On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.

So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.

any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.

...

This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.

This part of the article stands out to me for a number of reasons. First, the idea that people with physical and mental disabilities prior to the nineteenth century suffered in a difference sense compared to what they deal with now. Prior to this point, this introduction points out the stereotypes that people with disabilities had in the eighteenth century. Though this is something that is still socially dealt with now, we've taken further measures to help people who deal with specific setbacks that emphasis the overall point on maximizing "the importance of personal agency," and minimizing social change. Overall, this article interests me because it allows me to think deeper about how disabilities have always existed, though they've been handles in a variety of different ways as well as reflect it to how it's handled regarding circumstances we've learned including the role of the doctor and what they can do to help and the resources we had access to then versus now.

Digital Social Networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

Makes an interesting point about homogenisation in Facebook and Twitter (i.e. people are a binary of friend or not friend, categories that collapse all different categories.

Interestingly, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to address this recently.

This was also custom and simple manners when attending a party. It is offensive if this action was dismissed. It is a way of introducing oneself to the host/hostess and showing gratitude for the invitation.

During this time, the purpose of this was just so that your presence was known and acknowledged. This is custom.

A 1799 income tax put a particular strain on the middle and upper classes at this time. For Edward, being idly rich could also be beneficial. His options for rewarding work are few.

p. 2

Originally wanted to study HSS and STEM but scientists didn't qulify. See chapter III

"Natural development" here seems to imply that there are types of language that are not constructed, but of course we can use cultural context to intuit that she does not mean "natural" as the opposite of constructed but to mean something closer to "just as valid as other language, which is all constructed and ever-evolving."

Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.

2 April, 2017 - International Fact-Checking Day Lesson plan and several how-to guides.

Colleagues. connection. mutualisation.

Network colleagues

Nice talk and nice use of social media

Conner on the social nature of listservs--cf. McCatry

This is a really good key question..

Social presence

Disconnection

Courses. Mapping. Focus.

Yearning to reach out and be really present with the people on line.

Timezone confusion. Competence

Being able to picture the person in a physical context in which one has walked.

Virtual Connection. Real Connecting

Distant Presence Friends

Modeling reflective practice.

Narrative connected

Porous walls. Hybridization. Change narrative

connections attachment identification

Learning the power of open.

Different methodology for research.

The 1st to annotate here

From page 1329: "Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action."

Burke seems to be reiterating the social and political web that Nietzsche suggests throughout On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. The fictions we come to believe as truth must be taken into consideration as part of a larger network of relationships and systems that are at once predetermined and unstable.

Throughout this section, Burke calls attention to the ways we use universal truths to act out discriminatory practices. In doing so, there's an inconsistency between the name we give something and the function it serves. The "truth" of the thing doesn't equal the way it operates in the world. In the case he presents here, the power is named "United Nations," but the power is acted out through the "United States." (Would claims to religious freedom to deny service to, say, LGBT couples be included in something like this? The fiction is "religious liberty" but the function is "discrimination"?)

How can we connect this back to Willard and Nietzsche? What do they say about fiction and power that resonates here?

Again, from the MicroResponse:

Thus there is a social aspect here as well, which is one of the ways that taste isrhetorical – it is a product of the dynamic relationship between the self and the world

In "The Letter Killeth" Frances Willard admonishes the acceptance of "truth" without acknowledging the social fictions at work in male-dominated exegesis:

We need women commentators to bring out the women's side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when woman's eye and man's together shall discern the perspective of the Bible's full-orbed revelation.

I do not at all impugn the good intention of the good men who have been our exegetes, and I bow humbly in the presence of their scholarship; but while they turn their linguistic telescopes on truth, I may be allowed to make a correction for the "personal equation" in the results which they espy.

It might be useful here to think about the "social aspects" of rhetoric as they were mentioned in the MicroResponse:

In other words, taste depends not only upon the senses, but also upon established standards. Thus there is a social aspect here as well, which is one of the ways that taste is rhetorical – it is a product of the dynamic relationship between the self and the world.

I think this procedural notion also resembles Rickert's ideas in "Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic"... For him, rhetoric is not something we do, but something we take part in. Hence his use of the term "rhetoricity."

Useful: Zuckerberg's article is here available outside the Facebook silo.

This "continuing dialogue" also seems to be further embraced on a bigger scale and globally due to influences like social media and bloggers.

Pretty rad that Nietzsche was already dismissing the concept of gender as a construct as early as 1873.

Fair trade chocolate is a topic that i recently learned about after a long discussion with my sister. It essentially is a Standerd that certifies that the chocolate is not made from plantations that make children and work under unfair conditions and wages.Its amazing how they were able to stand up to cooperates to a issue that most people are not even aware of, Great Work

La poesía social se ha desarrollado en cada país coincidiendo con períodos históricos conflictivos (por ejemplo, dictaduras), y suele ir unida a movimientos políticos de ideología izquierdista. ¿Estás de acuerdo en que la poesía también pueda denunciar o reivindicar situaciones, o consideras que debería limitarse a expresar sentimientos personales? ¿Debe ser la poesía útil y crítica para la sociedad o solo artística?

