It wouldn't surprise me at all if we are missing important cultural infrastructure to deal with social media. And that there's gonna be significant growing pains in developing that cultural infrastructure. I guess I just don't see yelling at tech companies about how they're evil destroyers of the social fabric (not pointing fingers at you; pointing fingers at many) as productive. Because these tech companies have also done a ton to help bring together a social fabric that, in America at least, wasn't doing so well to begin with. It's not like "Bowling Alone" got written in 2011. They've been enormously instrumental in helping organize, from activism to local sports teams to friend groups. And we've all plugged into them voluntarily. And we've all poured hours of our day into them. And then we go and try to pawn off all that responsibility on Daddy.I mean, I think the internet is a miracle too, but I also see that, say, the average online American’s scope is much more simple and surficial than ours.
So really I shouldn’t have asked for your own experience, but what you think of the average experience of the digital native, I.e those who did not experience socializing before the internet.
The medium really does feel like the message. The way we interact with something like the news on social media feels much more important than whatever the news itself actually is. The way it prompts you to respond to and share information, the speed with which it reaches you, the brevity of most reporting, the increasing impact of headlines as a result of the above.
Virilio's “synchronisation of emotions,”.
You make a great point Stan, and it was brilliantly phrased.The research could be pseudo-science and disregardable as such along the lines of science, but it sure seems like almost everyone, even on this board, admits to consciously recognizing how getting a positive emote reaction feels good, good enough to occasionally impact the conscious decision-making regarding posts, etc.
Yeah I don’t see pointing fingers as productive either, in and of itself. But I do see blame, in general, as useful insofar as it can inform policy, I.e learning from precedent where an actor in X capacity pursued Y ends without sufficient accountabilityIt wouldn't surprise me at all if we are missing important cultural infrastructure to deal with social media. And that there's gonna be significant growing pains in developing that cultural infrastructure. I guess I just don't see yelling at tech companies about how they're evil destroyers of the social fabric (not pointing fingers at you; pointing fingers at many) as productive. Because these tech companies have also done a ton to help bring together a social fabric that, in America at least, wasn't doing so well to begin with. It's not like "Bowling Alone" got written in 2011.
it was a classic "you pop in, say something of no consequence or interest to anyone, don't even listen to what other people are saying, have your basic story about the world reinforced, blearily feel good about yourself, then wander out again" moment@mvuent don't redact it was a good comment
Ian! You've ruined it!OK I'm going to bed.
(I'm going to watch Farscape)
What psychic influence do they have? What do they cause people to do that they can't control?I personally don’t understand neuroscience enough to intuitively navigate these phenomena and the data derived therefrom, but there seems ample reason to believe that the major social media platforms are in over their heads in terms of psychic influence, and may perhaps even benefit from some regulation (a comparison here is to how the automobile industry benefited from the regulation that ultimately resulted in traffic lights and highway systems, but I don’t have an understanding they’re either).
But this insistence that their will can overcome the emotion, the fomo, the aversion to being ostracized, etc.What psychic influence do they have? What do they cause people to do that they can't control?
Could be a matter of semantics around “psychic influence” but the ability to control what new information gets introduced to users, even indirect control through machine learning suggestions, does strike me as non-trivial power in terms of the development of minds.I think it's less that they have a unique psychic influence and more that they ruthlessly intensify the already potent influence of media and that information moves through their networks more quickly than they can hope to keep up with it.
What they can't control would be the irl consequences of people reacting to said information.