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Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV (technologyreview.com)
Reader Joe_NoOne writes: Like TV, social media now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside. This is why Oxford Dictionaries designated "post-truth" as the word of 2016: an adjective "relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals." Traditional television still entails some degree of surprise. What you see on television news is still picked by human curators, and even though it must be entertaining to qualify as worthy of expensive production, it is still likely to challenge some of our opinions (emotions, that is). Social media, in contrast, uses algorithms to encourage comfort and complaisance, since its entire business model is built upon maximizing the time users spend inside of it. Who would like to hang around in a place where everyone seems to be negative, mean, and disapproving? The outcome is a proliferation of emotions, a radicalization of those emotions, and a fragmented society. This is way more dangerous for the idea of democracy founded on the notion of informed participation. Now what can be done? Certainly the explanation for Trump's rise cannot be reduced to a technology- or media-centered argument. The phenomenon is rooted in more than that; media or technology cannot create; they can merely twist, divert, or disrupt. Without the growing inequality, shrinking middle class, jobs threatened by globalization, etc. there would be no Trump or Berlusconi or Brexit. But we need to stop thinking that any evolution of technology is natural and inevitable and therefore good. For one thing, we need more text than videos in order to remain rational animals. Typography, as Postman describes, is in essence much more capable of communicating complex messages that provoke thinking. This means we should write and read more, link more often, and watch less television and fewer videos -- and spend less time on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Come visit us on Slashdot, the antisocial media.
So... a human society
If some dumbell starts talking racist bullshit on the street I walk away, if some dumbell posts about it in their Twitter feed I unsubscribe from them
If anything I talk MORE now than ever about social issues with a wider variety of people than my own small group of friends / coworkers
It's not because it's like TV; it's because people are idiots. Social media gives them an outlet they otherwise would not have.
Human curators pick the topics on social media, based on what they post and share. As I recall, Facebook also used human curators to select trending stories. TV channels also try to maximize the amount of time you watch them, because ratings (especially the 18-49 age group) have a large impact on their ability to sell advertising slots. If a show draws low ratings, especially in the key demographic, it will get cancelled. I don't think there's as big of a difference as this suggests.
Is social media also killing Stack Overflow, which is what Jeff Atwood did before Discourse? Because I'd hate to have to go back to ExpertS-exChange.
Clearly there can only be one possible explanation.
It is all the fault of those pansies, the liberals, who unlike rational, logical, rugged, and manly, conservatives always let their emotions out. Some of them are known to cry, even when watching ASPCA commercials with that known communist, Sarah Maclachlan, singing one of her caterwauling songs. A real man would never show such a reaction, but would go out and hunt like the founding fathers did.
So in conclusion, love America, and Spock was right.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOO! Mooooo cows MOOOOOOO! Mooo say the cows. YOU POST-TRUTH COWS!!
That would explain why millennials are such worthless shitsacks.
If anything "post-truth" is a symptom of a classic bit of subterfuge: lying by omission. Sure, what is known as "objective truth" is true as long as that information deemed "truth" is the only thing you know about the subject.
Another Republican who can't help himself but to attempt to bash one subgroup after another. Maybe this one is secretary of education material? Lol.
This is excellent word for summing up the social justice warrior movement.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
That summary reads like an article. Since I rarely RTFA, why would I want to read the summary?
Hilter won in the German Federal elections is 1932, long before "Social Media." Whenever you have large and long-standing Economic Disruption in a society, Social Strife and Political Upheaval seem nearly inevitable
The business model of TV is also built upon "maximizing the time users spend inside of it". Millennials need to stop trying to think. They aren't good at it.
The big difference is that TV has to create something the maximizes the average time of all their users so it has to create something relatively generic that will appeal to a large cross section. Facebook doesn't have this limitation. It can custom tailor its drug to the individual user. Every time a person "likes" something on facebook, facebook can now show them more of what they like and less of what they don't like. Facebook is the perfect echo chamber. Add in VR and you have the perfect escape from reality where you customize your virtual world to be exactly how you want it just like the addicts in movies like "Strange Days" or "Inception".
