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."
"This may sound strange, but people who I've always considered "conservatives"/"Republicans"/"right-wingers" have started to express some of the most positive and hopeful sentiments."
Why would that be strange? We're watching the left self-destruct as they take identity politics to its inevitable conclusion and start to eat each other. I haven't felt this hopeful since the collapse of the USSR.
The right is driven by love of their family, their nation, and their communities. The left is driven by hatred of anyone who's different to them. The only reason you think it's strange is because the left have had better PR, thanks to decades spent infiltrating the media.
See. Point out that the left can't stand people of differing opinions, and what do the lefties do...?
Yep, you guessed it.
Downvote those opinions.
It's almost like they're a bunch of little robots whose brains have been taken over by hostile meme viruses.
Oh, hang on. That's precisely what they are.
You guys are funny.
Conservatives will climb on the table and look you in the eye while they shit in the punchbowl, then act all sanctimonious and berate you when your trying to sneak out a fart.
Cheap storage VM.