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.

Comments

A deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:A deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions

[narcc]

Of course, you're only talking to people that already agree with you. People who disagree with you are walking away, unsubscribing, etc. just like you've been doing to them.

When you share your message with millions, you start to think that you're really making a difference; like you're really doing a lot to spread your ideas. Of course, you're only sharing your message with people who have already heard it, and already agree.

That racist idiot shouting nonsense on street to passers by is, possibly, reaching more people from his street corner than than the average social media user can from inside their echo chamber.

Re:A deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions

[Falos]

They won't let it hit your feed.

At least the shouter makes your brain say "That's dumb." and maybe, just maybe, apply a brief moment of critical fucking thinking as your recall why - exactly why, objectively why, deductively why, using logic and reason and established data that leads to a conclusion- it's dumb. Even if it's only "Torture is bad, making humans suffer is wrong." you cement your morals.

Re:A deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions

[Archangel Michael]

We are all tribal, even when we hate tribalism. We've just convinced ourselves that we aren't tribal, even while we are still practicing tribalism.

Instead of tribes being built around clans of families, we now use our Echo Chambers as our clan identity. We use our "sports teams" as tribal identity. We use our employment, our politics, our social interests and isolate ourselves away from anyone too "different" from us. We are all tribal.

Social Media Is Killing Discourse

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Social Media Is Killing Discourse

[Jason Levine]

I see it as a double-edged sword - like pretty much any form of human communication. The upside is that you can communicate with people across vast distances instead of just the people who live near you. This can expose you to different points of view. Perhaps I'm for something since I live in Upstate New York but haven't considered the repercussions to someone living in Montana. In ages past, I would have never spoken with that person and never even considered their opinion. Now, I might see their view and reconsider my support.

The downside is that you can wind up surrounding yourself with people who agree with you. This happened on both sides of the aisle during the last election. If someone expressed support for Trump, some Hillary supporters would unfriend them. If someone supported Hillary, Trump supporters would cut them off from their stream. The end result is that you just see people supporting your candidates and causes. This leads to dismissing the other side out of hand and even exaggerating their position to an extreme. (For example, "expand background checks on guns" becomes "THEY WANT TO TAKE ALL OUR GUNS AWAY!!!!")

It should be noted that this isn't unique to social media - my father isn't on social media and surrounds himself with "news" from Fox, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. He doesn't listen to CNN, MSNBC, etc at all - even in an effort to see how different stations spin the same news. He's in a bubble and refuses to listen to anything that originates outside of his bubble.

The other downside is that people tend to be more brash online than face-to-face. If you called someone an idiot and a traitor to their face simply for having a different political opinion, you'd risk a punch to the face. Online, though, the worst you'll get is named-called right back and blocked. What's worse is that it seems like this brazenness is leaking out into everyday society (at least for some people).

In the end, I don't think there's an easy fix. There's no way to keep the good aspects of social media (and the Internet in general) while forcing people to be civil and to not stay in bubbles. You can ask people to behave in certain manners and perhaps even encourage it in some ways, but no system will be perfect. They will all suffer from the flaws inherent in the fact that the users are human.

Feelings, feelings!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Feelings, feelings!

[Mashiki]

It is all the fault of those pansies, the liberals, who unlike rational, logical, rugged, and manly, conservatives always let their emotions out.

Thin skin isn't just a symptom of the left. There's plenty on the right too. The real problem is that there's an entire generation of snowflakes out there that whine and cry over things like Halloween costumes and them being "racist or sexist." Or get so upset that they need to run off to rooms with colouring books and pictures of puppies because someone dared to disagree with them. The worst cases are the ones that defend restricting speech because it hurts their feelings, or claim that disagreement is harassment. The disagreement is harassment bit is a hallmark of the current progressive snowflake bubble(or SJW if you prefer).

Could somebody summarize the summary?

[Nunya666]

That summary reads like an article. Since I rarely RTFA, why would I want to read the summary?

It's the (personal) Economy stupid

[Dorianny]

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

Re:TV's business model

[Wycliffe]

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

[chispito]

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.

Re:I almost wish Hillary had won

[Rockoon]

In 2008 the media praised Obama for his campaigns social media genius.

In 2016 the media declares social media is the devil.

Re:I almost wish Hillary had won

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Yes, because there would have been soul-searching about how someone who was not any kind of recognizable conservative temporarily seized the helm of the Republican Party and got the party spanked. The discussion would have been different, but it would have happened regardless.

Re:I almost wish Hillary had won

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire establishment, which includes the media as its key henchmen, are furious with the outcome of this election. The number one goal at this point is to do what they have always been doing: shape public opinion and thought processes. The specific thing they are trying to do is make "official TV new media" the only place people view as reliable sources of information. They can't do that by getting up and stating it - they have to discredit their competitors.

Every news/discussion source that is not CNN, FOX, NBC, etc is being labeled "fake news" or "emotion driven" or some other bad word. Never mind that their news is equally if not more biased and the perceived biases liberals are claiming are just the other side of the truth being told.

