Obama Warns Against Irresponsible Social Media Use (bbc.com)

In his first interview since leaving the White House in January, former President Barack Obama spoke about the dangers of irresponsible use of social media. From a report on BBC: He warned that such actions were distorting people's understanding of complex issues, and spreading misinformation. "All of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the internet," he said. The former president expressed concern about a future where facts are discarded and people only read and listen to things that reinforce their own views. "One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases. The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanisation of society and allows ways of finding common ground," he said.

Comments

People don't know this?

[Horatio_Hellpop]

So ... we need a president to tell us that social media is made for narcisissm and is basically a loudspeaker for idiots.

Sorry, that's freedom

[argStyopa]

People are little more than hairless chimps: we chatter and squeal (and sometimes kill) anyone we don't recognize as part of our in-group.

We only have the intellectual capacity to identify a small number of individuals personally as part of that group; beyond that we build more ephemeral identities based on communicated reputation and shared biases to identify 'tribes' of commonality with whom we perceive a commonality of interest, at least in the categories of behavior and belief that we feel are personally important.

Outside of THAT, we simply cannot know everyone individually; we base our expectations on stereotypes. What makes those stereotypes to enduring is that they are indeed based on FACT to a greater or larger degree - there is, for example, no stereotype that Asian men have 3 heads or that Muslims breathe water: unfortunately, the building of these stereotypes is rarely today based on personal experience, but on 'shared wisdom' which is just as likely to come from CNN or Breitbart as it is from someone trustworthy.

Finally, this is coupled with a deeply-felt (but never actually proved?) faith in little-L liberal tenets of western civilization: that if we "just communicate more", if we "just understand each other better" we'll all get along better. SIMULTANEOUSLY we profess that people should be coerced as little as possible, that the ideal (in fact, the very essence of democracy) is freedom of choice for each self-aware individual.

I don't believe our ideals are reconcilable with our fundamental animal natures without large scale dictatorial reprogramming. So there's the question: do we get to be ourselves and make free choices, or shall we embark on a Great Leap Forward where a beneficent overclass tells us all how to live so we can be happy?

Frankly speaking: I think John Calhoun's experiments into mouse dystopias are far more predictive of the ultimate outcome of this experiment than some sort of idealized utopia of unicorns and rainbows where we all love each other.

That sounds like a shot across the bow

[rsilvergun]

at the Democratic party, which basically ran Romney Bot 2.0, right down the the comment attacking the electorate and having $700 million pocketed by consultants who figured they already won.

Re: Said...

[jellomizer]

There is a different between Scandal and Bad Decisions.
As president you often will need to make these no win decisions. And most of these were exaggerated by the GOP just because they were grasping for straws on making him the bad guy.

Re:Said...

[hey!]

I warned my liberal friends back in 2008: Obama isn't some kind of leftist firebrand. He's a center-left moderate who will govern somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon, because basically he's a 60s era Republican "moderate".

Liberals couldn't get over Obama's penchant for drone strikes; Obama never pursued an idealistic foreign policy which was ruled by *values*, although he talked a good game. He used military force freely to maintain the international status quo.

On the environment he was unreliable. Yes, he expanded some protected areas, but he also quietly but aggressively promoted fracking and expanded domestic oil production -- to the point where the US is expected to become a net energy exporter soon. Again foreign policy was a driver; not only did Obama take America to the brink of energy independence, he also greatly curtailed Russian military spending by strangling their energy-based economy; by becoming a gas exporter the US also limited Russia's use of natural gas supply as leverage over Europe. This is why Putin hated Obama and Clinton so much.

And his landmark health care reform? It was originally developed by Republican think tanks for Bob Dole's presidential campaign -- right down to the individual mandate. It not only maintained private health care delivery, it propped up the private insurance industry. It didn't even *have* a public option, which was the party left wing's line in the sand. He basically ignored them.

But while policy-wise Obama pursued stability and continuity, politically he represented change, because of his race. It's kind of the flip side of the "only Nixon can go to China".