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Communication Making The World Less Tolerant
angkor writes "Interesting NY Times magazine article with a contrarian viewpoint: "In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place." " Reg. required blah blah - but the point the author makes is interesting - what if all the hubbaloo about connecting people via the Internet makes us less likely to like each other?
In some small way, knowing about a culture allows some of the more unsavory types to point out that bad things and say "See, they are ALL bastards! Look at what they do!" I am always amazed at how quickly people will forget the good and look at the bad.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
I have to disagree with the authors viewpoint. As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day, and understanding among peoples who have disagreed for tens of centuries, isn't going to go away in a decade or two.
I read a really interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly Journal, not too long ago. The article discussed how the Muslim world used to be the center of art and science in the world. They were way ahead of the rest of the world. So the article investigated why that changed.
It made a very persuasive argument that openness and freedom of expression were the primary reasons. Though it may be a coincidence, I doubt it. At the time that the Muslim world was leading art and science, it was much freer and open than other nations of the world. As west became more open and allowed more freedoms, and the Muslim nations did the opposite, the balance began to change and has been that way to this day.
Oppression doesn't work. It stifles growth and it breeds hate. Many of these countries are very successful of blaming the west for their lot in life. It's always easier to blame others for your problems than it is to look inside and see what YOU are doing wrong.
Eventually, this open communication, however, will have a positive effect, I believe. I don't expect it to happen overnight, and there will always be periods of years or decades when there will be heated differences (as we're experiencing now), but the overall trend, as seen from the point of view of a century, I believe, in the end, will show that the world will have grown closer and more enlightened because of the growth of free communication.
Maybe we'll be less tolerant of racism, child abuse, slavery, dictators, monopolies, pollution...
I just don't like the way the idea of tolerance has been appropriated as a good thing. Tolerance in itself has no values, its the things you choose to tolerate that do.
Baz
The statement isn't too surprising, but I think a distinction needs to be made between short-term and long-term effects.
... in short, an evolution of viewpoints and cultures.
In the years before the Internet, most of our communication was with people in conditions very similar to our own. Homogeneity breeds similar viewpoints.
In the short-term, as many different cultures and types of people begin to interact, there will be a lot of conflict as different viewpoints come across. In the long-term, though, as these viewpoints are reconciled, either through debate, conflict, or even violence, the community of shared viewpoints becomes larger, and the differences in opinion should lessen
The Internet should lead to a more unified world community, but certainly not in the short-term.
This article highlights the differences between television and the Internet. TV is a passive medium: you don't usually have to think much (or at all) while watching it and you don't get the whole picture because you only see what the person (or organization) that is broadcasting wants you to see (or is able to show you).
If you read about the same situation from credible sources on the Internet, it doesn't provide you instant gratification and it makes you think more (and hopefully investigate more) about the situation. You are more likely to get different viewpoints on the same topic depending on who wrote the information. While this is a longer process, I would argue it facilitates more tolerant view points from the person doing the reading and the research. Instead of taking up arms, the boy mentioned in the article may have decided to evoke change through peaceful means and become a future leader of his people instead of taking up arms and putting himself at risk of dying a senseless death.
Television is a wonderful entertainer, but a poor educator. (Are you reading this, parents?)
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 6)
I liken the world before the Internet to a group of really small colleges, and the world after the Internet to a huge university. People come to both with their own little prejudices and idiosyncrasies. If you find people who share your prejudices or idiosyncrasises (or do not conflict with them), you enjoy their company. We call such people friends.
In a small college, it is really hard to find people you like, especially if you deviate from the mainstream in any way [as most of us do at Slashdot ;)]. OTOH, in a big university, you are more likely to find people who share your view of the world. It's not unusual to see very weird (read: different) groups spring up in a big university, whereas each individual would probably have been a loner in a small college.
The kicker is that in a small college, you have 'x' number of people you don't like. That number is obviously magnified several-fold in a large university. It's up to you to decide how much of the world you want to make your playground, so you meet the people you want and are not so bothered by the people you don't really care for.
Genebrew
1) CNN definitly shows a North American view of the world. I get CNN Europe and it's still mostly USA, USA, USA.
After September 11 (even months after it) by comparison to European news networks it was extraordinary visible how much CNN concentrated on the "War on Terror" and "Live State Department Press Conferences" and "Brave American Soldiers in Afganistan" while all that time the situation in the West-Bank degraded into extreme violence (one side with Tanks, Attack-Helicopters and Fighter-Bombers the other side with Human-Bombs).
