Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
vox.com
vox.com
"This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity."
And science evolved greatly in the highly interconnected parts of the world.
"In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas"... but aren't those brought about by evolution as well? And as far as I can see the top ten keeps changing, evolving.
My argument is that the internet has enabled hyper-evolution. You get access to the best possible information, you have through torrents and libgen access to all the media and books ever produced at your fingertips, free of charge. What you might've figured out in 30 years of your own trials and tribulations can now be learned in a couple of years reading books. Of course pride and arrogance keeps us from learning but that's a different story and will probably be weeded out by evolution much faster now than ever before thanks to free access to information.
An isolated group is forced to find novel solutions because they don't have a body of evidence to lean back on.
In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that.
It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. So it benefits you to use the established method.
But the group at large would benefit more from having lots of people try novel things, because otherwise innovation stagnates as the "known" solution takes precedence everywhere.
There’s ways around this, though. For example, occasionally accepting a method that’s worse in the short term can eventually lead to a better long term solution. The likelihood of accepting a worse solution can be inversely proportional to how much worse it is to the current solution. The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm does exactly this to avoid local maxima.
Meaning you just need some people to take a seemingly worse idea and run with it occasionally. I think there will always be a few brave or naive souls willing to do that.
Depends on the problem. If the problem is complex enough, say nutrition, then you see constantly changing narratives and theories and even competing ones in the present. There's no Best Solution™ way to nourish ourselves yet so people experiment and the top competing theories are being actively discussed and debated. Sure there are keto / vegan / paleo nuts out there but they're just test subjects really. Same argument can be said about software dev, there's no best language or best framework; or about ways to earn money, employment vs entrepreneurship is not a settled debate.
Can you name some problem that you feel has stagnated in the modern world?
Sure - passive cooling for homes. Architecture used to vary dramatically by climate. In the last 50 years or so new homes are generally only designed for electric cooling.
It's so easy to literally build a square box and stick a cooler/heater in it that everyone (including me) chooses to do it.
Does that mean it's the right way for us to be handling heating/cooling for our homes? Sure seemed like it 50 years ago. Sure seems less like it today with climate change, but we've already picked, and now general cultural preferences make it hard to undo (not even mentioning sunk costs on buildings that are hard to modify)
Basically - the point they're making is that as we homogenize, we put all the eggs in one basket. And we have a long history of making decisions that seem GREAT! today, but actually have some downsides at scale (like electric AC contributing to climate change, requiring more electric AC, making climate change worse, etc)
Truth is we haven't got to 5 billion online. Just getting 3 billion online has run into massive issues that has split the net in many ways no one imagined. It doesn't look like we will ever get to 5 billion.
So there is some baked in natural resistance. Andrew Odlyzko is looking like he was onto something when he said Metcalfe and Reeds Law of network growth would not hold.
Primarily the limitation is the 6 inch chimp brain and the Dunbar number. If the avg chimp has the channel capacity for a 100 ppl max what's the point of all this connectivity?
We are taking our sweet time to realise it.
Micro (is a Honey I shrunk the kids story but with a much more jurassic park science vibe. Have no idea why its hasn't been made into a movie)
Timeline (has been made into a movie and is a cool time travel story)
COVID as an example, would have previously been a contained regional outbreak. Globalism made it an instant problem for every continent. Social media exacerbated responses in most every country.
Interconnectivity is fragility.
Monocultures are fragile. The only part of globalisation that gives me cause for concern is that it can make bigger monopolies that would otherwise be possible.
Biology evolves through mutation propagation, and larger populations tend to regress mutations to the mean more than smaller populations.
Behavior changes don't require any mutations, and they can be shared in all directions (unlike mutations, which can only be shared with descendants) This already fundamentally changes how societies can evolve.
Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case, as we have continued to innovate and create new things even after we have been globally connected.
While our global society does propagate some homogeneity (McDonalds and Starbucks everywhere), it also lets innovations spread very quickly, which gives more chances for amazing new things to propagate.
