People often fail to realise the connection between their political or social views and the media sources they prefer. How one’s beliefs are formed is a bit of a chicken and egg problem when it comes to media sources – which came first, being right-wing or watching Fox News?

But I maintain that if you care (personally or professionally) about getting to the bottom of issues, you will have to select the best possible information sources, amongst them primary sources.

First, you have to face a basic problem: our current media landscape is not helping you staying informed. The New York Times has no real interest in reporting the objective truth. They have an interest in selling their product as often as possible, which means maintaining an effective illusion of reporting the truth for as big of a market of potential readers as possible.

You may think people care about the truth. Don’t be mistaken. Look at which newspapers have the highest circulation numbers: mostly those who have effectively locked down a geographical market or serve a general world-view. And that’s for people who even buy newspapers, who are probably more interested in informing themselves (or at least upholding the appearance of doing so) than the mean.

So when reading newspapers often makes you rather misinformed, what is one to do in order to truly learn about issues one cares about?

Select the issues you truly care about and read primary sources!

You cannot reasonably be well-informed about a lot of issues so you have to select those you truly care about – there is only so much time in a day.

For those issues you do truly care about, Clay Johnson has helpful hints to give. He is the author of a new book, “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption”, in which he makes an excellent point on the importance of reading primary sources:

“All too often, we consume information at the top of the trophic pyramid of truth, and as such, we’re getting only the information that has been selected for us by a network of operators interested not in telling us the truth, but in giving us what sells. (…)

We have to move towards the base of the pyramid if we want to see what’s really going on.”

Let’s focus on a concrete example of what reading primary sources will yield in terms of insights: the recent Wikileaks publication of internal StratFor (Strategic Forecasting) emails.

If you had read every news piece the mass media published about these emails during the first 24 hours of their publication, you would have come away with a lot of misconceived ideas and story-lines about what StratFor is and is not (‘do they sexually exploit their sources?!’) and what information they are privy to.

If you had spent about 2-3 hours reading the actual first 230 published emails, you would have gained very interesting, if a bit superfluous, insights into how an intelligence organization like StratFor actually works (which is similar to how the CIA etc works) and what regional issues they care about. Their analytical guidance e.g. for Germany from 2009 lists Neo-nazi, radical right wing and anti-immigrant violence as the ‘main internal threats to Germany’, which has proven to be very well-founded during 2011.

You would also have learned e.g. the following information, which was mostly not reported in most media reports about the leaks:
- Israel may have already succeeded in destroying most of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure
- Mossad may have contracted out the Dubai murders and the Iranian physicist hit
- Chavez’ cancer may have spread to the lymph nodes and into the bone marrow already and there may be all kinds of shady background deals going on as to becomes the successor
- US Democrats may have committed election fraud during the Presidential election of 2008 in Philadelphia and Ohio
- “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy may have been orchestrated from the very beginning and the Imam may have been an operational asset of the FBI
- Karl Rove may have a close personal/working relationship to Kerry Cammack, whose wife happens to have been elected to the Texas Supreme Court
- Osama bin Laden’s body may have been flown to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda for examinations etc before allegedly being buried in the sea
- French businesses may pay some of the highest bribes in the military procurement business
- Estimates of drug profits from Mexican sources may be wrong to the order of tens of billions of USD
- Turkey may want to lead the Islamic world
- Several mid to senior level Pakistani Intelligence service and military personnel (including a retired General) may have known about Osama Bin Laden’s safe house arrangements; the United States may know which ones
- Russian Prosecutor General / Attorney General may have been a source for StratFor; there may be a lot of specific criminal activity going on in all kinds of Russian institutions
- 1 of 19 Pakistani brigadiers recently promoted to major generals may be a StratFor source
- German Bundeswehr may have failed dramatically in their stabilisation efforts in Afghanistan due to not understanding counterinsurgency operations

All this may or may not be true – given the nature of the leaked emails – but at least you can read the primary sources for yourself and make up your mind about them (insofar as one considers the emails the primary sources in this case and not the StratFor sources/analysts themselves). Journalists instead are often bound by internal guidelines and will not report about certain information at all or may just be under too much time pressure to spend a few hours reading and evaluating. Not to even mention that most journalists don’t really know their covered topics that well – they are just not incentivized to truly know or to care.

Also, these primary sources and the information contained within may or may not surprise the most hardened analysts whose very job it is to stay informed about these topics. Which is a point that is often mentioned in relation to Wikileaks publications – how “there is nothing new” in the leaks. But there is a lot of new information for the general public and most probably for you and me. At least, most, if not all, of this information surely didn’t become public knowledge beforehand.

So if you care about an issue, do not outsource your information gathering. Read primary sources. You will learn a lot and become less misinformed in the process.

The German feuilleton and ‘literary establishment’ have been discussing this for the last few weeks, accomplishing nothing. Whole magazine issues have dealt with the plagiarism charges, coming to no concrete result whatsoever.

Of course, art is an utterly subjective manner and basically follows arbitrary rules all the time.

But there is a clear distinction to be made between remixing the works of others and purporting that one has written an original novel. Both are forms of art, but while remixing derives its value at least to a certain extent from the parts that are remixed, originality by definition derives its value from creating something original.

