Facebook Makes Us Know Too Much About Each Other
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Take away the human aspect and look only at tweets or shares or headlines, and you don’t have that magical ability that humans have to connect with each other in spite of tribal division.
But remove the physical proximity and the vitriol often re-animates.
As we have pretty strong social expectations for how people behave at meals.
Cars are an interesting in-between, where we're just barely removed from being in-person and as a result we tend to act far more rudely and dangerously than we would to someone's face.
Put someone in an environment where social norms favor civility and respect, and they will generally become more civil and respectful over time. Put them in an environment where social norms favor tribalism and vitriol, and they will tend to become more tribal and vitriolic over time.
That said, I think we should be cautious about nostalgia for how things worked before the Internet. 30 years ago, people in socioeconomically homogenous communities might have been adept at being civil to and empathizing with their neighbors, but they perhaps also had a lot less opportunity to become aware of what was going on outside their bubbles.
It is common these days for people to interpret the self-management people perform as a type of filtering (or "hiding" in your words). I find the cynicism in this viewpoint to be distasteful, when equally one could interpret the same behavior much more favorably.
When someone, for example, tidies their apartment because they anticipate a guest, they are engaging in exactly the same thing. But this is widely considered a good thing. The connections one anticipates have caused one to "brush up". The same thing is true for outspoken opinions. We aren't just "real" creatures with disgusting opinions walking around wearing "fake" masks to hide them.
The treatment of a person is different depending on which lens you opt for. On the one hand, you view society as a collection of people who ought to be unmasked, for their true identity to be uncovered and scorned appropriately. On the other, you view society as a collection of people with a fluid set of opinions that are molded by the company they are with. The unspoken idea becomes the forgotten, abandoned idea.
This is more like having kidnapped people in your house and hiding them so when someone comes over for dinner, no one can see them. I'm not morally opposed to a cluttered counter.
But I think avoiding political conversations is best described by what I've seen called "social cooling" - I don't really care about litigating morality with family at Thanksgiving. We may have fundamental differences in our interpretation of reality and human behavior, but that doesn't make one of us an actual criminal.
“Well, yes…”
“What have I said about talking about politics with people I love?”
“That you don’t.”
(Looking very forward to a frank conversation with my dad about his apparent need to keep a loaded handgun in his nightstand before we bring our toddler to visit, by which I mean, “actively dreading”)
I think the difference in our positions is that you think people are born with a rigid, unchangeable "real" opinion, and I think opinions change according to the person's company.
Online media attempt to amplify these differences to the point of rage because there's money it in.
> Only the loudest, rudest, dumbest, most extreme opinions
I'd add the voice of rich people to this list.
To customize twitter: https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1428712897136533510
I heard people using lists, but I have not explored.
I would even suggest unfollowing everyone on your list but if to many people did that it would probably cause Twitter to make huge changes because their whole ecosystem seems to be about "Followers" & "Likes" & "Retweets". Whatever content can generate that. In fact here's a list of abused tweets in the tech world - https://twitter.com/jamonholmgren/status/1423036069189099520
A big part of the idea of twitter is to curate who you follow rather than use it to see what the lowest common denominator is interested in.
Every social media site that allows connection to an essentially infinite number of people will demand curation.
As Hannah Arendt wrote in her notebook "Amor mundi - warum ist es so schwer, die Welt zu lieben?"
I just really get on in short sprints to post my own words and if there is an emerging crisis, I can hopefully search for independent (non commercial and non-partisan) comments about the issue through carefully tailored keywords.
Social media betrays and manipulates us by invalidating an removing options that work in controlling what we see on it. They start out useful, but slowly degrade once they go public.
They think twitter is the paramount of humans' open discussion, democratize/revolutionize politics & finance or something.
These people communicate not like they are having a discussion with someone else. They don't just post a link and ask, "can you believe what happened here?"
Instead they post the link and tell you what you should think about it. It isn't a conversation. It isn't even just half the conversation. They are lecturing. It's a behavior that wouldn't happen in person, and if it didn't that person would just be avoided.
