Pastimes revisited

I’m looking back at some of my blog posts from 2013. The posts canvas the topics: gaming culture, time management, design transitions, and online inference. As it happens, they each circle around the subject of evidence. Evidence is material for narrative, delay, aesthetic judgement, and inference.

Let’s Play introduces the sociability of play, including video gaming and ludic fan cultures. In other posts I have drawn attention to the relationship between play and interpretation. Play is one of the major metaphors deployed by Hans-Georg Gadamer to describe the to-and-fro movements of interpretation. See earlier post Play anywhere. Evidence is under the sway of interpretation: how we understand, seek, evaluate, manage and shape evidence.

In Buying Time evidence becomes tactical. A corrupted Word file buys a student an extra day; diplomatic delay becomes a geopolitical tactic. The logic of evidence here is temporal: information is not simply what you have, but when you choose to reveal or withhold it. Badaracco’s counsel on “begging, borrowing, and stealing time” shows how evidence can be staged, slowed, and sequenced to shift obligations or soften impact. Evidence is not only a matter of proof but of timing. This post was written long before the furore over the so called “Epstein files,” which foregrounds delay as a political tactic. (See BBC article.)

In The Hegemony of Good Taste, an operating system update becomes a case study in aesthetic persuasion. The evidence for “better design” foregrounds clarity, minimalism, luminescence, and other genre conventions of modernity. Consumers are primed to accept the new interface because the cues align with established aesthetic norms. Evidence becomes a matter of reception, informed by memories, habits, and cultural training. It is less a matter of deduction than of sensibility.

In The Internet as Evidence, we see evidence as refracted through search engines, click metrics, and inferential leaps: porridge must be healthier than shortbread because a query on the subject returns more results for porridge. The logic is weak, but culturally ubiquitous. Online, evidence is often a mix of countable traces, plausible narratives, and confirmation loops. The post introduces the theme of abduction, evidential reasoning, within the framework of calculative logic.

Now, generative AI produces fluent, plausible interactions that resemble the presentation of evidence without being grounded in it. ChatGPT contributed to my formulation of this post, mostly by helping me hone my own contrary insights and linkages. It did however offer up a confession: “A model like GPT does not trace the truth of a claim; it recombines patterns from prior language. The ‘logic’ that emerges is a composite of exposure, frequency, and context shaping.”

Here are the early posts, followed by an audio rendering.

160 Let’s play
161 Buying time
162 The hegemony of good taste
163 Internet as evidence

Note

• Featured image: Please generate an image of a chessboard in disarray with a timer clock (as used in tournaments). This is a post-apocalyptic setting.