The establishment doesn't know how to handle the fact that they can't lie by omission anymore. They used to just only show the news they wanted.There was never a second camera angle. There was no alternate outlet to display damning e-mails or other anti-establishment content. As we know from Hillary's e-mails, there was constant filtering and manipulation of what is shown on the major news networks by the political establishment.

But now they realize the problem is huge. People actually have access to the raw content on a massive scale for the first time ever. People are being allowed to directly interpret e-mails, videos, and other content without it being edited and filtered first. They then compare the actual information to the CNN view and realize CNN is full of shit. Listen to a full Trump speech vs. what CNN replays the next day and the interpretation of it. It is basically lying or the same "fake news" they accuse everyone else of.

They are using their power to call everyone else "fake news" while relying on the implied authority of a video camera and high production value to mean they are not liars. If they can get everyone to distrust all news sources except TV then they have their power back. But, like I said, they can't do this directly. They have to win by making everyone else lose.

I have had an unfortunate run in with a con-man. The thing he did the best was making his victim distrust everyone around them so that the con-man was the only one left to turn to. This obviously becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon because once the distrust is established, the active brainwashing by the con-man (media) can happen without conflicting information/opinions.

To OP

[Geste]

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 BS

[brunnegd]

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.

Re:TV BS

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

I hate to break it to you, but in reality (you know, as opposed to the microcephalic mentality you mistake for "real life") there are far more gay people, people of different ethnic backgrounds, and transgendered people, than are shown even now on TV.

...Actually, I lie. I don't hate to break it to you at all. Rubbing bigots' noses in their blindness and their bullshit is hilarious. Sweet, sweet schadenfreude...

Re:TV BS

[Baloroth]

No, there really isn't. It's hard to get good statistics for the number of gay/trans people in the US, but of the ethnicities, only Hispanics are underrepresented. Statistics on Hollywood characters can be found here, and statistics on the demographics of the US can be found here (though the comparison is a bit confused, as hispanic != not-white, so I don't know what the PBS numbers consider as hispanic vs white).

This

[QuietLagoon]

It makes us feel more than think

.
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.

It's not just Social Media

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Re:It's not just Social Media

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw very few in popular media who "fell for Hillary." By her own admission and even some of her major endorsements she was "less bad." What a ringing endorsement. Her "flawed" candidacy was a reoccurring story line since before the primary season even heated up... Such infatuation .... Major outlets discussed her emails including leaks (her obvious weakness) over her policy positions (her obvious strength) at a ratio of over 40 to 1... I can't believe all the love for Hillary... How you get there from here is beyond me. Nonetheless, here we are,; the media "fell for her" and "propped her up." I think the main problem is you and others can't see past your own noses; so obsessed with finding bias or agenda in others' you fail to reflect on your own.

You're confusing effects for cause

[H3lldr0p]

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.

Re:"Post-truth" is killing discourse

[Jason Levine]

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."

Are you fucking nuts?

[CaptainDork]

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.

Re:So what you're saying is...

[MountainLogic]

Yes, you must stop immediately! Each time you watch a cat or port video some friary dies! Or is that a kitten? Don't remember, but I heard it on social media so it must be true,

It was pretty obvious...

[Sir_Eptishous]

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.

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 /. has, it is an infinitely more interesting place than FB.

Re:TV's business model

[Comrade Ogilvy]

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.

Re:Post-truth

[Austerity Empowers]

SJW's scream racism and misogyny so quickly and so easily that they have enabled actual racists and actual misogynists. They shouted down anyone who either used a mildly crude expression, passed on a bad bill that somehow was tied to an SJW interest, failed to renounce some other figure who they deemed badpolitic. They rage against everything from blatant rape to some very shady/everyone-was-guilty date rape cases, to the point where heterosexual men became afraid that there but for the grace of God, they have not yet ended up in prison for women they had sex with. Even mildly insinuating that you have moral or religious issues with homosexuality gets you branded a homophobe and recidivist.

Meanwhile the mainstream person, who may not share their particular zealotry but has what the majority may consider a reasonable view on these topics, become increasingly distrustful of anyone yelling these words out. Now, the Orange Enemy, himself labelled as a misogynist for things I personally think were mostly gross exercises of poor judgement and bad character, but not necessarily misogyny, is appointing people, and those words are being yelled, and we're really not sure if they are truth or just more shrill voices from the lunatic fringe.

That's another example of post-truth, devaluing statements to the point where truth doesn't have meaning.

BBC App now has clickbait articles

[Britz]

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.

"engagement"

[globaljustin]

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

Hitler lost the election, to Hindenburg

[doug141]

He was appointed to Chancellor a year later, and became head of state when Hindenburg died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Come visit us on Slashdot

[Enigma2175]

How about them removing posts because the Scientologists DMCAed them?

https://slashdot.org/story/01/...