When I identified this style of post and blocked these people, the only thing really left that annoys is the clickbait ads.
In short, treat the people on the other side of your messages like friends you are speaking to, not as an audience you are educating on the proper way of doing thinking.
This, IMO, has been the bane of online forums of all kind. People talk like they're pundits on a discussion panel - they make points for the people watching, not for each other.
My family's pretty conservative. In 2018, my brother's best friend from high school ran for political office as a democrat and won.
Every Christmas, my mom bakes cookies and takes them to family friends. She had to look past all the headlines, politics, political disagreements, and that guy is everything FOX News told her to hate, to remember she likes the guy and his family.
It's hard enough to look past disagreements normally; it's even harder when your people are telling you that should you hate this guy you've known for 20 years.
On one hand, I'm very encouraged that, when faced with this choice, people can cut through the divisions and look at the person. On the other hand, this doesn't scale, and he's still dead to my dad.
There's far more nuance to the discussions regarding, say, border security, entitlement spending, immigration reform, etc beyond accusations of racism and xenophobia. It's quite possible for two people to look at the same set of data and come to different conclusions because of differing value systems, priorities, risk tolerance, etc.
Maybe part of the problem is this insistence that our platforms are justified in censoring opinions because of this false belief that if two people differ in political opinion, one side must be mislead by "misinformation".
People can, of course, legitimately be found in all sorts of positions on the liberal/left leaning <—> conservative/right leaning spectrum (Jonathan Haidt has some interesting things to say on this [1]).
But from this side of the Atlantic it looks rather as if Trump's Republican party strongly prioritises getting and keeping power over basic democratic principles [2]. I find that very worrying, and I also find I can only really give two explanations for people supporting it: either "they're bad people" or "they're misinformed". I prefer to think that in most cases it's the latter.
[1] e.g. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
[2] e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/republ...
Maybe they vote for (what they perceive to be) a lesser evil. Like, they know that it's not okay. But they think the alternative is even less okay.
I am not agreeing with them here. Just pointing out that when we talk about our support for groups containing bad people, we excuse it like "a few bad apples". But when we see other people supporting groups containing bad people, we are likely to see it as unambiguous support for those bad people.
Our party's glass is half-full and we keep hoping it gets even fuller; their party's glass is half-empty, how could they vote for it?
Only if your definition of "trump's republican party" is excessively reductionist. Which speaks to my point - your point of view lacks nuance, likely because the guardian (and any of the outlets unilaterally labeled as "reliable/authoritative", enforced by tech censorship) is not an unbiased source on the matter. Particularly when they are still referring to jan 6th as some coordinated "attack" (sans guns?) rather than a riot.
When all right leaning sources have been preemptively defined as unreliable then naturally the only possibility is that anyone right of center is misinformed; but this is a toxic manufactured consensus which is at odds with the views and values of about half the country. Indeed you would think that this half is merely some crazed racist minority if your views on the US are informed by a steady stream of blatantly agendad left leaning sources. The logic is effectively circular, and left leaning journalistic interpretations are being paraded as objective facts. Jan 6th is an excellent example.
It's obviously difficult to be certain of which information is reliable and which information is not. In my view, the discourse has shifted rightwards such that there aren't any longer any genuinely left-leaning sources in the mainstream media. The Guardian, the NYT, CNN and suchlike all look solidly centrist to me.
The Guardian piece I linked is by an academic, so I have a bit more faith than usual that it will be an intelligent and independent viewpoint. But that Guardian piece is not the only thing I'm relying on, and the events of 6 January are not the only thing I'm relying on either.
In particular, there appears to be gerrymandering, voter suppression, and worse on the Republican side [1]. I'm not aware of Democratic attempts to undermine the democratic system to any similar degree, but perhaps you can point me to some?
[1] e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...