I read the argument as being about diversity. There are innovations, but as you point out in the next paragraph, they spread quickly, which could be good, but also destroys a lot of diversity. Look at how different UI design trends spread e.g. I don't consider that a clear win. Having many less connected groups could potentially lead to more, and more diverse innovations, vs. everyone jumping on the same bandwagon
The other thing that spreads more quickly is disease (here I mean metaphorically). If everything is the same, it gets infected the same way, and I believe there is an element of that when you look at online discourse, at dark patterns and other user hostile business practices, etc.
There are some reasons homogeneity is good, especially locally in time, but it presents an evolutionarily disadvantage over longer scales, which is what I took to be the point of the MC quote
It is not only about "innovation" but about cultural diversity. For good or bad, a globalized world is standardizing culture around the world. Hollywood was a very powerful starting point as allowed everyone to see what the USA produces.
> innovations spread very quickly
That is the point. There are less and less pockets of different approaches. In one side of the world someone invents a new app and people is using it in the other side of the world 3 days later. Innovation may be fast, but it is not diverse but there is a convergence of ideas and ways of thinking. If we get it right it is fantastic, if we get it wrong there are no alternatives.
A good example, hot topic, is cryptocurrencies. If it is something good they are everywhere, if it is a mistake then it is consuming an incredible amount of resources for no use. If you had pockets of innovation the impact would be smaller and it will take more time to copy it if it becomes successful.
Take society as an organism in the abstract and it definitely needs to mutate.
Crichton was a pop science author, right-wing believer in America. His idea small groups get things done was lost on this guy who watched entire corporations publish his books and movies. I’d take his philosophy and science creds with a grain of salt.
The masses were too busy collectively validating his banal artistic efforts, so of course he would balk at collectivism philosophically while ignoring it took a village to lift him up.
Those folks are scared that if everyone can have time to write mediocre sci fi they’d have to get real jobs.
Actually, transgenesis happens. E.g. bacteria can share genes horizontally with plasmids. And viruses may bring genes from unrelated species.
Uniformity: top-down
Now everyone can live in virtual echo chambers where everyone agrees with them and they never need to compromise. So they start viewing anyone who disagrees with them as pure evil.
When population numbers within a species are large, interbreeding will tend to dilute genetic mutations within the total population. When populations are small, e.g. due to physical isolation or temporal isolation, mutations are more likely to spread and become established. This is increased further when selective pressure is applied.
https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-fr...
My own TLDR: Explains how the trauma and betrayal experienced by Boomers impacted that generation, and how it may have forged Crichton's personal philosophy.
This is more than backwards. Evolution does not only accelerate when you connect small populations into a larger one, it also starts happening on a higher level, selecting over collections of traits larger than what was possible before.
Group diversity (like speciation) of course depends on isolation, but individual diversity does not. It depends on a series of factors that are completely different for memetic and biologic evolution. (Personally, I don't know how either react to isolation, but since the author got wrong every single fact that I know, I don't imagine he has any idea either.)
I saw it first hand when I migrated to USA, here people religiously watched news and had very uniform, fixed ideas about policies, whereas where I came from TV was still a luxury back then. I found people more open minded willing to engage in different views.
The more connected we become the less diverse we get in terms of perspectives.
I think a lot of people think big social media platforms are actually communication platforms, they're not. They're designed intentionally to be difficult to communicate on.
That the not the purpose of them, it's in the name 'social media' they are the media, you are the social. They are creating media based on the things users post. They're not made to facilitate communication between friends, family, coworkers, etc...
They are designed specifically for users to generate monetizable content and data. They use a veneer of 'connecting the world together' so users will generate content that drives clicks and makes them money.
A true global communication platform would look nothing like the social media we have today. It would be designed around allowing people to communicate easily and freely, it would give you control over who and what you interact with and it would allow you to maintain granular levels of privacy.
Ya know...like other systems designed to facilitate communications...like say the telephone system...
My mother who can barely use Windows knows how to chat with me on Facebook. People use social media to communicate between friends, family, coworkers etc all the time. That's how all of that monetizable data gets generated.
