America’s Liberal Social Climate and Trends: Change in 283 General Variables
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https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/326747189/nfab061...
Computer use has actually declined since ~ 2013?! Wow. That's actually kind of sad.
These differences of course are superficial and your phone could be used as a computer. It’s an arbitrary category like most categorizations that we make. I think the important distinction is that smart devices are largely content consumption devices vs computers being relegated to content creation. For example, would you say that someone who’s used a SmartTV has used a computer just because the specs are largely the same?
I think you should fully expect computer use to decline over time because most people consume rather than create content.
[1] I find the overlap goes the other way: I'm using a laptop to write this, but I could have done so with my phone. Laptops and desktops are being used like smartphones.
As I said, the categorization is completely arbitrary and depends on how you choose to draw the lines, but neither categorization is right/wrong.
In other words, nitpicking pedantry, but nothing that should meaningfully shift the overall numbers. Same reason that you wouldn’t expect to include SmartTVs on this even though they’re all running Android.
So, it's more of the same, computer use is dwindling and so is general computer literacy. e.g. Ask what a file is, or a directory and majority of iphone users have no idea! Permissions too!
I find it so exciting, I read about this a while back, e.g. 2015, for user experiences and literacy and back then were reports that the entry curve for computers has been removed via cell phones (iphones, androids, e.g. general smartphones.) that daily computing difficulties do not present themselves as they used too (and they still exist.) from virus, malware, to sorting files, organization, search, and general software competency like excel and such.
But ask about social media apps and how they work - and there you go (which, ironically suffer the same issues on purpose, how do you sort information, organize new content or higher fruitful content, etc.)
There's also the fun part of addiction and dopamine feedback loops, but I'm getting a bit off the track here. :)
As someone that grew up with Win 95, this is a revolution in the way computing works. In the era I entered into computing, to use a computer really did often require at least a little knowledge of DOS or the commandline. Absolutely it required you to know how files and folders worked.
Viruses were super common and super easy to catch as we started entering the internet era. So part of correctly operating a computer involved picking and maintaining the right AV software.
That's a barrier that has kept people out of computing in general.
Now, everyone's grandma is on facebook (for better or worse). Everyone knows how to use a search engine. Even those that don't know how to use a search engine, know how to do "Siri: What is the capital of Kansas?". Knowledge is hyper accessible. (This also exposes new epistemological issues. How can we verify something is true when it requires hours of research, even with the internet?)
It is not a benefit, but just the realization curve that the more you make things easy, it can appear to be a step forward but instead become many steps back.
The whole reason I entered into this field, was because I could not get my computer to work, or that I didn't understand it - probably both, and it drove me to overcome those barriers. I was of course a kid, and the computer itself has entertained me and gave me decision paths that I would've never known possible without it.
It really is sad, those experiences seem gone to the sands of time and if a device doesn't work properly, then it's not per se the customer or audience, but an user experience flaw.
I have bad news for you if you think normal computer users were mostly good at understanding or explaining these things in the 90s or 2000s or whatever.
That said, I think the the term 'computer literate' is much less defined than 'literate', so using the term is a good way to start an argument.
My experience has been that outside of enthusiast or professional tech circles, and those directly adjacent, knowing stuff like where to expect a USB disk to appear when it's plugged in, or that you can cut/copy/paste files, what you can and can't drag-n-drop, where to expect common actions to show up in menus, the concept of UI focus and how it basically works in practice, and so on, places you in the (lower end of) top-tier of computer users, and pretty much always has. People, in general, have never understood how to use a computer well. We've had the term "power user" for folks who halfway know how to use a computer for decades now, because even most people who work with a desktop every day do not know that, and it's not like that was different pre-smartphone.
Either simple, ordinary GUI computer use is actually much harder than we (on a site like this) think, or the UIs and metaphors we use are flat-out awful and need to be re-thought from the ground up (what might that look like? Well, iOS has tried...). Or some combination of the two.
[EDIT] My point about the definition of "computer literate" hardly mattering is that I think you have to stretch it so far that it becomes useless before you manage to capture most computer users, since at least when they became common in offices. You have to put the bar practically on the floor before most users will pass it. I don't (entirely) blame users for that, to be clear, and think it has a lot to do with fundamental mistakes in how our profession and industry build & present UIs to ordinary folks who don't want to devote half their brain to understanding how computers work. It has very little to do with iPhones.