Thirteen posts later and this discourse on this topic proves the summaries point.
I almost wish Hillary had won if it meant less of this inane soul-searching about social media. Could you make all the same arguments if she had been elected?
Sure. But the clearly liberal-leaning hucksters pushing these stories would hopefully be doing something else. Or maybe they would be pushing stories about the profound good that social media had on the outcome of the election.
Okay, I take it back. That would be worse.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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in the 70's and 80's when your national and world news was a half hour program twice a day we got the sound bite. the network would film a speech or an interview and use 30 seconds or less to make a point in their newscast.
CNN gave more time to the speeches but in their quest to keep on talking they added the commentary. since there isn't enough news every day most of the news on the news channels is now commentary. even the reporting has a lot of commentary on it and the journalists have always been guilty of not reporting some things, etc
the only thing the internet did was bring us back to the media choice of the early 1900's before the great consolidation of newspapers began and gave us a few major conglomerates. only thing HuffPost, Mother Jones, Breitbart and others do is give people a choice before most of the niche papers were run out of business by the Times, Posts and USA Today
+1 insightful, but with modern cable TV you can tailor your message more. Fox News appeals to the stupid. MSNBC to the people who live in academia. CNN for white people who won't venture into a city, etc.
It would seem like a lot of what you posted should have been quoted so that it would be clear that it was drawn directly from the linked article. Many good points in that piece, but from him, not you, unless you are him. Perhaps you are him. Perhaps the editor already checked that.
TV shows no longer reflect real life. Every show has to be what libs perceive as PC, a certain number of gays, diverse ethnic backgrounds, even transgenders are showing up. Audiences do not like having this distorted version of reality shoved down their throats.
ROFL. LOL. That is what passes for discourse.
.
While not too bad for social things, it brings out the worst when exploited for political reasons, keeping a whole group of people of the verge of "outrage" nearly continuously.
Move on, nothing to see here
"Who would like to hang around in a place where everyone seems to be negative, mean, and disapproving?" This seems to be the epitome of Facebook.
Make facts punchy, edgy, give it a modern makeover...rousing music, hollywood style inspring stuff. Think of Anonymous' more inspiring and darker videos that have that threatening edge to it.
That'll do the trick.
People are increasingly just getting their news from overtly politicized outlets.
Fox News, Huffington Post, Breitbart, Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh radio network, Buzzfeed, Jezebel... (and more)
These are all sites with a political agenda and deliberately biased. If you're getting your news from them, you're getting filtered news that has been written to support one of two polar political stances. People need to diversify their sources (and/or) not get news solely from sources that are deliberately biased. It used to be political bias in a news article was frowned upon, nowadays it's a requirement for many news outlets.
I still trust the BBC world service the most, although lately I've noticed some "editorial" content sneaking into their news headlines.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Social media, and thanks for giving us a working definition so we know where you're coming from, is an extension of traditional media. The same problem exists there.
If there was a way to make money off of honest discourse of political and social issues, someone would have already done so. The unhappy truth is that it is very hard to do so. So TFA's ranting against algorithms and such is ranting against television programming and development. It's just not easy to get eyeballs on honest issues because most of us don't like it. We don't like being made to feel bad about something we had little to nothing to do with. We don't like being confronted by a reality that we didn't make but are forced to take part of all the same. We don't like being told to eat our vegetables, essentially.
Given how it has been put together over the past two and a half centuries, American democracy isn't simply advanced citizenship. It's advanced everything. The requirements for participation has got to the point where you have to be on 100% of the time to even have a slight chance at understanding what's going on. There's no simplifying that in a twenty two minute nightly news report.