Yes, the purpose of social media is to profit from user-generated content and data, but it still works as intended for 99% of people.
I would argue that it feels like it works, for 99% of people. I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.
Whole thing creeped me out.
Facebook's mission statement.
But that's effectively the same thing if you can't get users to change networks/platforms, eh?
> I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.
Sure. It's easy-bake oven internet for non-geeks. But they don't care. The cupcakes taste fine (to them.)
It is notoriously difficult to browse through, responses are sorted in non-intuitive ways, sometimes responses are hidden for no apparent reason, yet people regularly use it to communicate.
When people post status updates or pictures or whatever, they're trying to communicate, how many times have you gotten status or upload notifications from people you haven't talked to in years, but it never showed you your best friend's new baby pictures or something like that?
Twitter, It's designed around a character limit that strictly discourages longform communication. Yet, you get people trying to write blog posts using it, much to the chagrin of many HN commenters, and generally, the quality of most communication suffers greatly on twitter because of the inherent design.
They're easy to use because the major social media platforms know that reducing friction to use draws people in and keeps them there, while the platform serves their attention up to advertisers. There's even ways that they make it harder to stop using them than to just keep scrolling/refreshing. Dark Patterns abound.
People on social media are generally not communicating with each other, at least not in a meaningful sense. Social media users are sharing things that other people have created to draw attention, and whatever gets the most attention and shares, aka "engagement" sells the most ads, and makes the most money.
Perhaps it would look like that brief golden age when everyone had a self hosted blog and we subscribed to each other with RSS readers.
I wouldn't know how many deliberately chose not to self-promote in that way, but it is probably far more than those who chose to blog.
I think system architecture is part of the present problem, but it is not at the root. Even during your so-called Golden Age the deeper issue was already manifest, though not yet scaled.
Good news is that the seeds of better social do exist. I'm trying to set up one of them, http://www.reason.so/ which will match people with similar interests into small (3-10 people) group chats with the intention of creating small communities where it's easy to discuss things you find interesting semi-privately (i.e. somewhere between a public Twitter thread and a private group message). By keeping the chats small you also get rid of clickbait, astroturfers and "thought leaders" who only want to build an audience instead of actually interacting with other people.
The biggest problem with setting up a social network like Reason is probably monetarisation. People just aren't ready to pay for social media when Facebook, Clubhouse and co are free.
In addition to that, meetup.com makes its money by charging people who want to setup a group.
It’s E2E encrypted, so the server can’t datamine your posts or meddle with your timeline. Built on Matrix underneath, so building federated communities will be straightforward.
Let me know if you’d like to try it out.
It seems to have that same problem many alternatives have though.
My friends and family aren't on there and there seems to be a lack of a way to at least make some new friends on there.
First, I’m trying really hard to get an Android version ready by the end of the year.
Second, we’re going to be offering some group deals and discounts, so one person can pay to get their whole family / group / crew on the network for an introductory period.
No doubt it will be slow going for a while.
But I think (hope?) that once people get a taste of an easy way to keep in touch, without the platform itself working against you, then it will start to spread organically and pick up steam.
I think the very name "social media" is catching people off guard. It implies something social, which for most people is good and aspirational.
> 2007 is when the human species accidentally invented telepathy (via the fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media with always-connected handheld internet devices). Telepathy, unfortunately, turns out to not be all about elevated Apollonian abstract intellectualism: it's an emotion amplifier and taps into the most toxic wellsprings of the subconscious. As implemented, it brings out the worst in us. Twitter and Facebook et al are fine-tuned to turn us all into car-crash rubberneckers and public execution spectators. It can be used for good, but more often it drags us down into the dim-witted, outraged weltanschauung of the mob.
[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/some-am...
Infinitely scrolling through flashy, zero-effort "snackable" content is the equivalent of mental junk food.
But that's not even what this article is about, its discussing the spread of misinformation and social media being full of low information content.
