Abstract
It is argued that mass deployment and use of high-capacity electronic communication has caused the breakdown of a human institution so elementary that nobody in the past bothered to make laws protecting it: the everyday give-and-take of speech. It has done this by vastly increasing people’s power to deceive without, at the same time, increasing their power to detect deception. The reason the imbalance is so problematic is that speech is an economic act, something done by the speaker to achieve some gain or personal benefit and involving exchange of value with the listener. Speech is therefore not inherently truthful. It becomes truthful, if at all, only when the speaker is afraid of being branded as a liar or a fool if found out, but, at the same time, not too afraid to speak out in the first place. Modern electronic means have provided speakers with a huge arsenal of tools to evade personal responsibility for what they say, thus badly unbalancing the economics of speech. Fortunately, the cure is simple: one need only create institutions that circumscribe this power in just the right amount so as to restore balance. In this paper I describe experiments I have conducted in creating such institutions using cohorts of students in coursework. I have found that a carefully crafted electronic interface that enforces the right amount of transparency, together with a small amount of human intervention, can have a startlingly positive effect on behavior. No policing is required. Creativity and intellectual cooperation bloom automatically and massively when healthy economic interactions among the people in the cohort are restored.
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Verbal speech rate is 100 words per minute. Assuming 5.1 letters per word and 5 bits per letter (speech effectively has punctuation marks), the baud rate of speech is 42.5 baud. Typical human reading speed is 250 w/min or 106.2 baud. A telephone audio channel is about 8,000 baud. High fidelity sound is 200,000 baud. Standard analog television is 3,500,000 baud. High-definition digital television is 19,000,000 baud. These audio and video rates are known mainly through compression technologies. The full capacity of a video channel, including improbable frames that one would never see, is much greater.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by a research grant from MediaX at Stanford University, enabled by a gift from Konica Minolta.
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Laughlin, R.B. (2015). Truth Telling and Deception in the Internet Society. In: Matei, S., Russell, M., Bertino, E. (eds) Transparency in Social Media. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18552-1_14
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