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."
We always hated each other. Social media just makes it easier to be in other people's circles...
If you hated someone in 1970... you just avoided them. On the internet, short of blocking them on social media, you are confronted with them constantly.
So we haven't changed... social media just brings out some bad things in people. While still doing many good things.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
What do you expect when activists organize 2 minute hates every 2 minutes?
I mean, that's like half of the "news" any more. Let's dig up some rumors about someone who says that someone said something and see how many people we can convince that they're thoroughly despicable.
And if you know anything about the dynamics of a clique, you know they don't
tend to involve niceness or admiration.
What many forget is that humans are still animals, and that human behavior is
driven by the desire for power or sex. All else is trivial details compared to power
and sex.
A clique is used to exclude more than it is to include. Exclusion is not a friendly
behavioral phenomenon.
I'd have to say Nicholas Carr is not wrong in theorizing that social media may foment
dislike and related behaviors. However, I don't think such a realization is amazing,
because it's pretty obvious if you bother to think for yourself. Facebook is just an electronic
version of a high school clique. Some people will find this useful, while others will find it
distasteful.
It is not "social media".
It is a "gossip platform".
It is a social ill.
It has transformed society into a bunch of bored. blue haired old women and 15 year old mean girls. We are giving megaphones to mean spirited idiots, and the less responsible they are, the more free time they have to spout stupidity and bile.
It's time to kill it with fire.
Controversy generates clicks. Clicks generate ad revenue. Everyone (who is exchanging money) is happy when we're all miserable.
Reminds me of the climax of Jedi: Luke is thrashing away at Vader, full of hate and anger. Meanwhile the emperor is laughing with glee. Dance, monkey boy! Dance!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Social Media makes it easy for us to reinforce and confirm our beliefs. Family and friends help shape our beliefs and our social media "friends" tend to be those people. Social media puts us in a bubble as we self-select our "friends". We do not hear alternate views. I have 2 high school friends on Facebook, one is right wing and the other is left wing. They are both prolific in their postings. I want to block both of them but I don't so that I hear alternate viewpoints. We need to listen to alternate viewpoints. That is why they are not blocked.
No shit. Take this quote from Dostoyevsky:
“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov z
I always felt that it was the right that could not stand the truth so they started the whole "Fake News" on anything they did not like, and created this Alternate Facts crap that is going on. Now, I am not saying that the left is any better, personally I think all of the current politics need a reality check.
If techs didn't disagree with each other, then Microsoft would rule the world.
After an election pitting "real Americans" versus everyone else, where the biggest cheering was for building The Wall, banning Muslims, and sending the "Mexicans" (they're all Mexicans to Real Americans) back to Mexico?
Who's got a problem with identity politics?
Play Command HQ online
I have no problem with hating racists.
Lots of haters have no problem hating whoever, because [reasons]. They should all stop being haters. Including you.
There's no point in singing kumbaya when half the country cheers ethnic "cleansing", meaning mass deportation and police-state harassment regular people.
If you're talking about the US, there's no "ethnic cleansing " in the US. Perhaps some of this hatred is because people like you make up or repeat false stories like this? There's also no "mass deportation" of "regular people".
Unfortunately, there is government harassment -- which is one reason why I support a smaller government with less power over people.
"The more we learn about other people, the more we'll come to like them."
We're not learning about other people, we're only observing a tiny facet of them when they decide to write something online. All of the context is cut out. We only get a very superficial understanding of that person. Like stereotypes. When I meet with someone IRL I get all of the context, at least a much fuller picture, not the edited version.
Online people want to only show what they feel is their best side, and others may feel the need to match or exceed that, and at least the busy vocal part seems to be competing in a one-up contest.
Personally I am more reserved and tend not to write that much online, I don't really want to get involved in most of this and prefer to socialize IRL, perhaps there are others like me. Perhaps some keep their conversations hidden as well, and those are not indexed and processed. So perhaps what we see online is a very slim edited version, and maybe this is what we don't like.
Twinstiq, game news
It's kind of pitiful to watch somebody criticizing people who stereotype, do so much stereotyping themself. 'folks who've fled to lily white suburbs'? 'stone cold racists'???
You live in a comic book universe, dude. Them villains are sure nasty!
These people are sadists (the prototypical troll) and people that hate about everything for other reasons, often because they are pathetic themselves. Because they somehow think that social media is not a social situation, they believe they do not need to control their urges.
There is nothing that can be done about this. Censorship and punishment for voicing opinions (repulsive as they may be) are only compatible with a totalitarian state and those cause orders of magnitude more pain and suffering than the trolls ever could. It is just one more thing that people need to learn when growing up: There are people out there that are not nice in any way and the best way to deal with them on social media is to ignore them. This is actually a pretty important thing to understand for other situations as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In 1960, the USA was 96% black or white. Today, there are now more hispanics than black people. That is the power of illegal aliens and anchor babies. That is why racism in the USA has been primarily about black people. The Mexicans didn't have to go through slavery or Jim Crow. They were first class citizens in Mexico.
Leftism = rightism = centrism = authoritarian financialism