2) In order to even start to really understand a Country and it's People one has to live there. Television, magazines, radio and newspapers will NEVER give you enough of a background and people-feeling to allow you to really understand the issues. Going there on vacations doesn't work either - you will always get the "Special Turist Treatment" and the fact that you dress different, behave different and even worse - don't know the local language - will always guarantee that people (even unconsciously) will act differently towards you.
During the last century, more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars. And while some of those killings were known about and the requisite attention paid, many more were purged in massive numbers while the rest of the world wasn't watching.
Stalin and Mao killed literally millions per year while US college students studied their form of government and wondered whether it wouldn't be more fair than their own. After the end of the USSR, historians went in to try to figure out how many had been purged, and literally couldn't determine whether it was 20 million or 30 million -- that's how closed their society was.
But if a government can't run tanks over students in Tiananmen Square without a camera catching the footage, something's changed.
The situation in the middle east is that some cultures are still very closed. When UBL announces on several video tapes that he WAS in fact responsible and a majority of a culture still doesn't believe that fact, something else is going on there. But this is a short-term situation. The fact that al Jazzera exists and provides even a little competition in the war for people's minds, and the net is widely available, means the culture will slowly drift towards openness. I hope...
One aspect of this may be that here in the USA we seldom see the non mainstream view. Most people don't use the net(or their brains) to look at a news story we see on T.V. and hear the OTHER side from the internet. The first thing I do when I see an infalitory news story is go out and look at what the other side has to say. I might not a gree with them, but i want to here their side. Ive been lied to bu the us media, or only told half the story, or only gotten the 3 second sound byte too often to trust them for ANYTHING beyond getting the time, and maybe local weather.
The other problem that may be related is a lack of language skills. I only speak english, so reading or searching for information in another language is useless to me. Yeah, theres the fish, but thats no help untill after ive found the article i need to read.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
To start off, 'the globalization of the media' means that we all watch CNN, not that we have access to different and diverse points of view as it would be desirable.
Then, we give too much credibility to the media. Think about how mainstream media covers, often, news about a technology you know well and you know the stupidities that they say, don't you feel upset and think they completely misunderstand? Why should it be different with other kind of news?
We should be able to have access to other points of view (language is a barrier here) and try to look at them with an open mind, this would be more information about one another, not what we have now.
There is no great mystery here.
Television long ago learned that the highest ratings come from controversy; people watch fights - not shows where people get along.
As a result TV stirs up controversy whenever it can to increase ratings. This is the real reason that the so called 'fairness doctrine' where both sides of any dispute are required to be presented continues; people watch conflict.
Given that TV principally shows conflict - it creates the impression in the viewers that conflict is all that exists; how could it do anything but make relations between people in the world worse?
Fact is that people don't like things that are different. That's why as people get older, younger people's music always sucks. The thought processes is, "if I liked X, I'd do/have/be X".
Republicans don't like Democrats, Anglophones don't like Francophones, Catholics don't like Athiests, thin people don't like fat people, vegetarians don't like omnivores, IT staff don't like lusers, and so on.
Most people have a partially tolerant view, that "as long as I don't have to hear/see/agree/participate, I guess it's okay", but that's the extent of it. As for say, racism, the rule still applies, despite all the political correctness we've tried to nurture. (Sure, things are better, but it'll never be perfect.)
Case in point: take a traditional urban black male and put him in a traditional white environment. Who's uncomfortable? Both sides. Tiger Woods aside, since he dresses, talks, and acts without any of the stereotypical "black" affectations. He doesn't "axe" people questions, and he doesn't rap through interviews. I'm deliberately exagerating the point here. While we've damped racism down enough that visible minorities CAN get ahead, they have to act like the majority to do so.
We don't LIKE different. The Internet exposes us to different. Therefore the Internet exposes us to things we don't like. Screw tolerance, I'd just be happy if all those AOL'ers out there would die, die, die.
"Oh no... he found the
The Americans had been going after Osama for years. Clinton was trying to get him relatively early in his term. That Osama was involved in terrorist acts against the US, and that his mob were the most formidable anti-US terrorist organisation, is hardly a point of contention. If you don't believe the evidence, what are the alternative possibilities ?
I don't see how anyone can claim that the world is more violent/less tolerant than it used to be. These days if 10 people die its news. 50 years ago 10,000 could die without making headlines. Millions died in the world wars. What we see today is NOTHING by comparison.
