Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Being mindful and having empathy are not just good habits but foundational to being healthy and happy in the 21st century.
None of these articles place as much emphasis on the selling-off of our regulatory systems, the dismantling of election law, the homogenization of American thought in the televisual era, or the truly rampant epidemics of complacency, addiction, hedonism, and consumerism as possible catalysts behind a nation rapidly declining into total social schism.
this sentiment is illustrative of the world that the internet has created. on the internet, you never have to deal with something that bores you -- you can always open a new tab and do something else.
in the real world, unfortunately, the same old annoying stuff keeps coming up, and you have to keep dealing with it. like... i'm going to have to brush my teeth twice a day for the rest of my life, there will never come a time when i can just stop watching what i eat, and i'm going to have to keep dealing with the consequences of social media, including talking about it's effects, making choices about it, and convincing my friends and anyone who will listen to make choices about it, no matter how old and annoying it may have become.
one thing that gives me energy on stuff like this (by stimulating my brain) is to use my imagination. what i mean is, it seems like we've talked this subject to death, but nothing's really changed so far. maybe a slight shift in public opinion, maybe people don't assume technology must be good quite so readily as before. but try to imagine what the world could look like.
reality has this oppressive weight that restricts your thinking. "this is how the world is, so this is how it must be; in fact, this is good simply for existing. anyone who questions it doesn't get it.". it's much harder to imagine a counterfactual better world. for instance, what if instead of clumping into like-minded herds that re-enforce each other's ideas even when wrong, people on the internet connected with others who are really unlike them most of the time (maybe through something like airbnb)? or, what if there was a group/agency charged with maintaining factual accuracy on the internet (this idea comes from a novel called infomacracy). or, what if you could get people to connected better in real life (like the bash' in "too like the lightning"). imagining different worlds gives you a lens through which to critique the current one, and also gives you something to work towards.
This preserves the market dynamics and keeps the government from controlling the press, while still effectively making the press government-funded, as it should be, because access to timely and accurate news is a public good.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that this is flat-out untrue, it's just that the repeated cashing-in on an old and reductionistic theories of current events is becoming increasingly transparent. It's akin to thinkers like J.B. Peterson criticizing postmodernism 10-15 years after the movement ended, and solely by repeating the arguments that ended it. It might be true or consistent or whatever, but the point is that it focuses the dialogue on a too-narrow set of theories about the world.
Even your own statement, "Internet bad, makes people incapable of dealing with boredom" is a trope that, regardless of its truth value, doesn't address deeper issues with human communication and entertainment. People essentially said the same things about TV's 40-50 years ago: "you don't have to be bored, just change the channel!"
Facebook is the perfect outlet for every dingus who thinks themselves transgressive for having a cruel opinion or two but who can't handle the the cost of social ostracism.
This outlet reinforces and radicalizes beliefs gradually because there is no obvious "cost" or "censure" for saying horrible things about your fellow man except, perhaps, being unfollowed. The most unwell in our society use sites like facebook and 4chan and particularly their say-anything mechanism as incubators for their paranoia and rage and then go kill people. There's an obvious cause and effect here, even if the person was unwell prior to engaging with the site.
So, no, it's not Facebook's fault that people think and say this stuff, but it has created a mechanism to amplify it. And the design of the system, driven by "engagement" (aka addiction), creates a negative feedback loop. The more awful something is, the angrier we get, the more we engage, comment, argue, and the higher it climbs in the feed.
They are definitely responsible for this algorithm, at the very least.
On the whole, and in general, I agree. But I think it's worth digging in a bit deeper here.
Technology can amplify the nature of its users, if it's designed to do so. The extent to which this will or won't happen, however, also depends on design decisions made by its creators, whether intentionally or not. Technology in the abstract may be a neutral force, but specific technologies in practice very much are not; its creators have an outsized influence on what ends up happening on the platform. (See Facebook's surfacing of posts in the News Feed by "engagement" for example.)
What's concerning is how much reddit has gone downhill in the last few years. I used to swear by it but you can see how the Chinese investment in it has changed it. Also, the political atmosphere has made it very one-sided as a whole instead of balanced.
