Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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Smart Searching

In online searches we should be looking for dependable sources selected for their relevance, expertise, and fairness.

It is now part of the natural cycle of searching for a product or service to use Google to see what is available. It has become second nature, and that has become a bit of a problem. The recent moves by the federal government to investigate Google to determine if it is become a search monopoly is a good time to remember that it is by far the dominant search engine, getting 90 percent of the traffic.

Google is an American Goliath in part because it is able to sell placement of its search listings, giving a client priority to be near the top of whatever search list a person wants to see.  Most of us are aware of this. But I’m amazed at how often I bite for the first listing, forgetting that some are in the “sponsored” category. Font color and text remain consistent across all search listings, making it easy to miss a paid entry. It’s not that anything is concealed. It’s whether a reader picks up on the implicit advertising in the listing order. It is one reason the company makes something like 237 billion a year in advertising. I can’t even picture that number, but I know it’s more than a professor makes in even a good year.

The fee to the organization that wants a top spot comes with a lot of variables. But it can range from $100 to 10,000 a month. The number of clicks a site gets also affects what Google charges. Google is not the only search engine in this game, but it is by far the biggest. A few browsers such as DuckDuckGo do not take search ads, promoting searches as more useful.

A Google search result below is for the product of “armchairs.”  The first screen on my computer includes two sites and even a nearby store.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It takes a little bit of extra work to figure out where the listing of sponsored products ends and other relevant entries start. But that is something you may want to do to find better bargains. Most of us think that listings should appear high on a list based on relevance and merit. What we are usually looking for in these searches are quality sources based on an unknowable set of algorithms that will screen for merit. But we need to remember that “pay to play” placement of a listing can take merit and quality out of the equation.  A drug company with deep pockets may pay for prominent placement of a product of dubious value.  As with movies, the extent of a marketing campaign says little about the worth of what is being sold.

If you are searching for information about an idea, like “existentialism” you might think sponsored listings are no longer a factor.  Even the first listings should be good. But it does not always work that way.  On my computer there was a promoted first entry run by a pastor who apparently wants to bounce his Christian fundamentalism off of the idea of existentialism. His site is a hook for various jeremiads that somehow manage to exclude Judaism and Christian Science. Only after this listing do we get the paydirt of a modest Wikipedia entry, and a detailed entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The folks who paid for a high placement spot may have legitimate rights to pay to be first. But smarter searching usually means also looking at listings that are not sponsored.  It is slightly more likely an algorithm might serve you better.

Refining Communication as Feeling and Thinking

treble staff

Feeling must be given its due, not as the absence of thought or  logic, but as an ingredient fully melted into the mix of communication.

We can communicate feelings in the tonalities of speech. Any actor needs to be able to pull off this feat. There’s a feeling of defiance in Clark Gable’s famous line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” or in Judy Garland’s tentative wonder that “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” But the ideal machine for feeling is music, with its cues imbedded in the ways that keys, chords, fifths, and so many other variations of the 12-note chromatic scale are used.  Yip Harburg’s words to Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow for the Wizard of Oz marry its central idea of yearning to a rising pitch sequence ending in a high C. He could have easily written affettuoso (“with feeling”) to set the tone for the music. Harburg famously noted that “Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling . . .” Music is the tonal and non-stipulative dimension of communication. It pushes the process of connecting into a larger sphere. It follows, as Harburg noted, that “a song makes you feel a thought:” a natural marriage of what is too often represented as polar opposites.

You can easily assess your response to music as feeling triggered by sound in this unusual example of Over the Rainbow—usually sung in a hopeful key of Ab Major—transposed here into a minor key. It conveys more of a feeling of melancholy than hope: not what we would expect to hear from a child with more visceral emotions. The unusual departure to a minor key version of the song  below by sillyjet invites us feel differently about what it means.

Why does this matter? Music is more than a metaphor here. Quite simply, like spoken language, music is another form of aurality  that reminds us that communication as a medium of exchange is not a one dimensional process. Like a phrase or a chord, any word from a source sets in motion a dynamic progression of listening and reacting that is more open-ended than the idea of communication as ‘exchange’ would suggest. In essence, our reception of another’s message triggers projections from within that surface in the form of feelings.

The use of language or its musical equivalents always have tendency.  Through our unique perceptions we are the co-creators of another’s message. So, feeling must be given its due, not as the absence of the logical, but as a sum of all of its parts melted into the mix.