En España, durante los años 70 del siglo XX, surgió la denominada "canción protesta", un subgénero musical que denunciaba la situación de colectivos injustamente marginados como campesinos o emigrantes. Estas canciones eran interpretadas por cantautores que normalmente estaban comprometidos con el activismo antifranquista. ¿Conoces alguna canción protesta en tu cultura o en otra, y sabes qué situación denuncia?

Maybe that distance is a good thing?

The data Facebook collects, and what they do with it.

A Lanham connection here.

This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

This reminds me of Hume: "A good palate is not tried by strong flavors; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest" (835).

Anyone can praise or blame based on the most obvious and strongest characteristics of something. Taste is only at play when one is able to praise or blame based on the subtle and intricate details of the thing under review.

Black women using technology to advocate for their erasure.

A social aspect here as well.

black women are being erased from the discussion. Race in general plays a role on how much a topic is spoken about. This case was not even mentioned or discussed until black women started the talk.

Researchers at University College London have discovered a Twitter botnet of more than 350,000 accounts created in 2013, and dormant since then. They've also found another one with more than 500,000 accounts.

never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

Testimonial

Testimonial

The meaning of the term "fake news" and the dilution of that meaning.

It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.

Fascinating distinction!

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

...

Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

Tweets deleted by public officials and candidates.

Lindy West's thoughtful and amusing goodbye to Twitter. She concisely describes Twitter's good and bad sides. Then she leaves me wondering if any of us should be using it.

I quit Twitter because it feels unconscionable to be a part of it – to generate revenue for it, participate in its profoundly broken culture and lend my name to its legitimacy. Twitter is home to a wealth of fantastic anti-Trump organising, as well, but I’m personally weary of feeling hostage to a platform that has treated me and the people I care about so poorly. We can do good work elsewhere.

I’m pretty sure “ushered in kleptocracy” would be a dealbreaker for any other company that wanted my business.

source: https://s3.amazonaws.com/prod_foundationapp/364221/lessons/35/1384378776-john-carlton-1.pdf

from: https://campus.thefoundation.com/courses/1/lessons/35

Selling user data should be illegal. And the customer data a company is allowed to collect and store should be very limited.

Under the guidance of Jared Kushner, a senior campaign advisor and son-in-law of President-Elect Trump, Parscale quietly began building his own list of Trump supporters. Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)

Trump's campaign used carefully targeted negative ads to suppress voter turnout.

With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

100,000 personalized collections of lies.

Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads. Describing one such test, the Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims writes that “one day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters.” In total, Trump’s digital team built or generated more than 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content.

Donna Zuckerberg on replying to writers who are being harassed.

Helpful responses:

• "You're doing great work."
• "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
• Signal boost, if that's what they want.
• Support from old friends.
• Help from close friends and coworkers.

Less helpful:

• "That's horrible." (They already know.)
• "I reported the account." (She feels this doesn't accomplish anything. I think you should always report such accounts. You just don't need to tell the victim about it.)
• "What has this country come to?" (This sounds like you never noticed racism and sexism until recently.)
• "Hopefully it will stop soon." (The idea that the harassers have moved on to someone else is not a great comfort.)

Unhelpful:

• Don't ask, "What did you expect?"
• Don't suggest the victim should avoid writing about particular topics.
• Don't assume you know how they feel.
• Don't criticize them for showing the threats. (If there's some reason it bothers you, mute or unfollow.)

Hypothes.is nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.

Twitter may be a platform that mostly lives in the public, but it isn't a public platform. It's also one of the reasons I have my own site.

http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html

http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election

http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.

The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.

• Double-check every claim before you share.
• Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
• Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
• Do not exaggerate your own claims.
• Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
• Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
  • It will reinforce the previous information.
  • it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.

A survey of voters asked if they remembered seeing a headline, and if so, whether they believed it was true.

It may come as no surprise that high percentages of Trump voters believed stories that favored Trump or demonized Clinton. But the percentage of Clinton voters who believed the fake stories was also fairly high!

familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust.

...

if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.

An analysis of links among "fake news" sites and mainstream news sites and social media.

There’s a vast network of dubious “news” sites. Most are simple in design, and many appear to be made from the same web templates. These sites have created an ecosystem of real-time propaganda: they include viral hoax engines that can instantly shape public opinion through mass “reaction” to serious political topics and news events. This network is triggered on-demand to spread false, hyper-biased, and politically-loaded information.

Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.

Boy, we have problems:

• Fake news. (Bad, but not as bas as...)
• Extremist propaganda (increasingly, from government)
• Disinformation created to cause chaos and distrust.
• Tracking of individuals to create personalized propaganda.
• Google, Facebook, etc. merrily amplifying it.

This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.

This is our nation, and our world.<br> It is up to us to reclaim it.

The fact that people are reading about these fake news stories and realising that this could have an effect on politics and elections, it’s like, ‘Which planet have you been living on?’ For Christ’s sake, this is obvious.”