And that's the real problem. We need people to be participating now more than ever. But we don't want to create the sort of nation it would take for that to happen. It's hard. We've solved a lot of problems over the years. Hunger and disease are starting to look like we can actually do it. This? Organizing ourselves? This has always been at the bottom of the list of things to get done. Which is probably part of the reason we see the people that get into it, get into it. It's the last thing most people want to think about at the end of their long work day. Guess what? That doesn't make it any easier to resolve.
Where SJWs post exaggerated - if not fabricated - stories crafted to upset/anger/sadden the reader.
The problem is not Trump's rise. The problem is the mental disease otherwise known as Liberalism.
"Echo chambers are only good if it's my echo!"
The unreflecting hypocrisy of the left is hilarious. They create the biggest echo chambers, safe spaces and mechanisms to drown out dissent, and now they call for more censorship when that backfires? No way they'll try to fight their own echo chambers. They'll just try to further suppress those they disagree with.
You don't really have to look further than the first source in the article: Buzzfeed. Is constant "Trump is evil, conservatives are evil" circlejerking enough to be taken "serious" these days? Talk about "misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
>Without the growing inequality, shrinking middle class, jobs threatened by globalization, etc. there would be no Trump or Berlusconi or Brexit.
Nope, that's not it. I think "bunga bunga" Berlusconi is a hoot; Brexit is a slap in the face to the global elite; and Donald Trump will Make America Great Again. This is because I have been red-pilled into becoming a racist, misogynistic, white nationalist, fascist, anti-semitic, Islamaphobic, gay-hating Russian who has developed a new appreciation for the Nazi aesthetic choices found in WWII era German military uniforms. That's me, that's my identity now (so I've been told).
I think Hillary Clinton is just too corrupt to be President.
You bashing young people as a bloc = the GOP bashing black people and muslims and mexicans as a bloc. You are Trump's America.
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Right away, I'm struck by this guy saying the web of 2014 (when he got out of prison) is significantly different than what he remembers from 2006 (when he went in). This is completely contrary to my experiences (and memory, which is a funny thing) because I don't think things have changed much at all. But then he explains it:
WTF? He goes on:
Again: WTF?
What I think I'm seeing here, is that this person chose to stop using the web he used before, and instead he now hangs out on a much smaller handful of websites, especially Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
Ok, but is anyone making him do that? Are any forces encouraging or incentivizing it? Maybe instead of bitching about those sites, he should be explaining why he loves them so overpoweringly much, that he craves the things he hates and hangs onto them in spite of everything.
When you say something as nutty as those sites have taken over, I think you owe it to your readers to explain why you have chosen to have those sites take over for you. Because if the web is like television, it's a television with a million channels. You, the reader, are still in control of what you're choosing to read (oops, excuse me: watch since this guy is mainly into videos now, apparently) so you are responsible for your choice to leave the web of 2006, which is still there for everyone else who chooses that instead of your boring-as-shit Facebook.
Equating social media with TV is insane.
I can yell at the TV but does it ever listen? No.
I yell on social media a lot and I get yelled at.
However, I do all that shit with fake accounts.
I have a Facebook account using my real name and I'm polite as fuck so I don't piss off family or Friends. I post original photos, music, and I inform about the latest hack and how to prevent it.
I provide tech support and historical insight.
I do NOT speak my mind because I would have no audience. I do block insipid assholes who shit on my lawn. I don't allow religion, politics, or racism or gay-bashing.
Facebook is for cat videos.
I have many other Facebook accounts. I have a few Twitter accounts and one Instagram.
On Twitter, especially, I join the shit storm with fact-based logical arguments and I swing a dead cat.
For those social media people who behave as described in this article, (they don't block ads and crap) they have every right.
I advise acquaintances to go dark and yell.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yet another article bemoaning traditional media's loss of control of "the message".
Forget the nightly newscasts, or even news commentaries like "60 Minutes"; even those old sitcoms like "All in the Family" were force feeding you the message.
So we should all stop watching funny cat videos?
And... TV killed reading because it was filled with easy imagery and emotion. Reading killed verbal history because of higher accuracy of reproduction Socrates wants his arguments back.
