this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Speaking of utopias, have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates?
The idea was that people would be exposed to opposing viewpoints since everyone could communicate effortlessly with everyone. Information would also be easily available to everyone, which would make it clear who is right and who is wrong.
Yeah, that worked out perfectly…
I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.
Turns out, having the facts is only a partial solution. If people don’t want to take them as facts, you’re still going to have stupid debates about anything and everything all of the time.
We’ve fixed the information availability problem, but human psychology hasn’t changed one bit.
If everybody was fully exposed to the internet, a general consensus view on a topic would be eventually settled. The problem is that a lot of us live in walled gardens and the networks that be work to keep us in them
It has.
The fact that we're in others people's faces isn't a bug, unlike before we actually can confront each other and see their arguments, in the past we just made up what the other side believed.
This is a huge improvement, and we can disprove obvious lies to everyone except the truly stupid.
Yeah, growing pains, but still a massive improvement.
Totally agree. It’s an improvement, but there was a lot of hype around it, which lead to inflated expectations. As a matter of fact, nowadays we have similarly silly expectations about AI. History repeats itself…
Yeah, we thought it would solve everything.
It solved problems that uncovered a much deeper set of underlying problems... :)
The internet, like every other man-made thing, is a tool. And therefore its usage is determined by how people wield it. e.g. much of the anti-vaccine disinformation has been traced back to Russian troll farms - this is a known fact. The movement might have predated that, or it might not, but either way it undeniably received a massive boosting, especially in its formative stages, by such outside agitation.
At the same time the internet also provides tools to debunk such anti-"knowledge". Though like so many other things, it falls into an arms race where the disinformation can move quickly ahead to cover new ground, while getting properly factual information out to people takes more time, especially if refusing to use tools like rage-baiting that increases a message's ability to spread quickly.
Sadly, we just don't seem to have an immune system to attack sources of disinformation - at least not one that could ensure that all or even most people who can and will vote have what they need to be properly equipped to handle the continual onslaughts. Which makes me very much fear for the structure of democracy itself in our current age.
We are growing one.
Immunity comes from exposure, either to the infection, or to a vaccine.
Boomers see something on the internet they agree with, it's gospel truth, because it proves them right!
Younger generations are slightly more skeptical, and it gets better with time (filter bubbles notwithstanding, and as an artifact of people still wanting to believe).
We will get there.
Well, not everyone, the Russians and Chinese are just plain perma-fucked.
And in a couple of months, the USA could switch sides and outright join Russian aggression - or at least significantly scale back the current level of opposition - at which point the Ukranians too, plus ofc Taiwan, maybe Japan, and anyone else that China sets their sights on. Plus with the USA backing those Axis powers, the sky's the limit really.
Meanwhile companies like FaceBook or Reddit don't really seem to care, only chasing profits, and Twitter has flat-out joined the fight on the other side, by cancelling itself into becoming X.
These are dangerous tools that we are playing with - far more so than guns - b/c knowledge is power, after all.
I agree, but the only way humans grow is through experience, we just have to fight as hard as we can through this transition.
Once the boomers are finally out of our misery it might be a fair fight again.
bold of you to presume that American democracy will last that long
the kids have their own issues, including not knowing or being able to do much of anything, which is not entirely all or even mostly their own fault
I know and agree.
But we only adapt immunity from exposure, you can't force it, we never could.
Nobody respected the nuclear bomb until Hiroshima, that's an unfortunate tragedy, and we already forgot the horrors of war.
Humanity will have to teach itself again, lessons learned in blood can only ever be taught in the same language.
Oh I see - I was making assumptions about what you said and I apologize for that. You aren't saying "eVerY tHiNG iS goInG to BE FiNe", but rather, the USA could end, and yet... humanity will go on. (that might still be debatable as well...)
Yes, your thoughts exactly mirror my own: the only way is to move forward, and what will be will be - hopefully we can minimize the pain, and things WILL change regardless, and yet we still go on, having learned all the more from the doing.
Yeah, no, everything won't be fine.
We learned so much from WW2, and now the greatest generation are dead we've mostly forgotten those lessons.
Which means we'll have to learn them again :(
On top of that though, the world is literally different today than it was then. Some things changed EVERYTHING - agriculture, fire, medicine, even just knowing to wash our hands, etc. The advent of vaccines may have arguably altered our world in beautiful, wonderful, and potentially terrible ways - allowing children to have an extremely high chance to reach 80 years of age, as opposed to an enormous chance (way more than half) of dying prior to 5 years old.
And the information era radically altered our world. Except it also birthed the post-information, or perhaps we should call it the disinformation era. When companies such as Google were playing nice, we had free access to ALL of the information in the entire world. Whereas now... we don't, but as soon as they can figure it out, they'll have us sign up with a subscription to be able to "know things". What came before was always temporary, but we lied to ourselves telling one another or at least acting as if it would last forever.
My proof: https://hexbear.net/post/3820065. I know it's hexbear, but click it anyway. Hint: it's dis-information - active retelling of the story so as to ignore the facts and substitute their own presentation of their own... "alternative facts".