An Arab intellectual named Abdel Monem Said recently surveyed the massive anti-Israel and anti-American protests by Egyptian students and said: ''They are galvanized by the images that they see on television. They want to be like the rock-throwers.'' By now everyone knows that satellite TV has helped deepen divisions in the Middle East. But it's worth remembering that it wasn't supposed to be this way.
The globalization of the media was supposed to knit the world together. The more information we receive about one another, the thinking went, the more international understanding will prevail. An injustice in Thailand will be instantly known and ultimately remedied by people in London or San Francisco. The father of worldwide television, Ted Turner, once said, ''My main concern is to be a benefit to the world, to build up a global communications system that helps humanity come together.'' These days we are living with the results -- a young man in Somalia watches the attack on the south tower live, while Americans can hear more, and sooner, about Kandahar or Ramallah than the county next to theirs.
But this technological togetherness has not created the human bonds that were promised. In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place. What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn't just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people's lives remain parochial -- in the Arab world and everywhere else, including here.
''I think what's best about my country is not exportable,'' says Frank Holliwell, the American anthropologist in ''A Flag for Sunrise,'' Robert Stone's 1981 novel about Central America. The line kept playing in my mind recently as I traveled through Africa and watched, on television screens from Butare, Rwanda, to Burao, Somalia, CNN's coverage of the war on terrorism, which was shown like a mini-series, complete with the ominous score. Three months after the World Trade Center attacks, I found myself sitting in a hotel lobby by Lake Victoria watching Larry King preside over a special commemoration with a montage of grief-stricken American faces and flags while Melissa Etheridge sang ''Heal Me.'' Back home, I would have had the requisite tears in my eyes. But I was in Africa, and I wanted us to stop talking about ourselves in front of strangers. Worse, the Ugandans watching with me seemed to expect to hear nothing else. Like a dinner guest who realizes he has been the subject of all the talk, I wanted to turn to one of them: ''But enough about me -- anything momentous happening to you?'' In CNN's global village, everyone has to overhear one family's conversation.
What America exports to poor countries through the ubiquitous media -- pictures of glittering abundance and national self-absorption -- enrages those whom it doesn't depress. In Sierra Leone, a teenage rebel in a disarmament camp tried to explain to me why he had joined one of the modern world's most brutal insurgencies: ''I see on television you have motorbikes, cars. I see some of your children on TV this high'' -- he held his hand up to his waist -- they have bikes for themselves, but we in Sierra Leone have nothing.'' Unable to possess what he saw in images beamed from halfway around the world, the teenager picked up an automatic rifle and turned his anger on his countrymen. On generator-powered VCR's in rebel jungle camps, the fantasies of such boy fighters were stoked with Rambo movies. To most of the world, America looks like a cross between a heavily armed action hero and a Lexus ad.
Meanwhile, in this country the aperture for news from elsewhere has widened considerably since Sept. 11. And how does the world look to Americans? Like a nonstop series of human outrages. Just as what's best about America can't be exported, our imports in the global-image trade hardly represent the best from other countries either. Of course, the world is a nonstop series of human outrages, and you can argue that it's a good thing for Americans, with all our power, to know. But what interests me is the psychological effect of knowing. One day, you read that 600 Nigerians have been killed in a munitions explosion at an army barracks. The next day, you read that the number has risen to a thousand. The next day, you read nothing. The story has disappeared -- except something remains, a thousand dead Nigerians are lodged in some dim region of the mind, where they exact a toll. You've been exposed to one corner of human misery, but you've done nothing about it. Nor will you. You feel -- perhaps without being conscious of it -- an impotent guilt, and your helplessness makes you irritated and resentful, almost as if it's the fault of those thousand Nigerians for becoming your burden. We carry around the mental residue of millions of suffering human beings for whom we've done nothing.
It is possible, of course, for media attention to galvanize action. Because of a newspaper photo, ordinary citizens send checks or pick up rocks. On the whole, knowing is better than not knowing; in any case, there's no going back. But at this halfway point between mutual ignorance and true understanding, the ''global village'' actually resembles a real one -- in my experience, not the utopian community promised by the boosters of globalization but a parochial place of manifold suspicions, rumors, resentments and half-truths. If the world seems to be growing more, rather than less, nasty these days, it might have something to do with the images all of us now carry around in our heads.
George Packer is the author of ''The Village of Waiting'' and, most recently, ''Blood of the Liberals.''
As t.v. brings other nations into our homes, we see the results of our tolerance.
