> social media ... organized political power structure
It's not just social media and it is somewhat disingenuous to dismiss the idea that finance, specially specially international finance, does not have (some form of) power [that actually trumps and transcends political power].
This is a somewhat interesting film that I was watching the other day. It's mere existence addresses the first bit -- that perception is certainly not limited to "social media". And of course the film itself is about a super secret gathering of G7 ministers where they struggle with the decision to put in place some (undisclosed) policy change that they all know will have very drastic consequences for the global average joe.
> I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
The politicians want you to think that, but they are beholden to public opinion and follow the herd. There's a reason that powerful actors spend many resources on manipulating social media.
>More information has been flowing, circumventing traditional media, political and cultural establishments. But the result hasn’t been more democracy, stronger communities or a world that’s closer together. Countries with weaker social institutions felt the effects of social media most violently and immediately.
More information has made more people realize how corrupt and incestuous many powerful institutions are, and they are rebelling against them.
> It discounts without comment the possibility that the pre-internet style of governance had substantive problems which the working class didn't like (e.g. globalization leading to a race to the bottom in manufacturing wages).
It's there between the lines: the author mentions the power of the big companies in the 20th century to shape the narrative through mass media and a lack of proper information among the public, and how that power is now crumbling and how the narrative is being democratized.
Basically, it boils down to mutual knowledge, and large shifts in that causes power-shifts in society.
> I think many (most?) people people are aware at some
> level of the media manipulation of populations using
> crude psychological ploys, the hegemony of the big banks
> and multinationals and the hidden agendas of so-called
> benevolent nation states and governments.
I think everyone acts in their own self interest, and trying to gussy it up as a conspiracy is pretty counter-productive.
If you take any kind of historical perspective, then the ability of the rich and powerful to control the proletariat or bend the world to their will is at an all time low. I welcome any research or sensible citation that counters that, because to me it seems prima facie, and 2 minutes Googling suggests we live in a more democratic world than at any time in history.
US special interest groups are still worrying, as is their ability to influence the foreign policy of the world's biggest military force, but surely they're more worrying because we know more about how they work than ever, and there's considerably more transparency? Arguably the big let-down of the Obama presidency was his inability to work effectively within the system he was part of (as, say, a contrast to Bill Clinton). Labour organizations / Unions unambiguously count as special interest groups, which is sort of ironic.
Anywho, your real point was:
> More interesting is what we (can?, should?) do about it?
I think you can get involved with good faith technological and political movements that want to increase transparency. In no particular order, and with no particular claim to exhaustiveness, I am impressed by:
Are any of the above perfect? Of course not. Are they all focussed on making the world / their country a better place? I think the answer is unambiguously yes.
> 1) The corporatization of social media is a big factor.
Yep. There was a time when I trusted internet/social media reviews because they weren't bought and paid for access media. But now, it's clear that they are also bought and paid for. They are now invited to press screenings and follow disney rules on release of spoiler reviews. Not only influencers but entire social media platforms are now arms of corporate PR.
> 2) Everything has become political
It's always been political. The only difference now is that ordinary people have a way of voicing their opinions. Hollywood, media, film critics, best sellers list, award shows, etc are all political propaganda. Always have been.
The general state of the global economy, late-stage capitalism fucking everyone who isn't a literal millionaire over, climate change, general political instability, the mentioned rise of authoritarianism, etc. All of those are vastly more influential than "social media, enshittification thereof".
“ Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.”
...
“ The film’s first chapter makes it
sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.”
> It is so easy to paint social media as the bad guy, when meanwhile it has been responsible for some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring
No. Oppression, absence of freedom of speech and basic human rights, and the people who decided to not put up with this crap anymore is what was responsible for the Arab Spring.
Saying social media was responsible for that is like saying the football is what helped the team to win the superbowl and not the team effort (ok ok, it may have been the case in 2015 ha!)
> Why would the elites try to reign in social media?
To better control it?
> I'd want them revealing all the intimate details of their life, so I can better manipulate them with targted advertising.
Yes. As long as they control the targeting and advertising.
> You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the recent uptick in articles about social media's negative effects.
It's not a conspiracy. It's reality. It's what happened with every communication medium. Print, Radio, Film, TV and now the internet. To believe otherwise is the real conspiracy.
> It's called a news cycle.
It doesn't span years.
> Remember when lead was discovered in Flint, MI's water supply? And then there was an uptick in stories about lead poisoning?
Crazy how quickly that downed down huh?
That the elites want to control the means of communication is standard policy for thousands of years. And it spans all nations. The chinese elite, russian elite, saudi elite, the european elites, etc all want to control communication. Our elites aren't different. Societies, like humans, have similar organs.
> the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully.
