The Spiral of Silence and It's Effect on Public Opinion

    The spiral of silence was a theory devised by a German scientist named Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in 1974. The theory itself tries to make sense of why people speak up in certain situations, and why they don't. The general consensus was that people talk more when they are in more comfortable situations. The less comfortable they are, the less likely they are to talk or speak up. This interested Dr. Noelle-Neumann but she was interested in another aspect of this effect, the way it affected how people would voice an unpopular opinion.

    Though the original experiment pretty much tells Dr. Noelle-Neumann actually what she's looking for, it's how she views that information that makes this model so interesting. She looked at it from a different lens, a political point of view. She took a look at the data and realized that this says something about how people express their opinions, and most of all, their unpopular ones. She noticed that this means that the more uncomfortable one is, the less likely they are to express their unpopular opinion, thus hindering free speech subconsciously.

    This says a lot about how political science is run and how powerful a "herd mindset" can be. People usually trust what they hear from news sources and from the government, so going against the viewpoints of these massive entities can be seen as being an unpopular opinion. Because of this, by default, people already are too scared to speak their mind up against the media or the government in fear of being pushed into isolation. I guess it really makes one think about how much power the government really has, and how much media influence can play a part in their control of the people. 

The Problem With Secrets in the U.S. Government.

  

  Our freedom of speech is one of our most basic and cherished rights because for the most part, it's pretty simple. Anyone can say whatever they want and have the freedom to do so. Though sometimes this gets tricky. Like speech, the freedom of information is also something that usually is pretty easily spelled out, but this too can have some circumstances where things start to get a little murky. 

    In the case of Julian Assange, he tries to make a bold move to demonstrate both of these freedoms when he release the U.S. documents containing dark secrets about the Iraq War. This case really tip toes on the line of both freedom of speech and freedom of information, because though the information here is not life or death (at least for its citizens), the principle that it breaks is something that needs to be kept under control. If all of the information leaked from the government's plans, we would be defenseless against other countries, and there is the devastating truth that there are times where the government has to make some hard calls. Even worse, it can be very hard for the public to accept the fact that their government can sometimes make mistakes.

    All of this puts pressure on the government, and though it doesn't make things easier, it's necessary. It's a constant battle that we have to fight and it's a line that we must cross. We are a democracy, we make decisions as a people, and in order for the right decision to be made, the people must be informed. Our government must have secrets that is a fact. We could not survive if the government told us everything they were doing, but it's our role as a people to keep them in check. Our role in this democracy is to make sure that the government is acting righteously and if it's anyone who finds out their secrets, lets hope it better be us.

Living in the Age of AI

   

    I found this Frontline story to be both interesting and very scary. A lot of the things said in this video don't surprise me, but at the same time still amaze me. I know that the development of AI and Facial Recognition software are things that have high interest to governments around the world, as these tools will be the tools that lead us to the future. What I didn't realize is how advanced we actually were in this new field of technology. Also, 2019 may not seem like a long time ago, but I can guarantee you that since that story was produced, the advancements we have made in AI and machine learning have made these machines much more sophisticated in just 24 months. 

    One of the very interesting things that I found in this video was China's quick advancement into the field. I was not surprised to hear the fact that they were amongst the leaders in the field, but for them to have joined the game so late and produce impressive results so quickly is something that I don't think is even emphasized enough in that video. I mean, if they were able to make a jump like THAT in just 5 years, who knows where they will be in say, 10 years? Will we all be AI slaves by that time because it sure seems like that's the rate in which we're headed. In all seriousness though, this story has really opened my eyes about how quickly we are headed into this weird new future. I knew that society would look vastly different in 50 years, but it seems like even more and more, that vision that I have of the future in 50 years, is getting closer and closer to 5 years rather than 50. It's a scary time that we're living in, but I'll be damned if I don't say that I'm both excited and nervous at the same time. 

The Overton Window. What is it and How Does it Work?

