Feedback loops

It’s interesting how something only lasts as long as the complex series of feedback loops or roughly cyclic (chaotic) patterns that sustain that thing lasts. From a macro level a cyclic or repetitive pattern may appear to have some kind of permanence to it. It’s interesting how cyclic patterns can build up some inertia that resists a change to that cyclic pattern, and how a configuration can also change out of an established pattern so that different cyclic patterns establish themselves.

Confidence is a feedback loop – people act differently towards people who present as being confident and that feedback helps to maintain a feeling and expectation within that confident person that they can continue to act as if they know what they are doing. Even a will to bluff can turn into a repetitive habit that people take to be confidence.

With some other kinds of feedback loops, such as a negative feedback loop, the aim is to narrow the gap between perceived and desired outcomes. You look for the error and try to reduce the error for the next time around. That reflective perspective does not generally equate with the idea of confidence in the general public, but it can be a driver for some people to excel at their chosen goals. Negative feedback loops tend to be stable within certain bounds.

Social interactions can also be reaffirming, as you have with positive feedback loops. Feelings and emotions in a social context have an aspect of positive feedback loops to them, for good and bad. Positive feedback loops, though, are unstable. They either explode and then peter out or drop away to zero. Positive feedback loops can drive a system to a different configuration that may be stable with different levels of energy.

If you wanted a broad qualitative generalisation for the dominant mode for public and private realms in a liberal democracy,  obviously you would associate negative feedback loops with what happens in the public realm with science as an example, and positive feedback loops characterise the private realm.  The feedback mechanism of mass media is definitely a positive feedback loop with broadcast media and viral videos on the internet being obvious examples.

Before the internet, broadsheet newspapers were a forum for the public realm where issues could be developed by a number of journalists and stories could be elaborated on. This is standard for the public realm where elaborating on a story is a form of negative feedback. You ask why did that happen and then you build the story piece by piece. On the internet or on television, such an approach may seem boring to casual viewers. By having newspapers migrate over to the internet the kind of news that attracts hits is what they are likely to report on, and that will change the style of the printed newspapers as well.

Perhaps an answer to the decline in newspapers is to create dedicated virtual newspaper hardware – like an e-paper scroll – that has some advantages over both paper and the flatscreen-internet and that can not really be covered by either of the other media. The advantages would need to be practical – it would need to be compact and light to carry around and yet unroll into to a flexible and large sheet for reading. It needs to be sturdy and to be able to take the odd knock. It needs to be easy and clear to read and it needs to be designed so that virtual newspapers are easy to navigate. They need to be cheap and easy to upload information to. With a flexible screen that can be rolled up, graphics would be distorted by bends in the e-paper, so traditional graphics and internet pages as they are now would not look that good on such readers. Text would look good and the tactile aspect of a thin sheet that can be bended, rolled up and carried around while keeping the words on the page would – I think anyway – make that approach appealing as a medium for text. It is important to preserve something like a newspaper medium, because as the saying goes, the medium is the message, and text based mass media is needed to maintain a vibrant public realm where issues can be written about and debated. If newspapers just migrate to the internet they will be changed into an another image-dominated media like television or glossy magazines. You might also notice that sensationalist newspapers devote a lot of their space to pictures and much of their text is spent on emotive arguments.

Both Fairfax and News Ltd are planning to introduce a fee2see for online content. I don’t think it will work very well. The ABC and SBS are likely to be winners out of this. Computers are shifting more towards being platforms for dynamic graphics and sound, with text being used as if it were a subset of the graphics. As mentioned above, I think the answer is to reinvent the paper, so to speak, for newspapers.