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There Are No Facts
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There Are No Facts

Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life

Mark Shepard
MIT Press, 2022
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9

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Professor Mark Shepard offers smart insights about the societal shift into what he calls a “post-truth” era. He warns that for-profit entities target consumers in ways that create “micro-publics,” each with its own socially constructed version of the truth. Shepard cites philosopher Bruno Latour, who described scientific facts as socially constructed, asserting that people tend to value most the information they get from trusted social networks. Shepard reflects on how the challenge of establishing a shared truth might affect humanity and urges readers to value common sense and strive for collaboration.

Summary

Society is moving into a “post-truth” world in which shared fictions unite clusters of people.

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary’s “word of the year” was “post-truth,” defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” That year featured several “post-truth moments”: For example, then-US President Donald Trump called climate change a “hoax.”

For-profit entities leverage machine learning and an abundance of behavioral data to create “micro-publics”: clusters of people who relate to one another over a shared “ground fiction,” as opposed to a “ground truth.” Market segmenting and the data sets that link people into networks can affect their perception of what is true and, thus, affect which people they regard as part of their “in” group. The micropublics you belong to determine the degree to which you experience privilege or oppression.

“The real” is always subject to negotiation, and data always contains bias.

The society emerging in the age of “deep fakes” has...

About the Author

Mark Shepard, associate professor of architecture and media study at Buffalo State University, edited the MIT Press book Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space.

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