The Overton Window [#10]

The Overton Window: What it is and Why it is Important

 

    The Overton Window is a theory/model that shows understanding/acceptance for political ideas over time. The theory is that only ideas that lie in the window are acceptable for discussion or policy change, ideas that are the middle ground between the radical thinking of both sides. This is important because it tells us that no matter what a political candidate believes or runs for, they can not change polices that live outside the narrow window.  The window is a safe space, where the ideas can be discussed without worry of losing electoral support of the masses.

    Luckily, the Overton Window is malleable; it is not stuck in one place for eternity. It can change and it can shift to better match the ideas and feelings of the public as a whole. For example, races mixing in schools and women voting were once extreme and unspeakable ideas, but now they are common sense concepts that not many people think twice about. 

    Some ways to shift the window are getting foot-in-the-door policies to get people talking about it, but not so much so it disrupts the system. One instance is Massachusetts, who legalized gay marriage before it was recognized at a federal level, started the conversation about rights for anyone who did not identify as straight. Many other states after that legalized gay marriage and after another decade of struggle it was accepted at a national level in 2015. It was not simply a matter of approving it at a national level, but one of starting smaller at the states to shift the window in that direction. Another technique is pulling the rope sideways, for example during a game of tug of war everyone is struggling to win for their side, but if you pull it sideways, in a way no one would expect, everyone would come tumbling down. To put that idea to a policy, if people are arguing over hiring or lowering taxes, if you ask that you change where the tax money goes, people would be caught off guard enough to listen to you and change the conversation. 

"That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

- Milton Friedman

    Here is a quick and concise YouTube video that explains the Overton Window in a more visual way. It includes examples of how the window has changed for ideas such as women's suffrage and gun ownership.  

    The Overton Window effects society as it whole, because it dictates what our politicians can talk about, what they can change. It allows us to reflect on the ideas that we hold dear and ask ourselves "Can we talk about this upfront or do we have to do this another way?" The understanding that this exists frees us from the assumptions that anything can change overnight and reinforces the power we as the voters have to change policy. 

    Different groups of people are effected by the Overton Window in different ways, some minority groups may be front and center in the discussions of policy, such as immigration, Black Lives Matter, and homosexual rights, while others, racism towards Asian culture, may be more hidden from view. If you are front and center of the window, you may be more or less targeted with hate, you will have more attention, and most prominently, you will see political change. 

    It effects each and everyone of us because we live in this world caught up in political systems, but if we understand the system we can make it so it is not some scary huge monster to try and destroy. We can make the system work for the people again, if we allow ourselves to be educated on it. 

    

 

Privacy Online and Offline [#9]

 Your Online Life

    Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo | TED Talk

    Enriquez talks about how your online life is never personal, it is never secret, it is never protected with these big companies such as Facebook and Google. Your information, your photos, your posts: in this day and age those things can outlive you.

    He gives us four lessons about privacy, the first one was a metaphor comparing our posts and time on social media to Sisyphus. A man from Greek legend doomed to roll a stone up and down a hill for eternity. Once you post your information, it will be rolling up and down for a long time. The next lesson is about Orpheus. Orpheus charmed his way into the underworld to get his beloved back and he could leave with her if he didn't look at her; he looked and lost her. If we go looking too far into the past, we might lose who we are now. The third lesson was about Atlanta, a great runner. She would challenge men to races and if they won they could marry her. Hippomenes ran against her and won, because he distracted her with golden apples. The golden apples are the ideas for a tweet or a post, don't let those things get in the way of your race. The final lesson is about Narcissus, don't get caught staring at your own reflection. 

    We are being threated with our entire lives staying on the internet for eternity, don't give them everything.

    Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad: How tech companies deceive you into giving up your data and privacy | TED Talk

    "...because if we know that something innocent we said will come back to haunt us, we will stop speaking. If we know that we are being watched and monitored, we will change our behavior. And if we can't control who has our data and how it is being used, we have lost the control of our lives."

-Finn Lützow

    Lützow talked about how the toy doll Cayla, was an invasion of privacy and a danger to children. Anyone could connect to the doll (in the range of it) and tell the child who was holding it, anything. There was no security or any type of privacy policies to protect whoever used the doll. Even if you do not own this doll, your security may be at risk.

    Lützow continues to explain about terms and conditions contracts that you find with every app you download. The terms and conditions almost no one reads before hitting accept are getting you stuck in a legally binding contract that you cannot get out of. Most dating apps have access to all of your photos, your information, and anything you give them to do whatever they want to with them. Him and his team sat down and read out loud the terms and conditions of the most popular app for your phone on a stream; it took them 31 hours to finish. It is ridiculous that these companies do this, for we cannot fight this battle alone as consumers, we need the government to step in and make change.  An app contract should never be 900 pages long.

