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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.
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.
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".
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!
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
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.
But what does the fox say?
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.
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.
Because I'd hate to have to go back to ExpertS-exChange.
It was bad. But, you can still get pens from penis land but sadly no longer batteries from power genitalia.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'd say that post-truth is worse than lying by omission. Usually lies by omission still have a grain of truth in them. "Post-Truth" statements seem to be made up out of pure fantasy and the people repeating them don't seem to care if they are true or not, just that they sound like they might be true. Did Hillary really kill five people by hand and drink their blood? Who cares if it's true or not? If a person thinks it kind of sounds like something she might do, they will repeat it as if it were 100% proven true. Their audience will do the same and before you know it, Photoshopped images of Hillary with blood dripping down her mouth will be circulating as "proof" of the claim. Meanwhile other people who are saying "this isn't true and here's the proof" will be either ignored or shouted down as being pawns of the "liberal elite media coverup."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The Fox says the hoodie was as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was. Is that the sort of "misinformation" the article is talking about?
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?
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?
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.
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!
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!
I can imagine the angst that the elderly generations feel that soon the millennial generation will be deciding on their social welfare. Millennials got to grow up hearing what a free country this used to be while the former generations built up one of the most oppressive and violent national security states in human history. While you may adore the nostalgia of bygone eras, millennials cannot covet that nostalgia because they grew up in the shitty fucking world that prior generations had already cursed. Opinions such as these will help assuage the bad sentiments of pulling the social safety net to pay for a prior generations debt. Millennials that I know do not think they will get social security and therefore they do not really worry about your angst because you think you deserve it.
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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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
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
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
This is what a liar sounds like. You need more? Because there were plenty more during this election season. Remember how the DNC was exposed as paying for thugs to go and start violence at Trump rallies? Or how Michelle Fields lied about Corey Lewandowski? I can go on and on, there was tons of this stuff and the whole world saw it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
is not a "left" exclusivity, you know... ("left" and "right" still a thing in these days?!)
I think you missed the point here: this tools still exists, but are used in a very diferent way (ask you grandpa [that uses facebook regulary] what is an "hyperlink"....)
* by including Twitter in the so called "death of hiperlinks", maybe him referenced the "URL shortening hell" (bit.ly [or any other service used] -> t.co -> real URL)