...And over here we see the common pest species, the Internet Tough Guy, in its native habitat...
I remember when I first saw how people behaved on MySpace. Then when FB started to get big, and in the intervening years with Twitter, I really was able to "Grok", or intuitively understand how this platform would affect people. I saw it with friends and family. I saw it with the recent election.
/. has, it is an infinitely more interesting place than FB.
I am continually vindicated in my choice to have never joined one of those "social networks", with the exception of LinkedIn, which I rarely log into or look at.
Some of the problems I have noticed with social networks, and primarily FB:
1. A "keeping up with Jones" type of fakery, where people are always trying to make themselves seem "larger than life"
2. A constant barrage of crap, whether cat videos, political rants or very unimportant status updates about how great a cup of coffee someone just drank was.
3. Very little of any interesting, intelligent or thoughtful discourse(See Number 2.)
4. A huge waste of time, in addition to all the other things in the modern digital world we have to deal with and respond to.
5. Fake News(and yes, this isn't some new "revelation" after Trump got elected. It's been going on for a while...)
6. Echo chamber and group thinking.
For all the acrimony and debatism that
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Hasn't this phenomenon been around at least as long as AOL has been? Maybe even longer, maybe even as far back as the pre-Internet dialup BBS days? Aren't all the above 'walled gardens' to one extent or another? Granted, in the beginning Facebook wasn't really that much of a 'walled garden', but it's certainly been moving steadily in that direction, and now all it needs is to offer Facebook-only Internet access, and it's a full-on Walled Garden. But even without that, isn't it more-or-less a Walled Garden now? Aren't there people who are on Facebook and really not much else?
So are you wrong about the meaning of post-truth or are you saying that Trump is an SJW?
Trump supporters and SJWs are both post-truth. They may be political opposites (one conservative, the other liberal), but neither side has much interest in truth.
When both sides of mainstream politics abandon truth, we are truly living a post-truth society.
True. It is a matter of degree, and something that exists on a continuum can be reasonably described as causing qualitative shifts. Clearly cable allowed a networks to thrive by targeting 10%-20% of the populace. Even oft criticized Fox is appealing enough to at least 40%.
Today there is almost no bottom limit. Magic algorithms can find which 0.001% of the populace you are in, and "serve you" by leading you deeper down whatever mental hole you might find yourself in one bad year. The infotainment industry does not intend harm, but encouraging obsessiveness and ill mental health may serve their bottom line, and the algorithms may "accidentally" manipulate you that way because they see you as soulless data that is supposed to be manipulated.
Are you a vegan anti-vaxxer with a degree of sympathy for orientalist revisions of buddhism and the ALF, and get scared about nuclear power? Hey! We can lead you deeper into that bubble! Love your gun-toting heritage and are scared of immigrants and big cities? We can keep you scared! Everyone can have their very own "network" in the form of a personal news feed.
Hint: Gilligan's Island was not a documentary.
Yes it was. The misogynistic, Trump-loving alt-right racists said so, so it must be True!
Part of the problem is that media in general isn't something that humans have adjusted to. We appear evaluate our environment based on what information is available in our immediate surroundings and act accordingly, within our environment. However, media skews those evaluations by providing specific information that isn't necessarily part of our immediate environment. For instance, if we get one viral report in an entire world of situation X happening, our evaluation of the probability of that situation becomes skewed. Social media just makes it faster and based on collective intellect(or lack thereof) as opposed to other media which has at least the occasional journalistic ethic obeyed.
"Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV" ?
Don't think so. Faceboook, Twitter and Google murdered discourse by silencing opinion that disagreed with their agenda, which was to get Hillary elected as POTUS.
http://harvardlawreview.org/20...
"Censorship ...
How "terms of service" abridge free speech
Professor Ammori tells us that Facebook lawyers have created “a set of rules that hundreds of employees can apply consistently without having to make judgment calls.”9 The details of these rules, however, we do not know. Unlike censorship decisions by government agencies, the process in the private world of social media is secret."