Diffusion of Innovations [#8]

 Diffusion of Innovations

    Everett Rogers was a professor of communication studies, much like our own Dean Smith here at High Point University. Rogers came up with a theory, popularized in his book, called the diffusions of innovations. This theory seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas/technology spread. 

The graph is spilt up into five different sections, the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The innovators are the ones who invent the technology in hopes of improving humanity in some way. The early adopters are the first ones on the bandwagon, they see potential in this technology to improve their lives and run with it. The early majority is really where the technology/idea takes off, many more people see the potential of this technology and use it. The late majority is basically everyone else, who felt they would be left behind had they not adapted to the technology. The final category is the laggards, people who will never adapt the technology/idea.

    These people adopt whatever new technology/idea comes out because they want to invest in something the agree with or they don't want to feel left out or they can no longer live without this technology, like seatbelts.

    Some technology/ideas are adopted while others are not because of a variety of different factors, the state of the world, the moral beliefs of someone, or personal preference. To give a recent example of this, would be the invention of the corona-virus vaccine. Many many people want to use this technology to better protect themselves against the virus that has killed 500,00 Americans alone, while others do not. 

    To continue with the corona-virus vaccine example, many people are early adopters, because they are frantic to get back to their lives, to hug their loved ones, no matter what the cost others are speculating about. Some people will be late adopters, due to all of the unknown surrounding long-term effects of the vaccine, but will eventually crack due to the increasing pressure they will have to get that vaccine. As much as I disagree with opting out of getting the covid vaccine, some people will. They will due to personal preferences and religious/moral beliefs that they have followed all of their life and are too stubborn to give up now. 

    Now to explore another technology, I have talked about on this blog before, homing pigeons with the diffusion of innovations theory. Homing pigeons caught on and spread when people realized the benefit to how fast these birds could spread messages. So many people were early adopters because this was the only technology available to them to do this task of communication. People were late adopters, because they did not need that fast communication until other places spoke to them and wanted faster messages back. Some people never adopted pigeons as a form of communication, because the technology got better in the form of tvs and radios, so they never needed to use them. Homing pigeons as a technology did not have many disadvantages other than the upkeep and care it took to keep them healthy and trained.

EOTO: The Radio [#7]

 The Radio

    

    The radio has a history spanning back over a hundred years with the invention of the telegram in 1896, by Samuel Morse. This was the first and the start to sending electronic signals across vast and long distances. In 1901, there was the first true test of the telegram with them sending a signal across the Atlantic, thousands of miles in distance, that only took a few minutes to arrive. Fun fact, the first signal they sent was the letter "s" in Morse code.  

    Jumping forward to 1916, this was when radio tuners were invented and sparked FM/AM stations. Turners, like the ones we still see in many cars today, help switch radio stations to offer more channels to broadcast. No one really took advantage of this technology until 1920, in which the first radio station sprung up.

    The technology stayed pretty much static the next few decades, until 1961. In 1961, the stereophonic radio was invented in which this is the modern radio we still use today. Many speakers and other sound devices, such as headphones, use this technology to transmit sounds from one place to another.

    

    The radio was an important and revolutionary piece of technology because in WWI, it allowed ships to communicate with the land base and each other. It continued to be used as a war time technology to spread news and orders across the globe. It was an important staple in every household as families and friends gathered around the radio to listen to music, news, and plays. The radio brought the country together, like it never has before. 

    

Homing Pigeons: Following the Flocks Through History [#6]

Homing Pigeons: Following the Flocks Through History

    Homing pigeons were mentioned in history, centuries back in 776 B.C. You may be surprised at what they were used for. Homing pigeons were used by the ancient Greeks to announce the winners of the quadrennial Olympic games. They were sent off in the direction of every village in Greece to inform the inhabitants that there was a hero coming home. This was one of the very first instances of how communication had evolved to move faster than the word of mouth could carry. With the heads up of the winner, the villages could prepare a celebration and a feast to honor their new found hero. When the Olympic games started back up in 1896, they even still used carrier pigeons to spread the news of the winners. Demonstrating how, even after over a thousand years, pigeons could carry the message home.