If you strip away that residue I would suspect that the number of true computer literate people has increased steadily since the PC revolution.
As such, I think computer literacy has probably dropped over the last 9 years as fewer people get started. Which in general isn’t a bad thing compare the number of people who know how to do even basic car repair in 2022 vs 1960.
Phones "just work" but phone screens are too small and touch keyboards too imprecise to do any long-form typing on it. I think the adoption of the phone as the most popular interface for the web has made the quality of software interfaces decline, and has made things like forums less mainstream, both of which are a shame.
> Conspicuously missing from the top of the list are several issues central to political polarization and partisan sorting (Baldassarri and Park 2020). Abortion ranked 237th overall, gun ownership ranked 124th, gun regulation 251st, help for the poor 167th and 229th (two forms of the question), and health care ranked 149th, 150th, and 227th (asked three ways). Their low rankings are not an artifact. Change and conflict are separate. Future research will have to decide if lack of change promotes conflict or conflict stunts change, but from these results we can say that the liberal drift of Americans’ identities and attitudes, especially as reflected in cohort replacement, left several hot issues unmoved.
It's all falling apart and I feel like democrats have been asking for it and continue to do so.
The idea that public prosecutors won't prosecute misdemeanors and stealing a bunch of stuff is a misdemeanor and so theft is essentially legal would sound mad to most - if we knew. But most people haven't updated on the American left going crazy over the last ten years and mostly just live in an old world where the left-aligned media was less openly partisan and more sane, professional and trustworthy.
Both Red Team and Blue Team are dissatisfied with increases in crime, with more homelessness, etc.
Red Team has a narrative that policing has softened, that district attorney's offices have stopped prosecuting street crimes or let people out too early, that we have lost order.
Blue Team has a narrative that these crimes and homelessness problems need to be addressed through social safety nets, fixing income inequality or housing scarcity, etc. Basically focus on upstream changes rather than the street-level stuff. And also has a separate concern about police brutality or corruption.
A rational actor can likely see that there are merits to all of the above concerns and ideas. A rational actor could perhaps find a pragmatic answer that attempts to solve for all of these concerns, expresses empathy for each of these intersecting problems, and builds consensus.
But we are just full tribal, anti-working-across-the-aisle, full argue against strawmen versions of the other tribe, so that can't happen anymore.
Combine our current lack of the principle of charity with our two party system and we're fucked.
when we break out of such dichotomies, we realize that people hold all sorts of views, and each and every person is a bundle of contradictions, pride, and ambition, all mixing together in strange and unpredictable ways to form our sociopolitical environment. there is literally no true 'liberal' or 'conservative' out in the world. these are constructed poles of a false dichotomy.
and as such, this is junk food for people who want to believe they're better/smarter/nicer/whateverer than those 'other' people, and for the powerful, this kind of dichotomization collapses complexity to simplify their work of holding and expanding power, principally as a distraction from those machinations.
As a non-supernatural tarot practitioner, binary political labels are objectively worse than tarot. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I came to tarot by way of procedural narrative generation. In that vein, tarot is a fantastic way of providing a space to temporarily reframe psycho-social conflict and construct compelling narratives within a consistent framework of narrative-semiotic objects.
I'm more than willing to admit this is likely a minority opinion, but it has helped me in re-examining things like perceived intentions, what is the true conflict, how would I feel about particular outcomes in a way that checks my gut instinct to reactively reach for the most convenient answer or one that makes me feel the best.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/326747190/nfab061...
You are also seeing backlash to Bill Clinton and his attempts at healthcare reform (this would come again during Barak Obama's term and the rise of Tea-party style conservatism against health-care reform and the ensuing spiral into present day conservatism).
I do not see it as having to do with healthcare reform, but rather having to do with the wealth transfer necessary to facilitate the healthcare reform. For decades, the progress of certain socioeconomic classes had stalled, even by the 90s. Those classes could see those above them pulling away, but at least they had the comfort of knowing they were not at the bottom.
However, the wealth redistribution required for healthcare reform would bring those below them up to their level, or at least remove the veneer of not being near the bottom and no longer being in the same world as those making gains, which is apparently not a preferable situation.