Television typically brings "sensationalism" to the front, or else the ratings will fall.
We see the murder of innocent civilians by religious fantatics in the name of their god.
The media emphasizes that. Take for example, the middle east. Lot of palestinian civilians are also killed by Israeli military -- in the name of safety and security.
We see women flogged by the police because they were raped. We see teachers sentenced to death for discussing historical facts in the classroom.
The above statement supports the point of the original article. Would you watch the news if it had coverage on how many computers have been getting internet access in, say Sri Lanka. How many new colleges are coming up in middle east. Or, discussing new cuisines?
The sexier news (unforntunately so) is that of people killing each other, or people being weird. Imagine the CNN saying "Arabs are just like us, no big news this week. To keep you occupied, we are going to show cats, the musical tonight instead of nightly news!"
In my country, the TV shows usually depict stereotypes of Americans -- sex hounds, no morals, no stable families, etc. After living in the US, I have seen that everyone is basically just trying to be happy. Over time I realized that people find my conversations boring. Imagine what must be going through the minds of TV executives.
... in my opinion, why we all seem to be so intolerant of each other online, is that we are now able for the first time ever to speak with lots of people from other cultures whom we've never ever been in contact with before in the history of earth. There are A LOT of preconceived notions we all have about one another and the only solution is to have us all continue to speak and write with each other. We are in the initial stages of communication and we have a lot of fears and uneasiness to get past. Until that is done, all our intolerances will continue to thrive. The internet hasn't made us *more* intolerant. It's just allowed our intolerances to come to light in global grandness. Our intolerances are not hidden anymore. But at least now that they are out in the sunshine, we will more easily be able to fight them and create a more understanding and enlightened world.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
There is a problem when you send signals accross cultural borders, no matter how "neutral" those signals look: the interpretation of the said signals are always culture-dependent. So, unless you favour a unified global culture (and this is not only unattainable in any forseeable time-frame, but probably also undesired), an American-centric global media (and that is what we mostly have) will cause all sorts of problems.
Let me pick some of your own examples to try to explain it.
Child abuse is hot topic everywhere. But then one must define a child. An 8 years old is probably a child everywhere, but eleven year old girls are eligible for marriage in many parts of the world. Is this good? I don't think so, but that is the way things are in those regions.
Dictatorships are usually violent and always inefficient in the mediun/long run. But the definiton of what is a dictatorship is much, much harder to achieve. Just last week the US government was pretty busy first denying then spinning all they could, their clear involvement in a coup the took down for 48 hours the democratically elected president of Venezuela. And during the brief "provisional" government, during which the coup leaders tried to dissolve the Congress and the Supreme Court, the US government and the IMF treated those guys as the de facto Venezuelan government. And the US press, CNN International in Spanish leading them, concurred all the way with the Washington view and with the provisional government view (to the point of hiding up to the last minute the mass protests that defeated the coup and brought back the elected president).
Pollution is another problem very linked to eye of the beholder. After Bush's pullout from the Kyoto Treaty, we in the rest of the world find it very amusing when CNN talks about pollution problems elsewhere. Sounds pretty like "Do what I say, not what I do". Naturally, the same goes for a lot of things.
So, there is a fundamental problem with US dominated news. And when a non-American media organization gains some proeminence, as Saudi Arabian Al-Jazeera network did during the months after September 11th, the reaction showed that Americans are not better than anyone when it comes to dealing with alternate points of view.
The reason that some are surprised that communication doesn't lessen tension is because of a false premise. Many people have the erroneous belief that conflict is the result of misunderstanding.
This soft-headed concept, a belief that Ted Turner apparently subscribes to, is just plain wrong!
You think that the guy who demands your wallet at gunpoint is unaware that you'd rather keep it? That the group who insists that your land in fact belongs to them doesn't know it's yours? That WW2 Germany was operating under the belief that Poland wanted to be a German possession?
Conflict is opposing interests, pure and simple. We don't how to stop conflict so we redefine it as ignorance and prescribe education and communication as the cure.
Come on, people, this ain't the Age of Aquarius! A touchy-feely devotion to understanding is not going to stop people from acting in what they perceive to be their own interests.
There is a big difference between really communicating with someone on the other side of the globe, and the propaganda being sold to you over the tv. tv isn't there to make the world better - it's there to make tv corp money.
Go travelling and see things for yourself. Chat to foriegners online. The more you see for yourself, the more real understanding there will be.
try to remember that, and try to keep it in perspective.