In fact I would challenge you to find a single topic that was reported on differently by any of those sources. The fact that our primary media outlets consistently report nearly identical information and spin on every story is a glaring indication of political bias. And apparently it is enough to convince millions of viewers that these issues are cut and dry; that republicans are obviously evil, are the only ones engaged in gerrymandering, that the left would never support authoritarian pursuits of power, etc.
I could link you dozens of articles, but I would be downvoted for posting "right wing propaganda". Meanwhile approximately 70MM people voted for Trump a second time, but the fact that none of our major outlets (even Fox was not friendly to trump) represent the views of these people is fine, because they're all ignorant, racist rednecks, right?
And why would they, when none of his speeches, actions, or policies ever accomplished anything positive for anyone other than his hardcore rightwing base? That's not bias, it's just calling a spade a spade.
Don't you understand that getting your news exclusively from biased sources would make it falsely seem as though they are giving you the whole picture so long as you simply do not seek out alternative perspectives?
Do you genuinely believe that right leaning sources can only report positively on Republicans if they print lies?
I would ask you the same question. Are you so arrogant to assume that the only reason I haven't come around to your way of thinking is because I merely haven't seen the same information that you have? That the only reason why someone wouldn't be a conservative is because they've been brainwashed by the big bad mainstream media?
Every time I have tried to dive into the Conservative-leaning mediasphere to make sure that there isn't some hidden truth I've been missing, I come away more certain than ever that that is not the case. And believe me, I've tried. Why do you assume that I haven't, simply because I still disagree with you?
You are not entitled to having your political beliefs validated by everyone you meet.
Certain Dem candidates also undermine the democratic process when they make false claims about voter suppression. For example "voter purges" are reported on as if they are voter suppression, but in fact they are routine list-maintenance carried out by state administrators to remove voters who have deceased or moved out of a jurisdiction. Stacy Abrams made unfounded claims that she lost due to some foul play / voter suppression, but this was not the case, she simply lost.
That said, undermining democracy is much more prevalent on the R side.
It’s a great service of Social media which exposes how awful humans are. How hateful, vengeful and violent seemingly normal people can be.
I think it’s a good thing that humans have fractured and awful people are separated from non awful people.
There is only harm towards nature and humans (mostly non awful/non aggressive humans) when there is lots of human collaboration.
Instead of de-carbonization, we need a technological and political decoupling of human beings. That’s the only hope for humanity and all the innocent flora and fauna of earth.
De-globalization is too far too late. We are on the no point of return from absolute and rapid annihilation of nature and humanity.
Maybe our very short history of treating people equally, offering grace to those who fall short, and working towards consensus, is worth salvaging. The old days of tribalism were more horrific than we can imagine.
But it’s a good framing beyond that too. You see vacation pictures posted by a friend you haven’t talked to in five years, so you feel connected. You feel connected to tons of people you haven’t actually talked to in ages.
When I left social media, the biggest change I found was that I’d actually directly contact friends more. I had to now! Less pub-sub and more one on one interaction. You trade superficially knowing more about each other without effort for actually knowing more about each other with effort.
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Opinion | Facebook Makes Us Know Too Much About Each Other - The New York Times
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> In 2017, Deb Roy, director of the M.I.T. Center for Constructive Communication and former chief media scientist at Twitter, held informal meetings in small towns to talk to people about social media. Several times, people told him they’d given up speaking to neighbors or others in town after seeing them express their opinions online.
People have said the verbal part is just a small percentage of real life communication, I wonder if just reading someone's thoughts in text and not actually having a conversation contributes to this. But I guess verbal conversations are very lossy and when someone writes it down, you get their clear thoughts, and that can be good or bad (e.g. if they reveal themselves to be deeply racist...).
While in real life you e.g. just never give your neighbour the occasion to talk about politics with you.
Read back what you wrote, then delete it.
It's hard to want to be friends with someone that might support the abolishment of something you like, or that supports something you should feel abolished (does it matter which?). It's still possible, but I've found that I eventually figure out where someone stands on something and gravitate away from them, even without social media. Ultimately one of the biggest problems is the total lack of civil discourse. If that was more prevalent, I think it would be easier to have friends with opposing views. Nowadays, people throw up their arms and accuse you of being X when they can't articulately argue a position. That gets tiring.