So, when Facebook, Twitter and Google collaborate to demonetize videos, while stealing their ad revenues, shadow ban posts, or outright delete accounts to censor non-Marxist views, Joe NoOne claims they became too much like TV? Like when MASH denigrated conservative views by having Frank Burns behave like an idiot, or Archie Bunker is portrayed as the typical representative of Conservatives, and Hollywood blacklists Conservative actors while claiming to be the victim of a blacklist? No, it's not like TV at all. Conservatives rarely had a voice in the Leftist Hollywood productions which flooded TV in the late 60's and onward. Facebook, Twitter and Google, while supposedly representing the public commons, puts a fence around it instead. That's why I canceled my accounts. I may not agree with someone's POV but everyone has the right to express them.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
RIP Discourse 1.75 Million BC - 2016 AD Millennials - scientifically confirmed in laboratory studies to be worst generation in history.
Dr. Ben Carson at least admits he's not competent, so there's hope for your kind I guess. Sorta.
One problem is the internet itself. Newspapers used to be a complete product that was consumed entirely. Now we can click single articles. This produces two problems. One is that we click our own filterbubble and the other is the promotion of entertaining and easy reading articles. When I last used the BBC Android app in 2014, there were many article about political issues. When I tried it in 2016, it was all blood, crime, cute animals and other entertaining, but irrelevant stuff. The stuff people click on. So it gets promoted. And the people that write them get promoted. This seems to have a profound effect, even on the BBC.
The Fox News propaganda machine and garbage papers like The Sun in the UK misinformed readers with their intentional bias long before the internet.
Added explanation: There is news that is entertaining but irrelevant to us, because it doesn't effect us. Like crimes or celebrity news or other 'interesting facts'. Then there are political issues that effect us, like laws and deliberation of laws. Those are also news. A newspaper has a mix of both. The internet seems to promote the former in all media.
.. is called hater or troll
* I've been called a hater or troll several times up to now...
oh ffs...everyone with the "social media" hot takes...
first, *idiots* are killing discourse...not any kind of communications technology. Idiots. I blame the decades-long Republican project of defunding public schools to enable privatization.
2nd, idiots will use *all communication channels available* to communicate their idiot ideas
3rd, 'social media' is text and pictures...stored and communicated between users on a computer system. That's all it fucking is.
facebook isn't innocent by any means. They use an obtuse term "engagement" to measure usage of their system, and it is sentiment agnostic...meaning if the system shows you a dumb post about Trump for your weird uncle and you comment on it 3x, that gets meansured as "engagement"...even though you absolutely hate the article posted and were only commenting to tell others that it was from a fake news site. Repeat that over and over and it's easy to see how bullshit articles would rate high in facebook's system.
They do many shady things (remember the 2012 election and the phantom Mitt Romney likes on facebook???)
but blaming "social media" is steering this whole conversation wrong...it's not "social media" it's specific to a system and there are humans who choose how that system works
Thank you Dave Raggett
calm down guys!
Are we at the state in the decline of western civilization that the creation of words has been politicized? Post-truth shouldn't get to be a word damnit. It is two words with a hyphen. It is a concept, a neologism in order to allow those that thought they knew their shit to explain why they were wrong about this populist wave and their big brains and the corresponding egos. The exact same tendency can easily be spotted with the new refrain of "fake news" which would be a better new word if it weren't for the fact that it is also just two words, a sophism, in other words. Indeed, the ivory tower has gotten so tall it seems the ground is no longer in view and so the abstract can take its place. That is the conceit of the classes of morons within the echelons of power, that is what designs their terrible fall.