It's only obvious once you realize how many people are exposed to bullshit daily, and how many people are stupid enough to listen to it.

If you aren't an idiot, and you don't associate with idiots, you can spend all day on the web every day and rarely see any of this shit.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.

http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy

Another group, PropOrNot, is supposed to be releasing their study on Russian propaganda tomorrow, 25 November. [Update: PropOrNot apparently labelled so many sites as "Russian propaganda" that it is practically a piece of disinformation all by itself. Maybe they're Russian. :) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda

The users of a subreddit devoted to Donald Trump have been a big hassle for Reddit moderators

“At this point, I think reddit is a lost cause because of the admins inability to take action on the group while simultaneously being overwhelmed with dealing with the individual,” a moderator told us. “No other subreddit has been able to be used [as] a platform for harassment for this long in Reddit’s history. And it’s likely going to be what kills it.” Said another: “The social experiment has run its course.”

The names and pseudonyms of multiple sources in this story have been omitted to protect their anonymity due to credible threats.

Interview with a man who has run several fake news sites since 2013.

Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue.

...

We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.

Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison

...

First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.

It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.

...

The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

...

The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.

I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?

Paul Horner publishes fake news that is often shared widely. He claims that his stories are intended to be taken as satire like The Onion.

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

this is not exclusive to Facebook and Twitter, or just during this election. We suck at understanding history or considering the future when we adopt new technologies -- this is often intentional. We need to make sure we are this critical when any new technology comes along, and work hard to understand the historical motives and ideology behind the tech, as well as get better at exploring possible dystopian futures brought on by each technological tool

https://iheartmob.org/<br> http://www.troll-busters.com/<br> http://wmcspeechproject.com/

HeartMob, TrollBusters, and the Women's Media Center Speech Project provide support for people being harassed online.

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.

The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.

But a former employee, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, disagrees and says his old boss is being "more than a little disingenuous here."

...

"There's an entire political team and a massive office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other," Garcia-Martinez says. "Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."

Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.

People are definitely losing jobs and opportunities based on their social media presence. Distasteful photos should not even be taken let alone shared online.

Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.

This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.

This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures.

Today, all possible outcomes can be posted to any website that allows accounts to be set to private, or that isn't likely to be noticed. After the fact, the incorrect results can be deleted before making the account public.

This post points out that this trick could be used to "predict" election results, making it appear that they were fixed ahead of time. So it's potentially very dangerous.

23 suggested improvements for Twitter, mostly related to dealing with harassment. (13 Feb 2016)

Example of values articulated by the American Institutes for Research

My guess here is that he is scared of the dark within himself.

Comedy in shows helps bring awareness of femininity and its social issues?

“Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

...

“I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”

“Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”

Obligations: social expectations which change between cultures and social positions, as well as microcultures

Social context of citations. Need to understand the social system

Citation "game" as contrasted with "storybook"

Stephen Downes on why he's quitting Facebook.

Facebook has me going both ways. They make me pay money in order to allow people to read my content, and then they throw advertising at the people who are trying to read that content. And now they're tightening the screws.

And even as it clamps down on content, Facebook favours the wrong people, siding once again with the bottom-dwellers of the internet.

Sounds like a very quick summary of what Ben Thompson was saying two weeks ago. But, in this case, it’s from “the horse’s mouth”.

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."

"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."

Page 204

Borgman on the different types of data in the social sciences:

Data in the social sciences fall into two general categories. The first is data collected by researchers through experiments, interviews, surveys, observations, or similar names, analogous to scientific methods. … the second category is data collected by other people or institutions, usually for purposes other than research.

Page 202

Borgman on information artifacts in the social sciences

like the sciences, the social sciences create and use minimal information. Yet they differ in the sources of the data. While almost all scientific data are created by for scientific purposes, a significant portion of social scientific data consists of records credit for other purposes, by other parties.

I can even annotate folks comments WITHIN threads.. hmm Yet it will all pop up here.. as opposed to being linked to the actual post.. hmmm

Testing the amazing hypothes.is on FB.

At least, they’ve become unavoidable in class discussions even tangentially related to social psychology. In intro sociology, they lead to some interesting thoughts about lab vs. field experiments.

Where is the Facebook shareable link for this video? I would like to hit share, for it to look pretty and for you -hypothes.is- to earn and retain new subscribers?

(If I share this via youtube, the funnel flows to youtube. Do you have a dedicated "landing page" with simply this vid? I'll reply here if I find a "pretty" way.. Thanks Guys!)

The quotes are important. There are different approaches to innovation. The one described here may be pushed by politicians and administrators, but some would argue that it’s not innovation in the same sense as what either Eric Von Hippel or Michael Schragge might describe.

Automated posts from social media accounts pretending to be real individuals are being used to influence public opinion. (The Chinese government uses regular employees to post "real" messages at strategic times.)

Pinch & Bijker

According to scholars like MIT’s Eric Von Hippel and Michael Schrage, innovation is about usage. Otherwise, it’s just novelty. But the innovation discourse often repurposes the term to be about R&D.