As the article mentions, in some cases, social media reveals the depths of someone's political positions, personal beliefs, or other that you might not have known. Is it worse to know those things, versus not know? Hard to say, but I personally like to have things in common with my friends. There are no easy answers here, so my personal solution was dumping most social media, like Facebook and Instagram. I hate Twitter, but find myself having to use it to keep up with news in the infosec community; even if the group on Twitter is an echo-chamber club that mostly uses their "status" in the community to influence on topics other than cyber (super annoying).
All I know is, my peace of mind seems to be much better without social media; I don't miss it at all.
[edit] spelling correction
They're the personal ones. People who don't believe gays should be allowed to be married by the state. People who don't believe women or minorities should be allowed to vote. People who believe all immigrants come here to kill/steal/crime whatever.
The difference is when it's an institution (private versus public schools for example), that's pretty easy to disagree over. One side does not believe the other is inherently evil and a 'lesser' person. When it's about individual rights, and an attack on you as a person, and your inherent rights as an individual, that is almost impossible to overcome.
I think you articulated it far better than me. Certain things I could hardly care what another person says or thinks on the matter. But on certain issues or rights if there's a fundamental disagreement, I find the opposing position not just in direct opposition, but in a way actively working to undermine my position. I can't be friends with someone when there's such a basic difference in values; if we don't agree on that, there might not be much else we agree on.
Lesson learned. Keep your mouth shut and let people think you're stupid, instead of opening it and confirming it.
now they feed you the Facebook select which claim is the choice cut but in actual fact is the left overs from yesterday's main...
perhaps it's not the information but the medium is transfer and the lack of engagement with purpose.
The hardiness of peoples beliefs are proof they aren’t being more polarized by online, they’re just looking to agree with others.
Next time somebody says they don’t care about privacy tell them that.
When we think we know everything about somebody, our mind is no longer curious about that person. We think we know everything about them and start making assumptions.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-foru...
Besides membership, FPF seems to be sustained though local advertising.
This is accurate of right wingers, but it skimps on an observation I've noticed. As polarization increases, liberals become more tolerant of their own extremists. Most Democrats I've known throughout my life owned guns, valued the principle of free speech, would never get caught putting down an entire class of people, etc yet all of these are common views to, in some way, argue against as a Democrat these days.
One could argue it's the popularity of progressivism and how it's cultural values are now eroding the average Democrats, but I'm not quite sold on that idea. My pet theory has been that "own the libs" builds tolerance for extreme views because they further agitate the right, so it was interesting to see them highlight the rights agitation with the left. For now, I'll stick to calling myself an independent until all of this blows over and we can go back to having beers instead of talking about politics and our "values" for entertainment.
That's like comparing a Democrat with Antifa.
I do think FB is pushing people to extremes. More precisely I think social media is pushing people to extremes, I find twitter a lot more antagonistic than FB actually, where people think they can 'destroy' their opponents in 280 characters or less. Reddit is a cesspool. We know, or we should know, that these sites are deliberately divisive . There are bad actors who want us to be really angry, all the time, because angry people are stupid.
It still is just the latest iteration. People used to gather in beer halls. People used to gather in churches. People used to have their social clubs and circles and had been able to carefully manipulate their environments so that people who disagreed with them lived and worked and went to school far, far away.
This anger doesn't go away if Facebook goes away. I'm not sure how to make it go away. I'd wish that people could take a step back and consider for a moment that maybe intelligent, decent people can disagree with them. Probably not.
Or - at least - they used to.
The matter I described earlier still applies too. When neighborhoods have been carefully and deliberately segregated, you don't run into much risk of seeing neighbors of a different religion and color at your fish fries.
Sybok: I've done nothing. This is who they are! Didn't you know that?
Kirk: No I didn't.
Sybok: Now learn something about yourself.
Kirk: No. I refuse!