This is the inverse of the intended interpretation. By "probably x decades early", I mean "at least x decades early". I did not mean "it has probably not happened".
The singularity is not guaranteed to happen and with a high confidence has not already happened.
That's ok. Insignificant numbers are more than enough to colonize an entire galaxy on geologic timescales.
The thing about the "Great Filter" is that it is great. If you can even imagine an exception for your candidate filter, then it's not great enough.
Do that sort of stunt as much as you like, it won't become something more. It's like trying to jump over a building by hopping a bunch. You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back to square one.
Such a small group of people, armed with current genetic engineering and future artificial means of reproduction, could bring with them enough genetic diversity and reproductive capacity to reach colonizing scale.
You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back to square one.
Despite the first part of my reply, this point about minimum activation energy is relevant to a lot of contexts, from escaping poverty to switching careers, from getting fit to overcoming medical conditions. This is a pretty good analogy that I might use in the future.
The hard part I think is "playing factorio IRL" on a planet we weren't evolved to cope with. Bootstrapping industry sufficient even to create additional shelters would be very challenging. Maybe we could practice this on Mars.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but that gets the idea dangerously close to the theory of unfalsifiability.
Personally I am more inclined to the believe that we haven't heard any radio signals from space because you don't run a multi-galaxy civilisation on light-limited transmissions.
Invent the ansible and then maybe we will find the galaxy theming with life.
If 1 per billion wants to expand, out of a population of 8 billion, you have 8 expansionists. If each of them breaks the social conventions and have twice as many offspring as the sustainers (and if the desire is heritable), after 30 generations they’re now equal in number to the sustainers. Cambridge University is in the order of 30 generations old.
https://isogg.org/wiki/How_long_is_a_generation%3F_Science_p...
I'm not sure I agree. For the most part of humanity, we have been at war, murdering each other, enslaving each other, and numerous other atrocities... Including nearly a nuclear war.
The reduction in in person communication is due to the increase in global communication... Which I think is a net benefit. Social media is a bump in the road, and my hope is that we'll overcome the likes of Twitter soon.
I've noticed this since the advent of texting. Not since the advent of social media. It's absurd to me honestly that someone would prioritize someone on their phone over the person who took the time and effort to physically be present and engage with them that day.
>I really miss sitting around the backyard with friends talking
I do as well. But it makes me wonder now, if people always have been flakey and unwilling to hang out with new people. I swear when I was a kid, asking someone to hang out or do something was easy, even if you met them one time. It's almost as if unlimited media and instant communication halts people from pursuing anything with other people unless they have something they dont.
You know, that could be.
I'll present a meta-hypothesis. Diversity is generally dangerous and global communications/global movement drives everyone closer to hazardous behavior. Without the filtering of slow tempos, things get sporty.
The real danger technology poses is the increased leverage of ever-increasing automation consolidating in the hands of oligarchs who using it to enrich themselves and isolate themselves from the consequences with no regard for broader impact on the planet or future generations.
Despite the problems with social media, removing it would have no beneficial effect on this trajectory towards environmental catastrophe. To the contrary, I still believe that lowered barriers to global communication and information access are generally good for society. Sure it hasn't resulted in becoming a nation of philosopher kings in the utopian ideal envisioned by those early Berkeley engineers, but the problems we are seeing are just the same old dance of populism and propaganda that have always been at the heart of large scale politics.
Take your example of automation. Wouldn’t the way to counteract this be through smarter policy (like an automation tax as an off-the-cuff example).
I think the angle of the paper is that social media makes enacting smart policy that much harder because weaponized misinformation can be used to stymie such policy.
Personally, I think this can be managed by bringing back the idea of Cincinnati-style civic duty, rather than relying on a professional political class but that ship may be too far gone
IMO social media gets the blame, but it’s just the vehicle for something darker happening. Something more about widespread nativism that distrusts an educated, cosmopolitan elite.
Just because we see this on social media, doesn’t make social media the cause.
We don’t need to get into all the times doctors have been way wrong. Now those people who might know that are within your ear shot, perhaps a little less than the lunatics who just want to talk shit.
