Slashdot Mirror
Is Social Media Making Us Hate Each Other? (bostonglobe.com)
Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. Now an anonymous Slashdot reader reports on Carr's newest warning:
It seems obvious: The more we learn about other people, the more we'll come to like them. The assumption underpins our deep-seated belief that communication networks, from the telephone system to Facebook, will help create social harmony. But what if the opposite is true? In a Boston Globe article, Nicholas Carr presents evidence showing that as we get more information about other people, we tend to like them less, not more. Through a phenomenon called "dissimilarity cascades," we place greater stress on personal and cultural differences than on similarities, and the bias strengthens as information accumulates. "Proximity makes differences stand out," he writes. The phenomenon intensifies online, where people are rewarded for sharing endless information about themselves. What the research indicates, warns Carr, is that the spread of social media is more likely to create social strife than social harmony.
The article concludes by opposing the idea that "If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It's a pleasant thought, but it's a fantasy... Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst. What it doesn't do is make us better people. That's a job we can't offload on machines."
The article concludes by opposing the idea that "If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It's a pleasant thought, but it's a fantasy... Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst. What it doesn't do is make us better people. That's a job we can't offload on machines."
Or just not participate. If you don't sign up or log in, you're not part of the problem.
Trying to destroy it makes it stronger. Let it die on its own when the next generation refutes it.
Nice. Point proven right at the top. People are so focused on dumb petty political bullshit and are at each other's throats over it. In person, most don't talk about political shit non-stop since there are a million other things to talk about and do that don't bring up conflict between the person you're with.
It's the fucking Internet, not "leftism". In person, I get along just fine with people on the right and left who don't talk about that shit all the time. On the Internet, for all I know, they could spend a ton of their time arguing on forums like this and Reddit. There are always zealots and college activist types, that is not new and isn't going to change. They likely spend a lot of time pushing their political shit online, like yourself, and get others tied up in it and next thing you know everyone is divided up neatly into 2 political armies and want to annihilate each other. Fucking ridiculous.
The irony is that you don't realize you are stereotyping people in the same way that you dislike when they do it. Learn who people are, don't attack strawmen. That's what got us into this problem in the first place.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've noticed that on social media people make more assumptions about you than in real life. Seems to be due to them grouping people and then assuming that the group's properties apply to the assumed members.
I get that a lot on Slashdot. People assume all kinds of crazy things about me because they put me in some imaginary "SJW" group.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nonsense. Most human beings are driven by a desire to protect their families, and in most of the world are educated enough to realise that participation in civil society and being sociable is the best way to achieve that.
What you are describing are sociopaths.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC