Mental hygiene in an age of AI targeted advertising

A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:

Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persuaded to go with anything provided enough fake propaganda is thrown at it. Is this modern democracy?

This triggered me to write something that I've been mulling over for a week or several in odd moments. So I replied

The ad campaigners don't believe; they know. 70 years of experience under their belts and now social media have handed them the tools to begin to really target advertising. It's still playing the odds but upping the likelihood of responses they hope for.  Our difficulty as populations subject to this is how to think about our own agency. We're too used to thinking of ourselves as in control and not sufficiently aware of subliminal and unconscious drivers. 'Of course, I'm not persuaded by advertising'. Well, maybe not directly but over time background opinions shift, we tend to mirror or move towards what we perceive 'people like us' are thinking/approving/accepting. It's a long game, but then the Murdoch press have being playing it for what? -30 or 40 years? Add to that the new toolbox from the people who take up the market slack from Cambridge Analytica. We all need to learn how to practice mental and emotional hygiene in a advertising age.

I think too that we need to find a way to talk in popular discourse about the fact that advertising does in fact change minds or influence opinion without making it sound like someone who does respond is an idiot and doesn't know their own mind. It's clear that statistically, advertising and targetting it does work but it's not 100%. Certain percentages of people are likely to follow up certain kinds of advertising and to be influenced by certain messages relayed and spun in certain ways. We need to find ways to enable people to be more aware of how this happens and to step up our out-smarting smarts. Many have got quite good at spotting 'crude' and direct sales pitches. We now need to get good at spotting and discounting the subtle.

Somewhere in all the comments in the Times article you can find the originals. Times is paywalled, but you can see a couple of articles a week free.

Chaplaincy -a diaconal ministry

A couple or so years ago, I found myself in conversation about the ministry of university chaplains saying that I felt my ministry was more expressing my diaconal orders than priestly. And I recently read a post about 'distinctive deacons' in the diocese of Europe which seemed here to offer an explanation of orders that supports what I found myself saying then:

 ... a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain thingsDeacons are ordained to hold up before the Church and the world, diakonia, the distinctive ministry of Christ the Servant, as being central to all Christian ministry.

Some ask how a deacon is different from a priest; is a deacon not simply a junior priest? Well, no. A priest’s focus is on the parish community and sacrament. They are pastors/shepherds of the community, feeding them and leading them. The deacon’s focus is on outreach, service, and supporting the ministry of the faithful in the world. Eurobishop: Deacons make history in the Diocese in Europe: 

I'm not focussed on a parish community (though I do serve some), I don't preside at communion very often -it's not a major strand of being a chaplain to a university. I do tend to focus on outreach, serving the people and institution I'm placed with. I try to support the ministry of Christians (and others!) in the world of 'my' university and HE more widely. It's good to feel that my diaconal orders are still being 'used'.



On a separate note, Eurobishop's comment " a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain things" is a widely shared trope of more Catholic theologies. And I do agree with the reasons I often see or hear it shared: it provides a respite from functionalism and activism with their implied works-based judgmentalism. I've always felt that we should notice that being and doing are integrated and that where the priority goes in thinking about them depends on what one is trying to consider. I note that the 'being' in that passage is justified in terms of functions. Which makes my point that we can't conceive of pure being without taking in what it is doing.  Can we just not work with that distinction? Rather let's consider such things as dynamic and relational: a deacon is in relation to the church and the world, typcially, in certain ways and those ways are definitive of a deacon's 'being' in some way such that diaconal actions are likely to result and in turn the diaconal being is consolidated and grows in the doing of the ministry. Let's refuse to put ministry and minister asunder except for the briefest of thought-experiments.

A 'secular' ritual -what can we learn?

I find myself thinking a lot in odd moments about rituals and the language of ceremony and how the churches often 'speak' gestural languages that are quite alien, that is, unintuitive, to our host cultures. So this article and in particular this paragraph got me thinking.

The bell-ringing tradition started in the US, and has become popular in the UK over the past five or six years. The idea is that, on your final day of treatment, you ring a bell to mark the occasion: sometimes, other patients and staff are there to watch you do it and you’re clapped and cheered. It’s a moment for a photo for the Instagram account, a moment to stop everything and acknowledge that you’ve been through something incredibly scary and pretty hellish but that now you’re at a turning point. Your life might continue as it was before, or it might be different, but this experience was so big that it needs to be marked in some way.

It seems great to have a ritual that can aknowledge, somewhat publicly, and in the presence of people who have helped and supported that a turning point has been reached.

And why a bell being rung? The best clue I could get was in this later line

there are some who will never be able to ring the bell because they’ll never be “clear” of cancer.

Clear as a bell -get it? The thing is, though, if this is the right etymology of the practice, then it does and does not help us in a search for intuitive ritual actions. It does not do so because the explanation for the symbolism is at one remove in that you have to know the English simile to 'get' it. But then, a number of people probably respond to the action without ever knowing that connection to the simile.

How do they read it? I wonder whether their reading might be something like my naive reading before I saw that line inferring the connection. I think I read it in the light of other bell ringings -particularly as in the article there is a photo of the kind of bell (along with the notice explaining the practice). So my connections: school bells to call us to play or to class. If this was the interpretive adjunct then we might read the bell as a change from one kind of time or activity to another -possibly from treatment time to the rest of life. This would be reinforced by the continued use of bells to mark time.

I also associated with a bell tolled at a funeral or a time of mourning. This seems less apposite. I suspect that this association is not unlikely but might be rejected because it is the opposite of what is being expressed. (Though the death of the cancer? -probably not: this would be a cause for rejoicing not mourning). Similarly the sound of bells at sea on buoys warning of shipwrecks or sandbanks.

The bell itself must act as a standing visual sign and perhaps a hopeful one. It potentially speaks of a hope for the future. People could look at it and hope for the day when they would ring it as an all clear.

The article itself, of course, is noticing that the symbolism and ritual doesn't work for everyone. And that is something to take note of too. When we are co-creating rituals particularly for people who may be in emotionally charged or vulnerable states, we might recognise that not all will find them cathartic or resonant (sorry for the pun in this context but it's the right sort of word). Some of them may find it off-putting as a result. And that's okay: as long as it is not compulsory. All may, some should, none must (attributed to Elizabeth I, I believe, in respect of oracular confession).

From: I didn’t ring a bell at the end of my cancer treatment. But I get those who do | Joanna Moorhead | Opinion | The Guardian: