Different kinds of speech

Legal speech (otherwise known as First Amendment speech).  Ethical speech.  Practical speech.  It seems to me that people (politicians, news media, activists, and the general public – all guilty) have been conflating these different categories of speech.  You may think that the distinction is simply semantics.  Or you may not think you are doing it at all.  But the difference is really important so please read on.

First, legal speech.  I am a huge fan of the way the US has established our freedom of speech. The default is that you can say anything you want.  The exceptions are very carefully tailored and limited to the cause of immediate threat.  You can’t yell “Fire!” in a movie theater only because people could get hurt in the stampede to the door.  You can’t directly threaten someone standing in front of you “I am going to kill you with this knife I have in my hand” because they may feel an immediate threat of great harm.  But if you post something on a social network “I am going to kill you sometime” that is protected because it is not possible to prove that it wasn’t “trash talking” and we have a high barrier.  The recipient could contact the police to investigate and if they find that the threat was real, only then is there a crime.  We may make exceptions with kids because of the greater psychological harm of threats, the unknowability of how they will react or if they would think to call the police, and because of the harm of bullying. But we are very careful to limit each of these exceptions to only the gravest cases.

Then there is ethical speech.  If you violate ethical speech guidelines, you can’t be arrested for it.  You also should not be assaulted for it.  The police shouldn’t shut down your magazine.  Protesters should not physically block entrance to your store.  But they should refuse to do business with you. They should use their own free speech rights to criticize and condemn your speech.  Private organizations can expel you from their establishments or memberships.  The media should condemn your speech.  Unethical but legal speech is common. It includes racist or otherwise bigoted speech.  It includes lying that does not rise to legal prohibitions like libel or slander.  It includes insulting speech that serves no greater purpose.

Finally, we have practical speech.  This is speech for which the benefits exceed the costs.  We recognize the costs, but feel that the benefits make the speech worthwhile.  Speaking truth to power.  Parodies of bureaucracy that may be insulting but draw attention to a larger principle. 

The Charlie Hebdo case is a good demonstration of the difference.  Their cartoons were legal.  The cartoonists should not have been arrested, shut down by the police, or shot by extremists.  Whether their cartoons were ethical would depend on which cartoon you refer to.  Some of them could fall into the category of being insulting, but with a valuable enough messages to be worthwhile and therefore ethical.  Anyone who agrees can buy the magazine or just leave them alone.  Those who feel otherwise can protest.  The cartoonists themselves should answer to the public through their revenue stream and to their conscience.  

Other Charlie Hebdo cartoons were simply too insulting to have enough value to be ethical, Their practicality would depend on how they did on ratings, publicity, or clickbait.  But they are still unethical.  On the other hand, they are still legal.  The cartoonists should not be arrested, assaulted, or accosted.  But people should speak out against the unethical ones, even if they bring in enough profit to be practical in the eyes of the publication management. 

The debate on whether the US Government should use the term “radical extremism” or “Islamist extremism” when referring to ISIS.  It is legal either way.  But which is ethical and which is practical?  If avoidance of the term “Islamist” creates a practical value in that it does not alienate friendly Middle Eastern populations, then that is a valid consideration (as I discussed here).  There is also a great discussion of the issue here.

BBC Shorts

I am struggling to decide what I think about this.  BBC is creating a new video series called BBC Shorts that delivers 15-second videos that summarize the stories of the day. 

My struggle starts with the fact that the general public needs some guidance in what news to consume.  There are a lot of important things going on in the world that we really need to be better informed about.  It is this kind of ignorance that makes us so bad at evaluating important issues like climate change or foreign wars.  And if we are ignorant, we are at the mercy of political ads that play on our emotions when it comes time to vote.  We also don’t take the personal steps that we should be using to make out society (and our families) safe, fair, and sustainable. 

But BBC’s announcement says that they will be creating videos based on what is “trending and popular.” If it is just Buzzfeed by BBC, it will fail to accomplish what I see as being an important role for news media.  TMZ maybe, but BBC?

On the other hand, private companies should not be compelled to do what is best for society.  I appreciate CSR and the quad bottom line and all that.  But that is their internal choice.  If they want to chase ratings with these videos, it is not my place to tell them to do otherwise.

But on the third hand, a lot of BBC’s funding comes from the British government. That changes the equation.  I am more open to Fox, MSNBC or CNN doing this.  BBC may be an exception.

It is having three hands that makes me struggle with it.

Your Turn

Please help me resolve this.  A few quick questions:  

• Are you interested in selecting from a collection of 15-second videos to get your news?
• Do the news media have any responsibility to help us become a better informed public?
• Is your answer to #1 influenced by the fact that BBC gets government funding?

This Week in EID - Episode 44

What a week!  In a way it flew by, but in part that is because the work just kept piling up.  But on the positive side, we got some great response to the EID articles this week.

The Thursday post on the dystopian smart home resonated with a lot of people.  It also helps when a columnist at Fortune Magazine tweets out a link to the article.  We got several new subscribers just from that.  But the great comments we got on Linked In convinced me to submit a paper to the HFES conference on the topic.  And a version of this is already scheduled to be published by the Bentley PreparedU Project, which is a partnership we have with Bloomberg.  Exciting stuff.

I got a lot of pushback on the article about displaced revenge.  It is a psychological phenomenon that I was talking about, not a recommendation.  But many readers were worried that I was encouraging readers to take out their frustrations on people, which is not always the best way to vent your anger.  Good points!!

The post on leveraging our self-delusion skills to increase our happiness through attribution bias was a good one, if only because I love giving people proven ways to increase their happiness.  The world can certainly use more of it. And I don’t mind giving EID readers some advantage in getting there.

I was actually surprised that there was not more reaction to Monday’s post on education.  Usually, anything with a political dimension to it evokes an emotional response.  And when covering controversial topics like abortion, same sex marriage, etc. that just doubles it.  But not this time.  Maybe because it was a Monday.  Monday’s are like that, aren’t they?

Identity Boosting on Social Media

There is a service for researchers called Research Gate which some of you may be familiar with.  I have an account there that I never use.  I started it because other people use it to search for research papers, similar to Google Scholar but with much richer metadata about the publications and it includes papers, slideshares, videos, and other media all in one place and filtered by author. 

So if other people search for keywords that I have written a paper on, they get my paper in the search results and an easy way to see what else I have published and a rich profile of who I am.  It makes me more "discoverable."  Plus, if people like what they read, they can "follow" me, getting updates every time another one of my publications goes up.  A lot of international researchers who do not have extensive academic libraries use Research Gate as their research search engine.

But since I don't ever use the account, it should be empty.  But they use a clever technique that combines identity-boosting and gradualism strategies. Every week I get an email from them with two or three papers that have my name on them.  They ask me if these are really me.  All I have to do is click yes and they get added to my Research Gate profile.  Easy.  And just a few at a time so it is quick.  And it is ego-boosting because these are "my" papers (even though the copyright is owned by the publisher). 

If the web crawlers are any good, they should be able to fully populate my research archive within a year or two and keep it updated.  Their crawler doesn't actually find everything, but it is not bad.  At the moment, they have 45 of my publications (out of about 200).  But that is with me investing virtually no effort.  If I spent even a modicum of time, I could probably get it up to 100 or 150 without too much effort.

And interestingly, 1600 people have viewed a paper of mine on the site, 636 people have downloaded one of my papers, and 244 papers have cited one of mine and logged that into the system.  I have no idea who any of these people are, so this is not exactly going on my resume.  Every couple of weeks I get an email that someone new is following me, and I have no idea who they are or why.  But it does give me a little ego boost to think my research papers are valuable enough for this kind of traffic.