Even brain-trusts in universities can fall to the seduction of consensus. It seems to me that they are not alarmed because the live in a "post-truth" world but, rather, they are alarmed because the consensus of truth that they thought they had a handle on is groundless. Politics, too, is a science, much to the chagrin of those that wish to design a society like they design machines, people have wills of their own and being cogs in a machine is not suited to those that exercise their will even if people in ivory towers think they should be happy to get what they have. These fools whine: "but what about reality, but what about the truth" like a kid that doesn't understand why his mom doesn't write herself a check for a million dollars. The checks have to have a connection to a bank account, something that is not readily observable by the child and so they cry when they do not get what they think they deserve and these eggheads at Oxford are probably not power players, because their anxiety has a huge tell and it is the creation of this stupid fucking word.
Who is it that endowed Oxford with the right to dictate words to the English language. There are far more English speakers in North America so I hardly see the utility of some backwards Satrap of the US empire gets to make up words for that empire. Britain! Take a seat! You are not important. China matters more, hell, Monaco might even matter more. It is certainly a freer place. The UK looks to be building itself up to the destiny Orwell proffered for Her. Soon the parliament will dissolve the name "United Kingdom" for the more fitting "Airstrip One" and her people will be begged to dump all their money into the ocean so that they can keep the remainder of their freedoms, the ones that Big Brother sees as useful to society as a whole.
But what I marvel at, with the elite myopia of this nature, is that they cannot see thier own conceit. They do not understand that people no longer are appeased by the attributes of their expertise. And it is that expertise that they covet that allows them to establish truths. And these truths are used as weapons by them. It is that they believe the truth, that they can be suckered into intellectual hubris so as to think that they stand at the mantle of truth, that makes what they say salient. But it is that self conception that is a beacon for their conceit and you don't have to get a diploma to see this conceit; in fact, it seems like a diploma is a great marker for the inability to see this conceit. And so then, these poor snowflakes, being confounded on how the truth--their truth--is not self evident, they must mask their conceit with a narrative that elevates their hubris. The narrative will always be an apology for thier failure. It will expound how they have remained right all this time and it is the world that has moved outside of the context of thier greatness. Just looked at all the framed certificates on the wall! Do you doubt that those badges do not establish that individual as a truth-teller; that it is our job to listen to their ministrations? Meh.
Globalism itself is similar to the idea of post-truth. Truth is nuanced, it is conceptual, it is not a thing that an exp
To teach this point to my niece, I made up a TV commercial game that we play: You win by calling out when a commercial has one of the three things (below) in it before 20 commercials have been shown.
1) Stop-frame animation
2) A guitar
3) An interracial couple
I've noticed these have dramatically increased in TV ads within the last five years. With #1, at least I can appreciate the creativity. #2, I suspect this adds a "coolness factor" without being controversial. #3 is hilarious because they use a (who really cares anymore) unity to push their wares on us, making it seem like > 15% of couples in reality are mixed. They either think they win the "hipness prize", or they believe they're connecting to multiple audiences at once. You can almost feel the mis-truth through the screen.
Granted, I'm a slashdotter and I didn't RTFA, but TFS was enough to tell me that this is just another way for liberal crybabies and poor sports to blame somebody other than their candidate.
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There is: the 1%. You can literally s/Jew/1%ers/gi from Nazi tracts and come up with statements that people alive today will agree with. You've also missed the promotion of violence, including false flag violence. When someone can be attacked after a fender-bender merely because of the insinuation that they might have voted Trump, you have a highly toxic atmosphere among people who are giving others moral cover for violent acts, as could be seen in the protests in Oregon, as well.
It's also interesting how, after carefully detailing that you do support discrimination on people for the ideas they ascribe to, you're not at all worried that we might import those who would wage jihad in our countries. This being an IDEA, you're hung up on the problem that many of the people who have that idea might happen to share physical traits. Just as you get hung up on the fact that distributions of crime (including reports) do not perfectly match an even racial breakdown, as though the color of the perpetrators was our highest worry and as if non-criminals somehow had no right to have violent people removed from society that we might not be victimized by their violent acts.
I have two strategies on this one.