    Another early example of the homing pigeon in literature is the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible. Doves and pigeons are apart of the same family of birds, Columbidae. Noah sent out a dove to see if the flood was over and it returned carrying an olive branch. According to this piece, the dove was able to find land and fly back to the ark amidst the endless waves. It was carrying one of the most important messages of the early Bible books, that the flood was over.

    In the following centuries, pigeons became the popular and fast way to send messages across long distances, in an age before trains, cars, and planes even existed. Genghis Khan even used the birds to communicate across his vast empire. The average homing pigeon, while flying long distance, can reach speeds up to 100 miles per hours. That is faster than many cars are legally allowed to drive. Homing pigeons were the quickest and most secure way to send information, especially in an age where travel was limited. They allowed communication to spark between many groups of people, in which it would have been impossible otherwise and with this foot-in-the-door type of innovation, it only caused humanity to work harder to send information faster.

    Even in more recent history, pigeons have been used to send messages in war times on both sides and pigeons weren't a solo show, many people had to work together to train and send these pigeons out.

    In World War I, pigeons were the most trusted source of communication, even though they had telephones at the time, they were extremely unreliable. France and Belgium, when they entered the war, recognized pigeons as a key to national defense. One pigeon alone carried over 20,000 messages for the war effort. The most well-known war pigeon was Cher Ami. He was the last of eight pigeons as one of the American forces was under heavy fire, not only by Germans, but also by friendly fire as well. Cher Ami was sent off with the message of help to the nearby backup. After being shot, losing a leg, and flying 24 miles, Cher Ami made it back to his home with the message that saved many of the mens' lives that day. He delivered the message and saved lives.

    In World War II, two pigeons alone saved the lives of three thousand people. The war pigeon, William of Orange, delivered dozens of war messages, often when the Allied forces communication systems would go down. The other war pigeon, G.I. Joe, saved the life of a thousand when he flew 20 miles back to Allied headquarter to inform the team that the enemy forces had pulled out of the area and there was no real reason to bomb the city. Paddy the pigeon even helped with the D-Day invasion, fighting off German hawks to get crucial intel to the Allies about the invasion. 

    As technology advanced, the need for carrier pigeons lessened and they are no longer used on a wide scale. China, however, still raises homing pigeons in case their technology ever goes dark. But to this day in the rest of the world, people can still be found owning and using carrier pigeons to send messages locally in a grab for nostalgia and simpler times. The world may have changed, but the pigeons instincts to go home to their nest will never diminish. 

Hate Speech: Why it's Protected [#5]

 Speech Theory: Promoting Tolerance

    We live in an age where you can say one wrong thing and end up on a global stage. Thinking before you type or speak is crucial nowadays to stay afloat. While traditional cancel culture, can sometimes go too far in destroying lives, there is a need for hate speech to be said rather than suppressed.

    Many people may have a contradicting opinion (Amazon and Discord), while others struggle to what seems to be an insane idea, protect hate speech (Facebook). If you think about it on a surface level, yes of course we should ban hate speech, no one should be allowed to say slurs and derogatory words, but let's think through this.

    According to the first amendment, "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech". Like it or not, hate speech is free speech. People have a right to hate on other people, but the government should not be the one to step in to stop this. If the government stepped in to stop this, it would be a direct violation of the first amendment. The responsibility lies with the people.

    Hypothetically, the government had a blacklist of terms that were illegal to say at anytime, so that there couldn't even be a discussion about why we can't say them. That would make everyone upset and angry that the government is limiting the people and the new generation will never understand why those words cannot be said. 

    We however as a collective society have made our own blacklist of terms that if you say them, you will be condemned and pushed out, even fired from your job for it. Social acceptance is one of the most important things for a human being, being kept away and isolated from people is one of the worst forms of torture. If someone were to experience that kind of negative reaction for saying one thing, you can be sure as heck they will not say it again and if they do it's back to being socially isolated. 

    As much as we do not feel like it at times, we as a society do have power and presence over the evil and misdoings in our society. We can stop it. We can teach what it means to be right or to be wrong to so many people with the use of our voices and with not using our voices.

    We see so many companies and corporations trying to stop hate speech of them to be heard, but without that speech without those opinions, how will they be held accountable? How would they be stopped if they ever did something like that? That is why through hate speech we can send out a message of tolerance. We can send out a message of love for our fellow humans. We can stand up to injustice and say no, I stand with this person. 

    There is always certain situations where a certain type of hate speech should be banned, but then again there are situations where people need to be more informed about a topic than less informed about a topic. We must educate and teach others so they do not make the same mistakes.

"The remedy for bad speech, isn't no speech, it's more speech." 

- Professor Dean Smith