Sunday, August 31,2003

Bill Chess

"Human Communication and How it Impinges Upon Ethics"

Communication involves both packaging and content.

By packaging, I mean bundles of sound or images or actions by which information is transmitted and stored.

Then there is content. Content is information, preferably with some meaning which individuals or groups are trying to communicate to one another. It is packaged in the form of speech, the printed word, pictures, facial expressions—many forms.

As some of you may know I have a great interest in the packaging end of the matter. That goes with my interest in computers and other high tech things. But also being human and reasonably well educated I also must be interested in content.

First, though I will go into the packaging a bit. I’ll try not to get into boring technical jargon.

With the invention of the printing press, for the first time we were able to package concepts in reproducible form. Prior to that we depended upon scribes ( often monks working in their little cells) to duplicate books which were of course duplicated by other scribes. This allowed inaccuracies to creep into the books through each generation. It is a wonder that many more distortions didn’t happen.

Cultures with no written language depended upon people especially designated to remember history, contracts, agreements, lineage and many other things. It always amazes me that so much can actually committed to memory and that it can promulgate through many generations. Of course error can creep in and be promulgated along with facts.

The printing press still had the potential for inaccuracies to creep in through each new edition of a work, but at least many identical copies were turned out, thus forcing by sheer numbers the correction of future editions.

A similar process is exemplified in the duplication and copying of paintings, maps and other graphic arts- until the development of other, non-typeset printing techniques and of photography. And again we can site the difficulty of duplication of music, until the invention of the phonograph.

Until the advent of the computer and digital representation, even all the modern inventions could not reproduce information exactly. Repeated copying of a video tape, using two VCR’s, results in each copy being a little less accurate than the one before it. Eventually the copy has degraded very badly. The same holds for copy machine copying of copies, or audio tapes, or photographs—you get the point.

A digital copy of anything, written word, picture, music, video or what ever will not be a truly accurate copy either. But it can be as accurate as one is willing to expend memory allocation. In most cases it will be more than sufficient for even the most exacting needs.

The audio purist will insist that a perfect vinyl record played on a very good turntable has better sound and reproduction than a modern, digital, compact disk. Some of that will be because of a compromise made between the size of the file and musical purity. But for most of us the commercial CD is adequate. And if one really wants to he/she can use a computer to make a more perfect copy.

But the point I want to make is that once the object is rendered into the digital realm, from then on all copies of the original digital recording, photograph, text or whatever will be exact copies. The will be no further degradation.

An aside: a digital picture file has more information that is absolutely needed. It is possible to take each pixel (a pixel is one of those individual dots millions of which go into making a picture) to take each pixel and change it slightly and it will make so little difference in either the color or contrast of the picture that it is impossible to tell that any change has been made without careful comparison of the original picture and the doctored one. That slight change can be used to encode other information, such as secret messages or diagrams, into the picture. That additional information will be accurately transmitted each time the file is sent or duplicated. The secret information can only be retrieved by someone possessing the exact key.

It is so well hidden that it is only possible to determine that something is there through a statistical analysis of the entire picture. Recovery of the information without the key is just about impossible.

This technique is known as “steganography.” I have a book about it for those who are interested: “Hiding in Plain Sight”, Steganography and the art of Covert Communication.

So we are home free. We can transfer information from individual to individual perfectly. But how wrong that is! The receiving individual still has to perceive the information. That is to transfer it to the eye or the ear and store it in the brain, and then interpret it.

Ok now let us consider content. Spoken or printed information depends upon language.

Language (I’ll stick to English for this discussion) is an ever changing and fluid thing. Words shift their meaning from generation to generation. Pronunciation shifts from locality to locality as well as by generation. The way a sentence is put together can not only convey meaning but can generate prejudice based upon grammar or accent or choice of words, thus shifting the intended meaning to something quite different.

The spoken word involves media as well as content. That is where accent becomes important. The sounds are the media.

I’ve been plowing my way through an interesting but very pedantic book. “Standard English and the Politics of Language” by Tony Crowley. Even though he covers English from the UK perspective and hardly touches on the American version, the book has great insight into the working and development of language in general.

The evolution of written and spoken English through the 19th and into the 20th century involved a conflict between the “upper” classes and the “lower” classes. Proper English was that which was spoken by the “upper”, “civilized” class and was supposedly richer in vocabulary and precision. Thus more complex concepts could be articulated. And the “lower” classes wouldn’t be concerned with these higher philosophical thoughts anyway.

