The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

  Years ago, I was teaching a Grade 10 English course and had some students reading The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, which was adapted into its graphic novel form by Josh Neufeld. Parts of it stuck with me for a long time. I remembered it as being an illuminating exploration of media and I was hoping to use it, at least in part, for my media studies course. I remembered the book as talking about the funding structure for media and how that impacts the kinds of messages we get to see (think: Noam Chomsky). 

There is some of that, but it isn’t exactly how I remembered. Essentially, The Influencing Machine is a history of journalism. Gladstone hops between different time periods and watershed moments in reporting and discusses the impact of the media in relation to peoples’ everyday experiences. She quotes from a range of primary sources, noting the reactions that people had to news when it became widely available in print—and then widely available on television—and then widely available on the internet. Perhaps it’s because Gladstone is a journalist that she’s able to tell it all as a story. She draws some clear parallels between different historical points in time, the most notable of which (for me) being the way journalism shifted during the Vietnam War and beyond.

There’s a lot to talk about in terms of media evolution: the changing relationship between journalists and the military, the way polls sway us or not (posting this on election day feels serendipitous…), the way that we have come to trust and distrust information. The vignettes Gladstone choose are effectively representative and the balance between her own narratorial voice and the accounts of others is nicely achieved to reflect the times and the commentary on the times. If there’s a downside to Gladstone’s historico-anthropological approach, it is that it is doomed to the marching on of time: even since the book’s publication in 2011, we have seen immense changes to journalism and reportage. While Gladstone references Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness”, the book isn’t so current as to address “fake news” or living in a post-truth AI-content-generated world.

In a book like this (namely: a long-form essay turned into a graphic novel), it runs the risk of being bland, but Josh Neufeld’s illustrations add a liveliness and expressiveness to the work as a whole. The depictions of Gladstone herself are often amusingly cartoonish, transplanting her into different historical eras complete with period-appropriate garb. For a book that is intent on telling the “truth” (while “objectivity” is problematized), Neufeld does not shy away from some creative embellishment. The pages have a liveliness to them that captures the spirit of the time, if not the letter of the time (although there are specific speeches and letters that have been illustrated here).

Gladstone’s book gives us a lot of food for thought, especially as we progress into a world increasingly unchecked for factuality and manipulated into sensationalized stories. Granted, these tactics are nothing new—ever since the conception of news, there has been mis– and dis–information, but the book needs an update, a revised text that explores how the media industry is being influenced by big tech’s privatization of information and its subsequent manipulation over us. The debate of privately / publicly funded news is given an engaging voice with uncertain answers here—and it’s time to take action. Like the book itself, I’ll end this review with a reminder: we get the media we deserve. It’s time to claim it.

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

  Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein exists within a network of similar texts, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The text operates in conversation with other books like Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin, The Digital Closet by Alexander Monea, Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks, and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. Each of the texts deals with the way that technology impacts our relationship to sex, gender, race, and politics. Moreover, Data Feminism (like Automating Inequality) focuses on how data is used to manipulate real-world, tangible politics.

The unfortunate thing for D’Ignazio and Klein is that they are late to my reading party; I’ve already read several related books prior to their contribution to the discourse. As a result, a lot of the information presented here isn’t exactly new or revolutionary. Some of the examples are even pulled from texts I’ve already read and so it left me feeling a little bit lukewarm.

I thought some of the language they added into the conversation was valuable. First was the idea of “privilege hazard”---essentially that one’s entitlement in society creates dangers for others, often in the form of blind spots when collecting and presenting data. That term seems useful to me for conceptualizing oppression without it necessarily assigning a particular blame and without assigning a foregone conclusion. It’s a hazard—something to consider, but also something that can be avoided or minimized. Also, something that is a hazard to us even when it is unintended. On the cheekier side, D’Ignazio and Klein use the term Big Dick Data to describe a masculinized approach to data, and I thought that was an amusing characterization.

Another layer of the book I found compelling was their discussion of data visualization and the debates which surround it. Common opinion is to present data as being value-neutral and being presented in as clear and concise a manner as possible, without even icons to suggest emotion. However, as we know, data is never neutral. Even the decision of what to include is rooted in values. So, D’Ignazio and Klein discuss the idea of data sensationalism. They describe some interesting projects with how data gets presented. For example, they describe a death-by-gun-violence map blocking out entire sections of neighbourhoods or showing a tally of “stolen years” from children that have died by gun violence. They also talk about a presentation where people read the alphabetized names of all the artists in (if I remember correctly) the MET? The Smithsonian? MOMA? Anyway, they read the names out and it becomes a wave of Marks, Jasons, Jameses, Andrews, and so forth. It cascades like a wave and then every once in a while, there is a joyful insertion of a woman’s name and the presenters change their demeanour for that brief instant. It’s a way of presenting data in such a way that the implications are immediately obvious. Exploring those creative means of presenting data to give a particular point of view were especially interesting.

In any case, the book is pretty good, if not really ‘new for me’. If you’re exploring the discourse for the first time, it would be well worth it to start here.

Happy reading!