Maybe you are right, maybe it’s not social media but an extreme polarization for another reason and social media is speeding it along? Maybe that’s just what we do over time?
Either way, I can’t accept the appeal to authority you started with. I have personally be on the wrong side of a diagnosis and it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to my doctor in favor of information I discovered first on social media.
This is a very crucial concept: https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...
I wonder if perhaps the main problem is that social media changes the structure of human interaction by allowing those with similar ideas to congregate instead of being spread across the network in a diffuse manner.
Like in the 1970s if you believed that Aliens were here on Earth and abducting people, the vast majority of people you interacted with would think you’re a crackpot. It would be very difficult to find validation that your ideas are good.
Today you simply need to open a Facebook group for UFO conspiracy theorists and you’ve got all of the confirmation bias you need. It has never been easier to find people who agree with you.
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
The problem with social media is not that there are people saying things that are dumb or wrong.
The problem is that the platforms survive by finding the most virulent idiocy and spreading it as widely as possible.
Our elite seem to have decided that their power and profit are more important that helping civilization last another generation.
Blaming the working class for not trusting the "elite" them goes against the old adage:
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me.
It's such a non-specific and over-generalized word, and it's become so loaded with pejoration, that for me it's become a sign of intellectual laziness.
The "elites" are not out to get ya, bud. Start by defining with greater precision who you're talking about, and see whether this idea still feels good.
It would be more precise to talk about it in terms of extracting wealth from society without comparable investment of work. Those that game the system, such as the duopoly that infests US Government.
I eventually concluded that for most of America, what we see on TV and in movies doesn't match our lives.
I think the internet is actually an opportunity to give push back against that and better develop local or regional identifies elsewhere and give them a voice.
However, much more people are willing to believe that what they see in social media is real. Now think of how many people are feeling "they must be doing it wrong", with that in mind.
And since they are all run on some form of hyper-intelligent ML algorithm, none of it from a user perspective is intuitive anymore.
The bigger risk in my opinion is how SM and use of it on digital devices has impacted human behavior. More specifically, psychologically. Dopamine hits and instant gratification must have rewired our brains in the past ~2 decades.
We could do a much better job at moderating the obviously wrong stuff. And no, I'm not talking about censoring unpopular or contrary opinions. I'm just talking about extinguishing obvious and clear mis/dis-information.
The numbers on masks and vaccines show that acceptance is widespread. What are we looking for here, approval rates to rival Kim Jong Un? The worst thing that could happen to what little is left of social cohesion is an even stricter attempt at controlling information.
Sure, some information shared on social media is misinformation. Some information coming from mainstream media is misinformation, too. In some cases, the authorities will spread misinformation. After all, some of the "evidence" used to argue that masks are ineffective came from the CDC itself.
With the politicization of everything, even facts can not be considered neutral anymore. For every verifiable fact, there's a set of other verifiable facts that may be omitted to achieve the desired effect. Fact-checks are used for propaganda. When consuming information, always keep your salt dispenser at hand.
I think there are people who are looking for North Korea level approval ratings on things. If you have zero uncertainty in what you think is true then anything contradictory is naturally "misinformation".
If so, I would implore you to ponder the shape of the surface that we inhabit without the hindsight of 1000 years of R&D.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118
Abstract
> Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.
No comparison against control and this is only evidence that scientists publish clickbait.
> Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks
Sounds like social media to me
“[…] via virtual communities and networks”
(Friend and follower (and so on) relations create these virtual communities and networks, these don't exist on HN.)
Ergo, HN is not social media.
Facebook is social media, Twitter is social media. IRC is not, HN is not. Tiktok is, SnapChat is. Reddit isn't, Slashdot isn't. Google+ was, Orkut was. LWN isn't, Ars Technica isn't.
Social media implies a massive global social graph which under-girds the communication flows – not rooms, forums, articles, channels, "subreddits", spaces, etc.
This description would include email and SMS - and no one describes those as social networks.
HN is a forum.