The first is I come to the internet to either troll or to learn (sometimes both it , but that is usually not my intent.
really depends on how much alcohol I've consumed). I don't usually try to convince. Sure I a may be arguing points with you, but really all I'm doing is sharping my knowledge and arguing skills with the various fuckwits you find online that socially mean nothing to me. I may accidently point a few lost lamb in the direction of the light.
The second part is to take those skills and knowledge (as weak as they may be) and talk to people I know in the real world. If I convince 1 or 2 people a year on a particular topic I feel pretty successful. The lighter touch of a conversation over beers is usually for more successful than posts online. Most people already know what they know and aren't interested in "new" facts so you don't usually get many converts.
Obama just gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine. One topic he was complaining about is "fake news".
Rolling Stone just lost a case where they reported a fake rape case and refused to retract it. Judgment for $7 million.
So he is complaining about fake news to an outlet that got sued and lost for reporting fake news.
Social media merely reflects the society which we have built. Since at least the 1960s our schools have taught (to an ever increasing degree) that all cultures are equal, that we should not consider one social norm as better than another. Western society which developed the idea that every person is equal, even women and people of different races, is no better than a culture which teaches that a man should beat his wife if he doesn't like the food she cooks for him.
It is more complicated than that, but that sums it up. If no culture is better than another, if one set of ideas is equal to another set, if there is no absolute standard of right and wrong, why would we expect people to have common values?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'd definitely agree that social media is helping polarize us politically. It's very nature helps promote group think and isolate people from ideas they disagree with. What I disagree with is the premise that this empowered Trump. I'd actually argue that the group think mentality gave too much comfort to the progressive left and sjw crowd. And that comfort led them too far to the left politically and many traditional democrat voters felt disenfranchised from the party. The ivory tower progressives insulated themselves from mainstream America and lost sight of what's really important (the economy, self reliance, dignity of the average person) versus superficial social agendas.
Exactly. It's also a double edged sword. The internet allows someone (perhaps with a rare disorder) to find a support group of similar people to talk to so that they don't feel as alone and are not as depressed and feel happier while at the same time it allows a different person who is also depressed instead of finding a support group ends up finding a group that promotes violence against their perceived enemy and ends up self-radicalizing and blowing something up.
We the cream of the crop been talking about issues that will bring us enlightenment like veganism, feminism, anti racism, human rights, LGBT rights, animal rights, rights to be forgotten, right to have more rights etc
But some significant potion of our country men is seeing their basic quality of life dropping be it their own fault or not.
Guess what they want to talk about on social media?
Nope. Not about how to improve their lives cos it's shitty just thinking about it.
They like to talk about how to get rid of the self important enlightenment assholes. Thats comfort for the soul.
This has been know for a long time, but yeah it's good to bring it up again. Watch a few videos for fun, but generally you should go for facts. When voting, try not to watch anything on the candidates (hard to do, but try) and just go look at their voting records. That's the only concrete thing you have.
He was appointed to Chancellor a year later, and became head of state when Hindenburg died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
TV, challenging? I think anyone who isn't a white middle class suburbanite can attest to how seldom they see their worldview presented on TV. American TV is very heavily designed not to offend the target demo of advertising. Which means never giving more than the smallest suggestion that their worldview isn't objectively correct in all things.
Hillary lost. Get over yourself.
This second sentence is absurd, because it is functionally equal if you remove all words from the first sentence except 'TV'.
Democracy is better with fewer people people involved.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I say these street riots are little more than grown up temper tantrums being perpetrated by "adults" (or at least persons of the age of majority) who didn't get spanked enough, or at all, as kids. Mommy and Daddy didn't want to tell Junior "no" and now he has to have his way all the time. Now there's a bunch of kids with beards running around playing at being protesters. ... /rant
this is only a plus one?
"Rational animals?" We naturally possess a rather limited rationality. Our minds weren't engineered to deal with the floods of input we receive from our society. Reading more won't help unless we know how to think. We should have been teaching logical thinking in schools for the past few generations. While a sizable percentage of people have a limited capability for logical thinking, there are many people who can be taught logic and the art of questioning things.