Joseph Overton first conceived the idea of the Overton Window (AKA The Window of Discourse) in the mid 1990s. He came up with it as an idea to describe how and why certain political ideas get accepted in a society, and why others don't. Ideas that are found inside the Overton Window are ideas that have a chance to be accepted as policy by the given society. On the other hand, ideas that are found outside the window for the given society don't stand a chance of being accepted by that society. Joseph Overton unfortunately passed before he was able to fully finish his theory. Though thanks to his friend and colleague Joseph Lehman, the idea of the Overton Window was refined and renamed after Overton himself.

    The window is a model that tries to explain how a new idea is accepted by a given society based on its current state of its already accepted political ideas. The window is meant to predict the acceptability of certain political ideas, though some politicians have tried to use it to get their idea to be accepted by their society. Unfortunately for them, this misses the entire point of the Overton Window. This is because the Overton Window is not a model for how policies get accepted, but why they do. It's a little hard to describe but I'll try to do my best to have it make the most sense. In case you're still confused by the end of the reading, I found a video by Joseph Lehman himself, of the innovative man describing the Overton Window in his own words.

    Going on a scale from "More Freedom" to "Less Freedom" The position of the window on the graph is based on the amount of freedom that a certain society has been given. If there is more freedom given to a certain society, than more radically free-thinking ideas are projected to be accepted by that society. On the other side, if there is much less freedom in a society, that society is much more likely to adopt ideas that coincide with their ideas of limited freedom for the people. Because of this, ideas that are in the window in one society may not be in the window for another society. Time is also a huge factor in determining the position of the window because policies and public perception are always changing over time no matter what society you are talking about.

    There are 6 levels to each side of the model to help further categorize where a certain idea might be in relation to the window. These 6 levels spread out to each end of the scale and go from being considered "policy" right in the middle, down to "popular," then "sensible," followed by "acceptable," "radical," and "unthinkable." Ideas in the "policy" category are very likely to be made into policy, or already are, in that given society. On the other hand, ideas that are found in the "unthinkable" range, are ideas in which that society has no chance of accepting at the given time frame. 

    One good example for showing how the Overton Window works is the topic of gay marriage. Back in the 1950s, gay marriage would've been found somewhere in the radical or unthinkable range of ideas for American Society in that day. Flash forward to 2021, and we find this topic to be in the category of "policy" at this point. This shows just how easily the Overton Window can change, and how quickly different policies can shift into different categories in this model. Although it can be volatile at times, the Overton Window is a very useful tool for showing the position of where a certain idea stands in relation to its society.

Where Are All of the Anti-War Protests?

    I find it very interesting that you rarely hear voices in today's society about protesting against our wars. Probably the thing that puzzles me the most is that this is something that I've never actually thought about before. I've heard stories from my mother about the protests against the war in Vietnam and how she had wished she were old enough to go them. That war was an atrocity, and killed many men that didn't even sign up to be a part of it. I  think this is a small part of why we rarely see anti-war protests in today's society. 

    There's a common idea found in today's society that people think something along the lines of "oh well they knew what they signed up for." Not having a draft gives a different aspect to the war because, although there are still young men and women being killed overseas with no clear reason for what they are trying to accomplish there, it's not a situation where the government is knocking down doors and taking people away from their families. (Although one could argue against that due to the way that the government tactically recruits its soldiers.) Though this is not the only reason why we don't see anti-war protests like we used to.

    People nowadays are just as opposed to the war as they were back then. I guess the difference is that we came to a point when we were being fed so many different lies, and there seemed to be no end to the war, that people just got tired of speaking out about it. One of the websites linked here to support anti-war views looks like it hasn't been updated in nearly 10 years. 

    The lack of news coverage about it also may play a role in all of this. I didn't live back in the times of the Vietnam War, but I'd imagine that it was in the news a lot more than it is today. Today, you hear about stories coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but you never really hear any milestones that encourage you that the war is progressing. Usually it's just about another bombing in another foreign city that viewers quite honestly have a hard time connecting to. Who knows, maybe the government is using prior restraint on war stories that we just don't know about, but I feel like most of the bigger stories happening nowadays are more focused on issue happening inside our borders rather than outside our borders.