It is a distinction that has to be made independently of any specific work as it’s a basic issue of authorship, originality and the moral compass of an author. Plagiarism is not limited to works of fiction. It is also – perhaps even more so – an important issue in academia and science. Both fields recognize the importance of acknowledging previous works and established authors. As original research is not possible without knowledge of the current status quo within your academic field, creating your own voice similarly consists of having acknowledged and imitated the voices and narratives of others beforehand.

But you accomplish originality only when you transcend incorporating the work of others and add your very own distinctive contribution to it.

I think the concept of originality has to be adamantly defended in today’s remix culture. One should always distinguish clearly between the concept and value of both remixing the work of others and creating something entirely on your own.

It’s perfectly admirable for a young author ‘just’ to remix the work of others. Many famous authors have slaved away for decades before accomplishing now famous works of originality.

Clearly establishing a moral straight line between copying others and standing on the shoulders of giants to add your own contribution is what’s lacking in recent discussions. I consider this to be a failure of the ‘literary establishment’ who have proven themselves to be moral relativists and therefore deemed themselves, at least for me, not worthy of any further consideration.

People lie all the time. Even scientists do it. The Economist recently concluded an article about the (dis-) honesty of scientists with the fitting observation that “scientists are as human as everyone else”. This doesn’t help much with trusting humanity to deal with an ever-growing list of obstacles in our future’s way.

I fell into the trap of the confirmation bias: focus on seeing problems and soon you will feel overwhelmed by it all. But it’s absolutely ridiculous to worry about the future of humanity – it sure as hell doesn’t rest on my shoulders alone.

When you read about the ancient life, you recognize that there may exist a tendency in yourself to take yourself much too seriously.

This is why reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations helps so much – and why I consider it the greatest book I have ever read. It’s puts your life in perspective. You are awed by the recognition that everything is transitory.

Humanity hasn’t changed that much at all. In the words of Aurelius:

The age of Vespasian, for example. People doing the exact same things: marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power. And that life they led is nowhere to be found.

There is vanity to be found in constantly worrying. You have to be able to let it go to achieve a peaceful state of mind. It doesn’t ultimately matter whether or not we solve the problems of our times – they will soon be forgotten anyway.

What matters though, is how we go about it. How we live whilst hammering away at the opportunities (disguised as problems). As Aurelius says,

It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.

But how to give back? How to enrich the world with value? I do not want to add to the amount of nonsense and superfluous things already out there.

What it ultimately comes down to, is feeling obliged to thank the world for granting me existence in a time of prosperity and providing me with endless opportunities. I have thought about how to give back and how to provide value to the world and its inhabitants for years.

Still, I am no wiser. 

Nonetheless, I consider two steps vital to figuring out how to give back:

Keep training my discipline of perception

The doctrine of the three “disciplines” is central to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

Gregory Hays writes in his introduction to his translation of Meditations:

“The discipline of perception requires that we maintain absolute objectivity of thought: that we see things dispassionately for what they are. (…)

It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.”

For me it’s is all about differentiating between face-value and the deeper meaning of things. I still have a lot to learn here but hope to gain sufficient ability in it which hopefully will enable me to identify possibilities to further mankind’s good.

Start acting on my knowledge

“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.” Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 6.51

My well-being depends on what I do. If you have been training your whole life to sincerely give back, there will be a time where you are called upon to do so.

I consider that time to start now.

Honestly, I am still not any wiser how to give back. I know, though, that it all comes down to what I do. If I focus on that, I will not get lost.

The price of advertising is obviously correlated with the impact it leaves on its desired targets. 

The more impact you have with an advertisement, the higher the price. The more focused target group you can show the ad to, the higher the price.

Before advertising really took off on the internet, measuring the impact of advertising probably resembled – by today’s standards – a guessing game: you inferred impact from  general audience or viewership numbers. A huge ad in the NYT was worth more than a small ad in the Rocky Mountain News.

What happened with advertising in the internet age?

Finally, the impact of advertising was really measurable – with far better accuracy.

As Steven Johnson so expertly puts it in “The Invention of Air”:

As is so often the case in the history of science, an increase in the accuracy of measurement led to a fundamental shift in the perception of the world. Marking changes in the temperature of ocean water enabled navigators to identify and exploit a pattern in the ocean’s currents that they had blindly stumbled across in centuries past: a river of warm water that runs from the tropics all the way up the coastline of North America, and then makes a sharp right turn toward Europa as it passes Cape Cod.

An increase in the accuracy of measurement led to the conclusion that traditional forms of advertising looked – and still look – more doomed by the day. Not focused, not relevant, not measurable – therefore there is no justifiable reality-based price-setting mechanism.

And this accuracy of measurement will get upended again and again. 

Google didn’t just display ads more intelligently on its search engine. It found a way to display more relevant ads and therefore more valuable ads.

There will be ways to measure even more accurately, whether actual consumers find the ad to be relevant – and to give advertisers direct feedback on that.

Umair Haque has it right:

Imagine a button underneath every ad at every newspaper, magazine, and blog that said: “tell us this ad sucks”.

Which will, in turn, disrupt current forms of advertising again.

Advertising will get ever more focused, more relevant and more measurable. And those forms of advertising will always be able to command high prices.

Think about it for a moment: Internet advertising revenues are expected to drop.

Is it the recession or another upending of current advertising models?

And truth be told: when some years will have passed, there may be no advertising anymore – it may be called user-requested product information.