Herrington: Ask Joe

With all of the reports that we get from the media and conflicting resources, we might wonder who we are supposed to believe. I know many people who turn right to Wikipedia for their first glance at things. Others would not look at wiki-anything because for some reason, it just sounds un-American! We are led to believe that college professors are Marxists by some resources. And some resources tell us to eat the rich. What I don’t notice is the man on the street really having much to say, except a few “Joe the Plummers.”

It seems that as soon as anything becomes self-consciously available to the surface of our minds, we start pontificating like we have some inner angle on things; that “they don’t know and I really do know what the heck is going on” mentality sets in. Now, where this comes from is beyond comprehension. How could anyone actually know? Where do these folks get their news?

What I imagine in the world of our growing invasion of privacy is a link up that allows us to amalgamate all of the data we get every day with every choice that would create a sort of universal understanding of what people do on any given day as a visual that says how it is. It would look like a flock of birds flying or a school of fish swimming or a herd of wildebeests gallivanting across a plain in search of water. It would be a holographic visual that would say on any given day how many are for or against any given thing and we could use any number of parameters to check out how people feel and think about everything.

Okay, so let’s call our machine, or program, the “Guy-on-the-Street Viewer” and let’s program it in 3-D! Now, you can say that the DOW or Wall Street is a sort of viewer that does this, but the big investors are so big that the cloud shifts mainly with their weight. They purchase so many millions of shares and the whole cloud shifts with them. This would be way more democratic; one person and only one dot.

The questions would have to be designed so that every possible angle of the context would unfold visually as you add or subtract to adjust for things, a sort of Feakonomics on steroids about everything. And I know that consumerist groups already do stuff with live data so that you can get similar ideas bubbling to the surface of pie charts and rolling graphics…I get that. I want the people out there in the real world to have access to this thing so that the questions they ask are part of what is being tracked. What does the guy on the street really want to know and what should we be tracking? Everyone now tracking has a vested interest, not just a curiosity. We need questions that are driven by inner need and morbid curiosity.

Let’s think about it. Most people will ask the easy ones: sex, money, religion, politics, economics, education, and did I say sex? What about who has a boss who is a really mean person? Or what makes people so self-righteous? How many people say one thing and yet do the opposite of that in private? I would like to apply this program to history and, if we can gather all the stories that exist from every resource, see if the average telling of the story meets the facts. Here are the various stories, and then here is what we get if we apply all the resources available. A sort of Snopes for history, what is fact and what is a bold faced lie. The History Channel is trying this with Lincoln, and I think they are doing a bang up job. They have worked on Kennedy’s assassination and on the Bible and I love these resources.

We, or course, hire detectives and agencies and institutions and corporations, but the ins and outs of all of that and the cost is overwhelming and many times what we hear out of these resources is not very helpful. If we used an update of CLEVERBOT to interact with folks where they are and interview them, we might actually come up the story of the American people, race, gender, ethnicity, economics, and otherwise from their point of view. But then, what does it matter what those people think? If we can get their money and use their labor and get them hooked on what we want to sell them, or if we can get them to pay us to stay at home and have kids, or if we can get something free for our friends, or if we can waste tax-payer money to do something that only serves the rich, the poor, this special interest group, or that black op group that is off the radar, why not?

I guess what I am after is real interactivity. We could see what interests people. Really. Right now if you go to Youtube or surf the web or Google search or go stare at a magazine rack, what you get is what is available within reach, but I want to exceed my reach. I want to go where no man has gone before, an algorithm for everything. I want to know what others want to know in areas that are not specific to what is being sold or what is being guided by the researchers. I want to know what is really important to others. Are we as mindless as they say we are? Are the masses ………..? I think we should ask them and find out, for real.

runningturtle87