In summary, I am pointing to the increasing wealth/income gap and relative movement of various socioeconomic tribes, perhaps inevitable due to technology and the consequences of its economies of scale. As long as the pie is getting bigger, and everyone is getting a bigger slice proportional to the size of their original slice, there is less strife (except at the bottom). Once the sizes of the slices start moving down relative to others’, there starts to be a retreat to tribal affiliations to fight against it.
And Rush Limbaugh's syndication on even FM stations plus the launch of Fox News in the mid 90s helped get that national message across.
Edit: requesting Desktop site from mobile works. I guess they redirect mobile devices to a 403 screen? That is an interesting design decision...
As education increasingly becomes the political dividing line in America, liberal politics are where the valuable ad dollars are.
Edit: upon reflection, I would be remiss to not also advance the fact that the mainstream media is inescapably caught up within Twitter and it’s discourse. As much as Twitter “is not real life” and it is not representative of Americans views as a whole, it is representative of an outsized fraction of elite media attention.
Tbh I don’t really know what your point is.
Curious to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250026
As for my opinions on what the hacker news community believes. We know that certain demographics skew certain ways politically, empirically. It’s not surprising given the demographics of HN that certain beliefs are predominant here. That has little to do with money, at least not in the way it does for media products.
Advertisers are picked and closely vetted.
(Using liberal in the American sense here)
The forefront of culture is what's new and exciting. You have to actually be willing to try it out though. It's inherently not conservative.
Edit: the sibling's post about ad dollars is a fantastic point as well.
If that doesn't sound incorrect to you then I think it's down to the market. If the market willed the conservative voices to have a larger audience the market would so deliver. And if everyone dislikes market driven news sources then how the heck did we ever manage to defund NPR and similar programs?
Wouldn't there be a bias on what ads get accepted in general? Especially when Facebook is largely human monitored and Google caters marketing to populous beliefs, with AI augmenting this effect?
I find this to be a rather bizarre statement. While internally, both companies (as well as the other tech companies) are populated with highly educated employees, who tend to lean liberal, their public corporate behavior is neither particularly liberal or conservative until they are publicly embarrassed.
(Facebook and Twitter were an important component of Trump's election campaign in both runs, and at least the former is a big part of the COVID-denialism movement, right?)
1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
2 - https://www.wired.com/story/document-reveals-more-google-ant...
Liberals in 2022 are more like conservatives in 1970/1980 when it comes to nudity, community and free speech.
At a really basic level I think it's important to remember that corporations are not people (not just in the citizens united manner) - anthropomorphizing them is dangerous since (except when wholly controlled by a single unimpeachable entity like a founder or single person business) their actions are dictated by consensus and consensus decision making is incompatible with human morality.
Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!
The "liberal" party voted for the most centrist choice in their primary, and America picked him as their president. Americans today see Biden as more moderate than Obama, not more liberal [0]. I don't see how one can make the case America is getting more liberal when even the liberal party isn't.
The media is also absolutely not largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. Nationally, Fox News dominates the ratings and had the top 3 rated cable news shows last year [1]. That doesn't even touch on SBG's well documented reach in key markets or conservative talk radio (which you can also find all over the top of the ratings lists [4]).
As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.
It's hard to take such a claim at face value. On the one hand, conservatives like to play the victim against an undefined boogeyman, like we see here. On the other, conservatives are the ones wielding actual political power to enforce ideology through censoring educators and banning books [2], [3].
0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/100-days-american...
1 - https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/top-cable-news-shows-of-2021...
2 - https://www.businessinsider.com/virginia-school-board-member...
3 - https://www.wfft.com/news/education/indiana-teachers-push-ba...
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...
After the American Civil War, slavery became illegal. After WWII, antisemitism became verboten. After the Civil Rights movement, open racism had to be suppressed. After the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality entered the public sphere. Each of those steps represented a loss to conservatism. But they were not caused by some liberal conspiracy, rather the "better natures" of people (most people really do believe in things like fairness and justice, at least in the abstract) were forced to confront behaviors that were just conservatively accepted.
Showing law enforcement using firehoses, batons, and dogs on people seeking to register to vote is not inherently liberal or conservative. The response, however, was liberal.
Yeah, NPR and CNN exist, but none of them draw near the audience of their conservative counterparts do.
It would be more accurate to say that conservative media is highly concentrated while liberal media tends to be much more diverse, but draws far fewer people.