The Influencing Machine: A Brief Visual History of the Media

What a statue of Saddam has to do with cognitive bias, or how to think critically about improving information.

One of the coolest and most charming book releases of this year, The Influencing Machine is a graphic novel about the media, its history, and its many maladies — think The Information meets The Medium is the Massage meets Everything Explained Through Flowcharts. Written by Brooke Gladstone, longtime host of NPR’s excellent On the Media, and illustrated by cartoonist Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machine takes a refreshingly alternative approach to the age-old issue of why we disparage and distrust the news. And as the book quickly makes clear, it has always been thus.

Tracing the origins of modern journalism back about 2,000 years to the Mayans — “publicists” generating “some primordial P.R.” — Gladstone and Neufeld walk through our journalistic roots in the cultures of ancient Rome, Britain, and Revolutionary and early America. With this as background, the book then dives into our contemporary media condition, tracing how we got from Caesar’s Acta Diurna to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage. Also present was everything we admire — and require — from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoking to power. Same as it ever was.”

The Influencing Machine then turns to the timely, framing in pragmatically optimistic terms the impact of the Internet not only on traditional news outlets, but on our minds themselves.

Brain studies suggest that consuming information on the Internet develops different cognitive abilities, so it’s likely we are being rewired now in response to our technology. That process doesn’t stop. It can’t stop. And even the most strident critics of the Internet cannot truly wish for it to stop, considering how far we have come since we grasped that first tool.”

Although edification was a welcome byproduct, we were thoroughly entertained by The Influencing Machine, and know it will find ardent fans among comic collectors, history buffs, and anyone with an interest in how information makes its way from the original source to our brains — and more critically, how we can make it better.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Harvard’s Steven Pinker on Violence & Human Nature

Harvard psycholinguist and prolific author Steven Pinker is easily our favorite thinker about language and the human mind. But Pinker has also done some fascinating work on the history of violence, unearthing some surprising and counterintuitive findings that go contrary to what contemporary media might suggest about the rate of violence in the world today.

In this excellent talk from 2010′s Harvard Thinks Big event, Pinker looks at two reasons for these misconceptions: Our cognitive limitations and our moral psychology.

Our intuitions about violence and the facts about violence go in opposite directions.” ~ Stephen Pinker

News media has the unprecedented ability to send cameramen to places in the world where violence takes place and beam them back to our laptop screens or television. Moreover, they have the programming philosophy ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’” ~ Stephen Pinker

In a cultural environment where we’re bombarded with doom-and-gloom messaging about human nature and the state of the world, Pinker’s research is a necessary and timely grounding element that puts reality in perspective. For a more in-depth look at his fascinating work on the subject, we highly recommend The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

HT Open Culture

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Make Love, Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on How We Act

Last month, TED made a bold first move into publishing with the launch of TEDBooks — a revolutionary model for adapting the most compelling TED talks into low-priced ebooks under Amazon’s new Kindle Singles imprint for short nonfiction. Today, we’re thrilled for the release of Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s hardcore impact on human behavior — the excellent new TEDBook by our friend Cindy Gallop, whose project of the same name tackles one of the most underaddressed yet important facets of contemporary culture.

Sample the book with Cindy’s fantastic 2009 TED talk:

Coupling TED’s unshakable curatorial vetting with the radically low price point, we hope Make Love Not Porn will serve as a potent conversation starter for wrapping our collective mind around an issue we have failed to address intelligently, even though it permeates nearly every aspect of our lives, from our media habits to our private selves to our public personas.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.