And for someone who isn't smart enough to know the difference, how can they tell the difference? WE heard the horrific screams of the police officer as they were brutally murdered. We know of the other ones who died, including one who later committed suicide. We have empathy for their families. We saw the hearings. We heard the testimony, of the officers. We have seen the people involved admit their actions, and some apologized.
Or, you know, iT wAs PEacEfUlL, "it was hilarious and looked like tailgating gone wrong after too much booze", or as one commenter said "I hope it happens again" (11 upvotes as of now).
So... WILL we learn the lessons that we would need to in order to survive? I am not so certain myself. But maybe! Either way, we indeed will HAVE to, if there is to be any hope of the survival of our current way of life IMHO.
Confirmation bias is one of those special features of the human mind, that don’t always help. It’s like a mental shortcut that can be useful, but the modern world isn’t the kind of place where the mind of hunter gatherer is at its best.
Yeah, but that's the point of education, teaching you that your intuition isn't always right, and that's OK.
Whats devastating is when you combine religion, which says 'either I'm the chosen of God and therefore if he loves me I'm perfect and can never do wrong' with modern complexity.
I know so many people who think being wrong about anything is the end of the world, so they double and quadruple down and can never learn, they get violently defensive if you suggest they're wrong about the smallest thing.
College is about repeated exposure to being wrong, and growing from it.
Turns out it wasn't a lack of information accessibility keeping people stupid.
The internet has proven that the majority of the population doesn't want to think for themselves. That part of the population wants to be told what to think so they can fit into a group and feel better than some other group because we are social animals and that tended to work out for the vast majority of humanity's existence.
This includes people who do positive things to fit in too, and I don't think free thinkers are special, they are just not in the majority.
That’s basically how innate tribalism manifests in a modern society. That used to be a killer feature to have in a human brain when you’re mostly surrounded by predators and wilderness. Being part of your local in-group was a matter of life and death, so tribalism wasn’t really optional.
Someday soon I'm sure we'll get that paperless office.
This one I've seen pretty darn realized. My last "in office" job was more than 5 years ago, but while there were printers available they were not used often. Nobody would hand you a piece of paper with any exception you'd have to keep it safe or for any period of time, and even then you'd also have a digital copy sent to you. Then and now, I still keep an notepad, but its only for things I need to remember for less than 24 hours or that get entered electronically very shortly after.
This was a fortune 100 company too, not some Mom-and-pop office.
My office is paperless, but we're a tech startup.
My office is paperless and we’re a staid finance company.
I still have some papers around, but I don’t really need any and of them. If they all burned tomorrow, my work wouldn’t be affected in any way.
I can't remember when I've last needed paper in an office setting. I doubt I have a printer set up on my work computers. Don't even need to sign anything or pass contracts or doctor's notes around.
Notebooks or hand drawn diagrams and things exist if you want them, of course.
YMMV.
Who ever said this about the internet?
On the alt.* newsgroups, long before the average non-techie started having “internet” access through prodigy or aol or genie or whatever, it was plain to see this would be nothing but arguments between strangers.
I think that was in documentary about Darpa net and how it evolved into the early internet. It contained interviews of some of the early pioneers and they had interesting stories to tell about what the atmosphere was at the time. So, that was around the time when they were still developing the communication protocols and hardware needed for running a large network. What we think of as the web, didn’t even exist back then.
I don't know why anyone would ever think that.
People are always going to have differing opinions.
I was one of those people. I still maintain hope, but the fear of what the algorithms will do outweighs that hope some days.
The thinking was that people's core opinions are formed while they are young. They are mostly inherited from your family and society around you, so that information bubbles are formed early that are hard to break out of.
I thought that if people were exposed to multiple cultures and ideas from a young age through the Internet, they would understand them better -- not just as foreign concepts told to them through a thick lens of bias from their parents and teachers.
However, I failed to predict the opposite powers. First were the echo chambers that formed, strengthening the deepest dark sides of humanity that, before, were kept locked away in basements lacking anyone with whom to discuss and provide validity. Then the corpos and MBAs figured out they could psychology game us all with algorithms. They didn't necessarily know at first that the negative content would be the best for driving engagement; but they didn't care either.
So right now I think the bad is outweighing the good. But I don't think it has to stay this way forever.
I disagree!
As you might remember, it used to be called "information superhighway." As it turns out, not only does it make information flow faster from A to B, it also divides people that lie to either side of the road, in a metaphorical sense.
Required reading See especially figure 3b. TLDR: Increased information access and increased connections lead to more echo chambers.
It is also a bullshit highway, and bullshit can travel faster since it isn't held back by understanding, logic, or even thought.
Hmm… That’s an interesting result. Makes sense too. When more and more people have access to the internet, they can form more and more specialized niche groups with each other. Just in Reddit alone, there’s already a sub for anything you can think of and also many things you would never think of in a million years.
Yes. Sounding. 😬
There are lots of places like that. So many, that the number of people randomly visiting them and coming back feeling unwell was not insignificant. That’s why r/eyeBleach was invented. If you need a place like this, it really tells you something about the kinds of subs people never thought would exist.