Family History 4: My Last Visit to Susan Church, My Granny.

Entering the room at Walburton, I knew there would not be many chances left to visit her.

It is always strange to think how a life shrinks in the 'tract of time': - one day a woman is the wife of a blind man, an energetic mother of four, a co-owner of a relatively large estate with a vegetable patch, chickens, fields, woods, owls, wildlife, a world in a world; a later day, the same woman is sitting in bed, can hardly leave it; people visit her and then disappear from her recent memory, even if one hopes, somehow, your presence was remembered. And then, at last, shrinks altogether, becomes less than a full human being. The trace of her spirit lingers in the memory of the living, in the expression of her personality inherited by her descendants, in whatever way she is recorded in the life of objects, and possibly no more than that.

It was with this prospect in mind that I wanted to hear from granny about her life, what she could remember of it.

We began by discussing her success at vegetable and gardening contests. How it was unfair on her competitors really; because granny always had the garden space and the resources to outgrow their vegetables. She showed a benevolent look of glee, because she had won; and because life was an uneven playing field in which to win.

Thoughts of the vegetable patch couldn't help take me back to my childhood when I had enjoyed Southwood Lodge (my grandparents' place). Grimmard, an odd job man who helped out, built a treehouse with a swing in the woods [above ordinary ground]; where my brothers used to play and I used to watch and observe, for I was a little bit afraid of thrusting myself into the world.

So I spoke to her about the treehouse and the swing. And she said she remembered ..

"and wasn't there a stream, and sometimes you'd make it across and sometimes you wouldn't. And if you didn't make it across, well you'd take a splash and just get completely soaked through.

But that was half the fun of it! If you didn't sometimes fall in, it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting. Oooh yes my brothers and I used to swing across the stream....

Of course, It was a great advantage being a girl in a family of boys. It made you tough."

This is not a wholly accurate memory. There was more dialogue perhaps, and the conversation certainly continued (discussing how 'wet' she found the other girls at school, going forward to the her schooling in Switzerland, to being a nurse, not much beyond because that was too close to remembering my grandfather).

But that was the most significant part of the conversation to me. It seemed to me that swing was a very physical metaphor for something that enters every part of our experience as agents in the world. In order to take an action, we must have ordinary faith that we have the capacity to do what we are at that moment doing. A loss of faith in our ability to act is a loss of will altogether. And it may be that we are going to make it. It's the risk that makes it worthwhile. Without the risk, the act would be pointless.

So it makes me think - I must build my ordinary faith;
even if, for me, faith in the divine seems likely to be untrue to the actual state of affairs in this world.

US Election Politics: Information Wars in the Digital Era

The Obama campaign had a lightning-fast recruitment method. Simply sign in to Obama's website, sign up to various action groups at the click of a button and, hey presto, you are recruited.
(Examples of personal data given: email address; password; gender; age [as I recall]; example action groups: local; Jewish; young.)

Want to enjoy the Obama battle bus to Ohio from New York? Why not? It would be fun.

You can now telephone folks in Philadelphia and Ohio.
Read the script, first,  of course.
Second, elicit their electoral preferences to work out what you say to them; try and improv a little to give it a measure of reality.
Third, build support for the Obama movement so it becomes unstoppable. 

Totally unreal.
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I tried this calling method on the night before election night. You dial the number on the screen, with a name attached. All four calls got no response - not unexpectedly, since receiving a random call on the night before elections is likely to mean an election call.

Even such superficial impressions made me realise that Obama's campaign was an extraordinarily slick operation. It utilized the latest in digital technology and data-mining to mobilize the vote. Now UK politicians are clamoring to repeat the trick.

The language of US elections is highly militaristic (campaign; mobilize; fighting an election), and for good reason. Politics arouses a lot of violent opinion, especially in the States. The election is a situation that invites people to pick sides; to swear allegiance to their leader and party; to battle with their friends, family and acquaintances for recognition of the party as representative of their values; and then to take action and vote.

Through utilizing military rhetoric, people are strongly engaged and personally connected to their campaign. (And the election wasn't the end of it because I've received emails since then, eliciting my support for Obama's actions.)
It reminded me of the computer games I used to play as a teenager. Except this time, the information and the overarching narrative of election conquest played out in real time and real human lives. Peculiarly, Obama delivered videos directly into my inbox, just like the instructions you received in (video game) Red Alert.

Despite the artificiality of my connection to Obama, the videos generated a sense of personal immediacy and directness that was unusual in our media-driven age. It also reminded me of TV speeches of Neville Chamberlain we watched in the Appeasement module of A-level history. As of yet, the internet has not been tarred by the same sense of inauthenticity, and mediation by video channel, that prevents directness on TV.

But looking at other sources of my political awareness - the newspapers I read; the newsfeed I got on facebook; the channels I watched; all the sources were designed to reinforce my opinion that Obama was a good choice. Divisions in the US would suggest that exactly the same belief-reinforcing effect was happening to Republicans. They may not have been as likely to be tech-savvy as Obama's supporters (generally younger and in better connected areas such as the two coasts), but Romney was surely playing the same tactics.

Looking back at the now infamous '47%' speech, it's clear that people were being fed completely different angles on it. Republicans got the 'victim psychology' lecture - without always realising this rested upon a false dichotomy (i.e. that people always think of themselves as victims or as achievers; whereas surely we think of ourselves as both at different times, and neither much of the time too). Democrats got the 'elite' Romney lecture, which was also a less-than-rounded characterisation of him. (In fact, Obama's campaign spent a huge amount tarring Romney as a candidate, which is pretty dirty as a tactic.)

There were massive differences in the information given by each side. The intent was to mobilize core supporters with a one-sided wall of information. This information divides the people into two warring sides. One could make a case for calling it 'information wars in the digital age.'

It's not entirely new - Orwell certainly wrote about it in 1984; and this thread of information distortion is a subject that surely goes back to the classical era; in works such as Utopia and Richard III, humanists such as Thomas More recovered the distorting effect of eloquence noted by ancient writers such as Tacitus. For example, Utopia captures the paradoxical quality of information distortion that occurs when any powerful entity tries to create an idealised image of itself in order to win over and mollify its subjects and proximate populace.*

However, the difference today is the quality of virtual interactivity made possible by modern technology. It creates greater opportunities for each of us to be remote agents, rather than full-body participants, in these 'information wars'.

I wonder what happens when this behaviour moves outside the military and political sphere. Surely, subject to regulation, this is already occurring in the world of commerce. At my last job at Little Pim, I was certainly aware of digital strategy, and ways of winning over potential buyers in order to sell our product. And as a start-up, we were far from the cutting edge of this desire to encourage other internet agents to actively promote our product.

Will there be information wars between rival companies in the future? Is this already happening? What kind of distortions will that create?
My feeling is that regulation will keep commercial information control from becoming dangerously distorting (in the way that politics can be), but my current knowledge is insufficient for a conclusive answer.

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[*At many universities, people interpret Utopia as a depiction of an ideal society, where the semi-communist state intervenes to minimise people's working hours and prevent disorder in order to create social harmony. However, readings since the mid-80s have noticed that this coincides with chilling details of repression that exist within the text, suggesting that really this idealisation is a way of blinding people to the regime's flaws.

Example: "THEY do not make slaves of prisoners of war, except those that are taken in battle; nor of the sons of their slaves, nor of those of other nations: the slaves among them are only such as are condemned to that state of life for the commission of some crime, or, which is more common, such as their merchants find condemned to die in those parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes redeem at low rates; and in other places have them for nothing."]