what is most important?). For this reason, content moderation has been an important site of testing and intervening in controlled resource allocation and decision making models, not solely for media organizations but also as an analogue of societal governance at large.
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Is it possible to measure the state of the public sphere of a given country in real time? What are the factors that need to be taken in consideration in order to do so? Inspired by the project CyberSyn developed by the British cybernetician Stafford Beer in 1970, Public Audio proposes a hypothetical model for measuring and monitoring the entire media ecosystem of Brazil. Through the use of variance attenuation and categorical recursivity, each level of the media ecology influences the analysis of the following one, proving a diagrammatic image of the public sphere in real time. What are the levels of misinformation and confusion at this time? Is ownership concentration too high? Is the level of content diversity appropriate? Is the ecosystem offering enough reflexivity to further the public debate? These questions are explored through an interactive diagram that could aid policy makers and civil society actors in making better decisions about the media conditions in real time.
Arising from Media Democracy Movements in Brazil, the project became interested in exploring active online context-aware governance systems. Through six layers of analysis (infrastructure, organization, platform, content, context, and anxiety), Public Audio situates online content moderation at the heart of information organization, circulation, contextualization, and mobilization in networked societies. This arena of internet governance has shifted from traditional gatekeeping practices (should the information be published or not?) to a more hybrid and complicated curatorial, contextual, and algorithmic process of attributing value to content (of everything that is published, what is most important?). For this reason, content moderation has been an important site of testing and intervening in controlled resource allocation and decision making models, not solely for media organizations but also as an analogue of societal governance at large.
Stafford Beer's goal with the CyberSyn project, in 1972, was to conceptualize a way to simulate Chile's entire economy. His hypothesis was that there was a lag between the economic data that informed policy decisions, and the real economy. Policy makers would take a long time to act on a problem that was already at full swing. This was at the time, in fact, less of a Chilean problem than a question for the world at large: how could politics and data be modeled by one another.
The new modelling instruments to be used in Chile, decided Beer and his team, should be designed in a way that it would be possible for the human brain to grasp and debate, in a collective setting of no more than 7 individuals. In order to summarize and translate the massive amount of complex and constantly changing data, Beer created a system that could use variance attenuation, analyzing all variables pertaining to the state of economic performance and translating them between 0 and 1. On top of that, the system would also employ recursivity, which meant that it wouldn't differentiate between high or low-level processes (how a sector is doing vs. how a specific firm is doing), therefore allowing for the analysis of the whole economy under one single model that would "trickle" down through different levels of analysis (from the whole nation, to a particular factory.
It was "recursive" because every layer was attenuated (simplified) and used as data for the next one. In this way, the resulting "picture" was an image of the actual economy, with also the possibility of zooming in and out in order to obtain the most relevant information and make better decisions. Remember, this is 1972 and Chile is under the socialist government of Allende. The bulk of economic activity is under the control of the state which sought to 'regulate' the economy. According to Beer's account, Dr. Allende's intentions were not to rule the country, but rather to create a cybernetic system where "the people" would occupy the top management layer.
I believe that the political discussion of whether such a system should exist, could exist, or even would be desirable nowadays – or even considering the recent discussion about data biases and how this system in it of itself would "design" politics, steering the country to a specific skewed direction – is fascinating. This discussion should be accompanied by a critical account analysing the Chinese governance mechanisms, but also with considerations from the recent discoveries that arose from the Facebook papers, in which a private entity from Silicon valley skews the health of millions in order to make profit. Throw into the mix the debates surrounding individuation, the failures of western countries in containing the spread of COVID-19, and Californian ideology, and this discussion could become even more robust. The fact is that this system that I am writing about was real, and was destroyed by the US-sponsored coup of 9/11, 1973, removing Allende from power and killing 30.000.
Public Audio - a speculative media governance panel - draws from this excavation to simulate the current state of public discourse in Brazil. By imagining that this would have access to critical and strategic data, what kind of questions could we ask (or even should ask) to create a more safe, democratic public sphere, where information is not used as a weapon, but as an intentional prompt for discussion and cultural celebration.
I moved from this to study then how interfaces "govern". I first read this nomenclature in Benjamin Bratton's work, but I am sure many others have talked about this before (perhaps Brecht being the earliest that I can remember). I thought how control rooms were the epitome of centralized interfacial governance. And how this reduction, this "attenuation of variance" as Beer calls it, is needed in order for interfaces to "work". Yes, perhaps work here means "control", but if we think about this scheme conceptually, instead of practically, this control is a form of communication, or even responsibility, accountability.
It was from these points that I sought to think about the public sphere – a place where a society can come and gather, and discuss its future (or "Sistem 5" according to beer) – and how "free people can make free decisions", as Quijano reminds us. I tried to model the Brazilian public sphere as a series of layers, or interfaces if you will, that mediate the "users" (I don't like this word) in their immersion in the public sphere. What was in between? I came up with the following diagram:
For example, if I was accessing the Public Sphere through a video (interface), that I saw after another thing in my feed (sequence), which was in the context of the screen (context), inside the code (platform) of Facebook (organization), then I could analyze the problematics of this digital exchange considering all users and all layers, or simply the processes of a single layer in itself. In order to monitor that, every layer would capture data from significant interactions, attenuating it's variances, and producing a graph for every layer responding to the following questions:
What is the general state of public discourse? Is there ownership concentration? Is there bubble formation? Is there confusion? Is there under-representation? Is there enough reflexivity? Is there suffering?
As a researcher and filmmaker who specializes in the "making-of", I tell stories of how images are created, operationalized and consumed. This steers my focus towards the process of mapping and modeling the origins and dynamics of smaller components in relationship to a larger whole. I frequently use meta-referencing as a tool to visualize power relations that go unseen in visual culture.
References:
On Cybernetics, by Strafford Beer link
Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality and modernity/rationality." Cultural studies 21.2-3 (2007): 168-178.
Media Ownership Monitor: Brazil. link