I always think of 'E=mc^2' could be used to build a bomb or a reactor, it comes down to the intent and focus of the creator.
How so? I use reddit (and as a side note am pissed that my username was already taken) daily and it hasn't really changed, in my estimation. What do you see that makes you say this?
This is a common myth that ignores a century of philosophical thought[1] on the subtle interplay between technology and behavior. Good parts and bad parts—often unintended—but certainly not neutral:
- Jacques Ellul insists that 'technique carries with it its own effects quite apart from how it is used... No matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences. This is not just a matter of intention'
- Don Ihde, the philosopher, has argued that particular tools unavoidably select, amplify and reduce aspects of experience in various ways
- Abbe Mowshowitz, a computer scientist, argues that 'tools insist on being used in particular ways'
- Neil Postman insists that 'the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another... we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are.'
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190215155149/http://visual-mem...
That said, "technology" is a term that covers a lot of things, essentially creating a spectrum of neutrality. For instance, on a direct level, a gun affords killing and coercing with threats of violence. Second-order effects, however, involve complex implications on politics, society and economy. Still, you may declare it "mostly bad". But then let's look at its component - gunpowder, chemicals used in modern ammunition, or explosives in general. Are they force of bad? They don't afford killing as much. Then look at the theoretical chemistry and engineering knowledge around those substances. Those have as much if not more clearly benign applications as they have malicious ones.
Similarly, targeted advertising on-line may be evil, cookies less so. TCP? Ethernet? Those are all "technologies".
I don't think the second assertion follows from the first. This is a tech forum, right? What do we talk about all the time? "Scalability." Can this business scale up & can this tech scale up are eternal questions here and it's commonly understood that some techs don't scale and you'll have to change if growth continues. The same applies for many of the business models discussed here, no one bats an eye at a discussion involving a company where it jumpstarts growth with one strategy and then transitions to another strategy as it grows.
But, but but! We come to humans and there seems to be a faith in our infinite scalability. And not just that we can scale infinitely but that we can do it without changing. That seems incorrect. Seen this way it's not just a question of how far we can push the 'mindfulness' and 'empathy' of humans but whether they will have to give way to other traits as we push them. How far they go, what they morph into, all of this plays into the value of the 'force' and maybe it is neutral, but it's far from a given.
Technology might be morally neutral, but since amplification can bring things to an unrecoverable limit, it isn't neutral in the sense of producing balanced outcomes. If we manage to cure cancer, and blow up the world, we're all still dead.
A nuclear bomb is just technology, and is very decidedly not a neutral force.
EDIT: Another counter-example that they used all the time in my Ethics Engineering class was the low-hanging bridge, which served to segregate white-folk from black-folk in New York City.
City Busses cannot pass a low-hanging bridge. So by carefully crafting neighborhoods surrounded by low-hanging bridges, you can prevent bus-traffic, and therefore African Americans from visiting certain neighborhoods.
If you were a Civil Engineer and you were expected to build an anti-bus bridge today, should you, or should you not, build the bridge? This is a fundamental ethics question. As the engineer, your ethics are marked upon the products you make.
No, that is not correct. The "gain" of the amplification is VERY unevenly distributed. For example, nuclear weapons only amplify the force of the biggest and most powerful countries. Outside of thermonuclear warfare, technologies like social media greatly advantage hucksters and propagandist over the calm and rational.
But does technology amplify mindfulness and empathy?
It seems to me that technology is a one-sided amplifier. It only amplifies the aspects that are, in the end, profitable for big companies.
As long as people are part of the same tribe. Plenty of small communities who aren't terribly empathetic to outsiders, minorities or foreigners.
"By nature" is not a useful qualifier here. Maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture; either way, I for one think it would be better if more people were "mindful and empathetic", regardless of whether you attribute that gain to societal encouragement or the removal of societal discouragement.
(I don't mind these articles, because I think this topic should be constantly on the mind of anyone building consumer tech services - but maybe thinking that anything will happen as a result is wishful, I hope not)