> This description would include email and SMS
I would absolutely consider SMS and email to be a social network, they are just limited and have fewer features.
Definition of social network from wikipedia:
> A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors
> no one describes those as social networks
I do acknowledge that there is a more nebulous popular definition of social media which refers to the major platforms. However, when you try to define what makes them different than email and SMS, things get challenging. If email, an network of independent actors exchanging information isn't a social network, then what set of features would make it a social network and why? All of the major platforms have different sets of features, some of them overlapping. What set of common features makes them a social network and why?
It's an aging salon, and reflects the product of the current mood and amount of attention given by its host.
Or maybe, without social media to promote those very officially-approved opinions, we would have used our vast and deep social IRL network to discuss and reason, and would have come to that conclusion anyway.
I strongly believe that the various world governments' policies of lockdown, social isolation, and mask wearing would not have worked 50 years ago, because we were too connected.
Initial enthusiasm, lots of disruption & creativity, then captured by reactionaries and traditionalists. Spasms of overreach and overcorrection. Cycles of purges and remything.
Obelisks, cuneiform, drums, papyrus, pigeons, pony express, paper, moveable type, radio waves, light beams.
The disruption to society and culture is always the same. The only variable is impact predetermined by production costs.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The trick for us plebes is finding untapped margins and eddies, do our own thing, maybe find our tribe.
Social media is horrible for lots of reasons, mainly because it throws everyone who would never normally encounter each other into the same bucket of crabs, but their framing of the problem essentially reduces to being concerned the wrong kind of crabs are climbing too far.
I wonder what has changed? I think that it is not Facebook's management fault but the reality kicked in. Medium like Facebook is convenient for all type of content and interaction unlike Instagram for example which is more for showing off with photos and following other people's lives.
Then It pushes you further and further to the extremes of what it thinks you like.
People were warning about filter bubbles even before Facebook did it.
Makes me think of "reality tunnels"[] written of long before Zuck made his website.
Facebook just shows that, it doesn't change it. I think that most people (specially white, heterosexual and not poor) were simply living in a bubble of ignorance thinking the world was a much better place that it actually is and social media simply popped that bubble and showed reality for everybody to see. And now they are angry at Social media in a classical shoot the messenger reaction.
Sounds eerily similar to this:
> Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.
People look at social media but it started waaay earlier, back in old Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamic Urbanization>Ability to write>Journals>Newspapers>Radio>TV>Internet>Social Media
Social media is just the last step in the process. Each and every step of the process contributed to make humans learn about how many humans are there in the world and this somehow makes us feel less special.
When we wrap our minds around how many humans are there in the world, we feel insignificant and we feel like we don't matter at all. In a sense our sense of worth feels diluted by the immense quanity of people who are just like us.
This creates anxiety and resentment. Our brain is still the same as we had back in pre-Mesopotamic eras.
> My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world. And they seem to have done so in a manner that makes people particularly vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
This is such an unbelievably shallow take. Much of the "truth" mainstream liberals have been pushing in the past year has turned out to be false. In the past, before the internet and social media, the media lied to the public all the time. It was probably easier because regular people didn't have a good way to spread primary information quickly. The media got most of their information from government press conferences and, if the government didn't like what an organization was saying, the government would stop inviting those journalists to those press conferences. There's a whole book about it, it's called Manufacturing Consent. That type of information control is no longer possible now that everyone can livestream from their phones to millions of people and the establishment is mad about it. Now they are trying to wrestle back control of information by writing think pieces about the dangers of "algorithms" and threatening tech giants with anti-trust action.
Its ironic because I feel like these people are the reason social media is a threat to society. They want to use it to manipulate the public like they always have and are willing to go to great lengths to do so.
If academics can't comment cross discipline, no one else can comment at all.
For example?
He's still the only guy worth anything in the field of media theory:
So, probably the courts. That's an imperfect solution, but it beats the hell out of the position that any attempt to arbitrate the truth is unacceptably oppressive.