The following quotes are taken from “Standard English”:

Quoting  Whitney, Essentials of English Grammar, 1877 : “By ‘good English’ we mean those words and those meanings of them and those ways of putting them together, which are used by the best speakers, the people of best education; everything that such people do not use, or use in another way, is bad English. Thus bad English is not approved and accepted by good and careful speakers.

Quoting  Sedgwick, The Theory of Classical Education, 1868: “In order to speak English with accuracy and precision, we have but one rule to follow – to pay strict attention to usage. The authority of usage, the usage of civilized persons, is in all disputed points paramount.

One more qoute: West, The Elements of English Grammar, 1893: “Take the case of an English child, brought up in an educated household. At an early age such a child would speak good English though he had never learnt grammar… On the other hand, a child bought up in an ignorant household would speak bad English, would make mistakes in pronunciation or use wrong forms of expression. Without any grammatical training in either case, these children would speak correctly or incorrectly, would pick up good English or bad English.

This ends the quotes. I still have memories of my own childhood and my father correcting my grammar and word usage. Since these memories center on the family meals, I also have memories of being corrected in table manners.

My father never finished high school, but he did go on to take the New York regents exams for various subjects and essentially had a high school education. He was very much a self taught man and read extensively. His family had emigrated from Russia but had been Jews of the middle class before the pogroms. Evidently either he or his parents picked up a strong sense of “proper” English.

Society has changed very little over the last couple of centuries. We still get our early training in the use of language from our families. The schools do a valiant job of trying to upgrade their students’ use of language.

Where I found school to be invaluable was in high school where we had a course in “College Preparatory English” which was better than any English course I had in college. The course went into the details of language structure and grammar and for the first time codified all that I had learned as a child.

The attempts to formulate a “king’s English” had another purpose than class distinction. There was a need to allow more precise transmittal of meaning from one individual to another.

A strong reason why English is so widely used is that it has developed ways to express just about any concern of mankind in ways that can be understood by others.

As science developed, precise meanings were needed and this developed into jargons, often understood only by fellow scientists. Thus a new class distinction was developed between the scientifically educated and the “uneducated” general public.

The wide distribution of the printed word, as well as the advent of radio and television, has tended to bring a great deal of standardization to the language. I once heard it said that the English spoken by radio announcers was tending to standardize pronunciation here in the U.S. and that particular pronunciation was “upper mid-western”.

It is very noticeable that regional accents and language usage are slowly losing their differences. Our educational system is trying its best to smooth out language usage (e.g. him and me went… vs. he and I went… etc.) Radio and TV are bringing on a more standard pronunciation.

Nevertheless heavy variations of the language (such as “black English” or “hillbilly English”) bring down upon the user a stigma which can be very detrimental in obtaining a good job or functioning well in society as a whole. 

We really haven’t shed the problems of the UK in the 19th century with class distinctions in English pronunciation and grammar.

In the scientific community the use of scientific jargon has to some extent become a means for screening out the general public not trained in a particular scientific discipline. Science needs precise means of conveying precise ideas, but often it is quite possible to express concepts in terms that the uninitiated can readily understand. But often the expert is unwilling to do so.

Fortunately there are those who make their living by writing books on scientific topics targeted toward “ordinary” people.

We are seeing the application of the scientific method to formulating the speech, diction, grammar and message of politicians. Focus groups are formed to judge the reaction of the voting public to all sorts of nuances in the political message.

Because of this methodology it has become easier to influence groups of people, not through reason and logic, but through the manipulation of language.

Of course this has been going on throughout the ages, but on a more haphazard and instinctual basis. I question the ethics of the whole approach.

Some of us have been annoyed, if not shocked, by the mispronunciations of George W., as well as his misuse of words and phrases. I sometimes think that even that is a put up job. It may be deliberate. The everyday person, for whom education has never really caught on, may well be attracted to a president who is “one of us.”  But to those who can’t stand him anyway, it only serves to reinforce their dislike.

Thus Bush’s use of English cuts two ways. It attracts a lot of “everyday guys” and it probably blinds (to some extent) others to not pay attention to what he is really meaning.  That is both groups have prejudged him for the same reasons but have come to diametrically opposite conclusions.

The thing that really bothers me is that manipulation of public opinion has become a “scientific” endeavor. It really does not appear ethical either from the left or the right.

The objective of either party is to get public support for themselves and obfuscate the arguments of the opposition. There becomes less and less study of the real facts, let alone of the methodology of correcting the problems of society.

I don’t know what the answers are, or whether there are any. Let’s discuss after coffee!