I think, what most people are missing, is that Democratic (the free world) governments have lost control of the narrative. It's not that there wasn't corruption before, but people trusted the government more back in the day. Before the immersion of social media, information moved slowly. There wasn't free channels to transfer information (the Media controlled what can get out) and people couldn't take high-quality photos, videos and live stream to their fellow citizens.
This changed now. This means the government and politicians can't control the narrative anymore (ie: almost all politicians are corrupt now!). This is doubly worse since young people disproportionately use social media. TV is still watched, but only by seniors. They'll be gone soon and the politicians will have to rule a ruly population.
The next decade is going to be quite challenging to Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Privacy, Freedom of Movements and all freedoms and liberties really. Many of the liberties the West population take for granted are quite expensive; you better be ready for this change.
>People in the West don't understand how much of an advantage social media has been in countries where media was always controlled by corrupt businessmen or politicians.
You severely overestimate the independence and faux-organic nature of "western" social media. Every last aspect of it is controlled by "corrupt businessmen or politicians".
If you're in "the east", wishing for a system like in "the west", be careful of what you hope for and be cautious of what you actually build.
> I don't think this is entirely new. One thing that confuses people is that social media (ie twitter) is all shared, so if a scandal happens anywhere you see it.
I kind of think it's the exact opposite. We all have our own individual views of reality and are only able to see an extremely small subset of what's going on. Whereas before you were mainly reached by broadcast media that others would see as well, now you and the person next to you might have an entirely different feed of information coming in. To me it's not surprising at all that the author doesn't know "all the things going on". Really I think the author should consider the opposite: this is probably just an example of a million similar things that everyone should know about, but that he does not.
> The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more.
This is by design.
Before social media, to have your voice heard you needed to get help from either: a billionaire-owned TV Station or Newspaper or the State Sponsored Approved truth Station (in this case, the BBC but CBC and whatever official news network the party maintains in your local dictatorship will do).
Now, all you have to do is simply post it online on a property owned by some billionaire who doesn't really care (as long as it's legal he'll pocket the add revenue) in faraway California. You can guess who's mad about loosing all that control over who gets to be in the news and who doesn't...
> In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened
I completely disagree.
Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.
But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.
>I really think people over emphasize the power that social media sites have.
You say, in the midst of a discussion amongst an international userbase on the political ramifications of a policy decision.
Let's be real about this. Social media, when you really look at it, propagates signal that makes remote events local in terms of sphere of influence. Any content can touch anyone, the globe over assuming an internet connection.
Frankly, and I apologize if this is out of turn, but I think you underestimate the power behind choosing what conversations won't take place.
Just look at the big difference that a U.S. Senate Majority leader can have in terms of the realistic chance of something being discussed.
Never, ever, underestimate the power of negation or deprioritization. In fact, it's a little funny, because being in the position to make those decisions at all is really the common definition of power/authority.
> Seems to me there is a lot of manufactured dissent to fracture or further curb political lines. making sides about every single issue.
yes, I think this is fair assessment.
however, democracy - and liberal society - encourages this. Social media is only an accelerant to practices which have already present - the only difference is that narrative formation itself has been democratised and so can now be more effectively contested. In perverse way, this is kind of another characteristic of democratic systems.
It could be that what we have today is the natural evolution of democratic systems, this is what it looks like when we democratize the means of mass communication. If we are not happy with this, then we need to reform the political system to encourage the outcomes we prefer. Suppressing the information is the other option, which the author implicitly endorses
>>Instead we got a lot of tech bro billionaires building social networks that have poisoned discourse and destroyed democracies around the world.
Social networks have provided people with a vast social graph that allows them to assess a vast number of people's credibility, interests, etc, which enables a whole slew of business and social relationships to exist that otherwise could not, everything from personalized cup-cake vendors, to children's school supplies vendors, to clubs for people interested in birdwatching.
All of these kinds of social connections are far easier to create when there's a ready social graph to tap into. But as usual, people take for granted what the prevailing technology provides, and focus only on the harm.
> I wonder how long it will be before the common person understands that social media has become mass scale social engineering
Never. Most people has no interest in directing their life. They want pre-made solutions to their day to day problems. They don't analyze the news or any kind of information given to them.
If they did, lying again and again and using the same campaign schemes again and again would not work for politicians.
But it does. It always has.
When you see an uproar, it's never because somebody does something bad. It's because either:
- somebody has been badly hurt;
- some kind of important symbol has been badly hurt.
It's an emotional response. No thoughts into that.
It's not just social media and it is somewhat disingenuous to dismiss the idea that finance, specially specially international finance, does not have (some form of) power [that actually trumps and transcends political power].
This is a somewhat interesting film that I was watching the other day. It's mere existence addresses the first bit -- that perception is certainly not limited to "social media". And of course the film itself is about a super secret gathering of G7 ministers where they struggle with the decision to put in place some (undisclosed) policy change that they all know will have very drastic consequences for the global average joe.
The Confessions (2016): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4647784
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