On another level: everyone has an obligation to arbitrate the truth as honestly and ably as they're capable, in every domain they have responsibility for, first and foremost in training themselves to be more careful about their own blind spots, tendencies, incentives, and limits, and then in exercising whatever influence and authority they have.
Have you never thought about why freedom of speech is an important and worthy fundamental right?
You're confusing the fact that courts are legal institutions directed by legal professionals with the conception that's all they are. In fact, a court is a process. That process is guided by law, and results in legal findings, but it is not limited to the legal sphere when it comes to findings of fact and truth. Where a court lacks specialists in truth, advocates on both sides will find whatever ways they can to bring them to the discussion.
And again, there is no such thing as rule of law without examining questions truth. You want liability for poor engineering standards? Courts must ascertain what good engineering standards are. You want murder to be illegal, and people to be tried for violating murder laws? Courts must ascertain evidence, often scientific evidence relating to whether or not someone is guilty. A court without capacity or authority to weigh in on truth cannot apply the law.
> Have you never thought about why freedom of speech is an important and worthy fundamental right?
Enough to know that speech and robust discourse are in fact a significant part of courtroom proceedings.
Once you have a courtroom deciding 'the truth' without respect to the law, that is my exit signal for that particular society.
LOL nice semantic game. Nobody thinks "arbiter of truth" means that court could, like, rule on a new gravitational constant or something and it would be so. It means that a court is a socially formalized process of speech & discourse for arbitrating who has the better case for accurately understanding a given question of truth. Which again, is absolutely necessary -- there will always be questions about what is or is not true at the heart of every court case.
Including already existing content-of-speech related laws like defamation. Creating a class of entities that opt-in to heightened obligations on this front in order to address the problems as the AC was thinking wouldn't change this.
It sounds like you want some kind of labeling system, kind of like 'USDA Organic' certification, but for news organizations. Sure, the courts could try to interpret whether or not a news organization satisfies some criteria for this label, but I wouldn't call the result of their ruling 'the truth'.
Assuming consensus could be found among 'experts', consensus isn't a magic bullet. I have no doubt this would turn into a game of cherry-picking sources and feed the litigation culture we have. I personally wouldn't attribute any increased credibility nor usefulness to any such labeling scheme. I would actually trust it less and avoid it entirely.
And yes, if such a system existed people would actually think the output of the process you describe is the absolute truth, much like a gravitational constant. It would further bifurcate our society and in the end, likely be co-opted by some political party to silence the other.
We'll be prosecuted for sending communications across state lines to mislead a child under Texas's Anti-Critical Race Theory statute.
We're nearly there already, happy to ban clearly-marked Iranian, Russian, and Chinese state media. Those actions have already been used by private media to ban US journalists by associations as weak as sharing the same opinions as enemy media outlets.
Academia has been trying for centuries to crack this nut, and it is not easy.
Human speech just doesn't lend itself to the type of formalism required for this to be possible. If you want the closest approximation, look at legal jargon, specifically for contracts: It is a set of speech standards that evolved over centuries in an effort to reduced ambiguity in transactions. As a result, it is extremely verbose to the point of incomprehensibility by outsiders, and it's still possible to deliberately misuse it without easy detection.
Free speech is important for a free society, although we are moving away in recent years with all of the platform censorship and truth labeling. While this censorship is technically legal, these platforms are used like public land and are training generations of people to undervalue freedom of expression.
Truth is not like that. It's must be absolute, and it should not be defined arbitrarily based on what improves people's well-being. (Or maybe it should, but that's going to be a different kind of truth.)
Sorry, but what are you talking about? The holocaust happened before social media, segregation and slavery happened before social media, religious extremism has been going on for at least 2000 years and its latest incarnation like in the middle east happened before social media. We had 2 world wars before social media, election tampering? Did you forgot about the Gore vs Bush fiasco before social media? I could go on all day, what are you talking about?
This is the best we had had it on all those fronts today after social media. You are making no sense. The first "cross-disciplinary" change we need is more historians combating this type of unbelievable childish ignorance and lack of perspective of reality.