Internet high five! I suspect they see information as power and as long as they gate keep it they seem to believe we'll keep coming back. All that behavior is doing for me is increasing my levels of distrust.
Or they're following a newsfeed algorithm that's determining their information-seeking proclivities for them. I honestly find that much more subtly disturbing and manipulatable than willful ignorance – people have ceded control over their information seeking behavior entirely.
While there is definitely an uptick in polarization, I think the more important and insidious trend is the increasing ubiquity of bullshit. We are flooded with information online, most of which is irrelevant or counterproductive to our interests. Needing to constantly wade through that in triage mode (with a judgmental attitude) has the general effect of wearing down people’s psyche and making them feel exhausted, anxious and on the edge. In that mindset, of course small things are going to set them off — but that is just the symptom, not the root cause. This is also a much harder problem to wrangle with because it is less specific. The causes of this problem are deeply embedded inside the incentives we have set up on the web over the last two decades — to challenge those will require answering some hard questions. At some level, people realize this (hence small efforts like the slow tech movement, digital detox, etc), but they are yet to find the right balance of convenience and sanity (for lack of a better word).
Internet mostly creates doubt. The first phase of brainwashing. Once the mind is confused and looking for answers, you need peer pressure and social reinforcement to create a sense of certainty around the radical new ideas you want to implant.
Great article. A couple things that crossed my mind...
Stress testing technology in the context of the worst moments in history might have illuminated what social scientists and propagandists have long known: that humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices.
Maybe the largest problem here is the appeal of popularity.
The effects of internet-brain used to be theoretical in my life. Over the past couple years, though, internet-brain has started claiming people near and dear to me. I have seen that reactionary propaganda, on social media, can persuade smart people whose personalities are not at all reactionary.
This has taught me that which, and how many, people share a message is more important than the actual content of the message. If enough of my family and friends are certain that sugar is a health-food, I'll likely come to believe it is, too.
Trust in institutions is falling because of political and economic upheaval, most notably through ever widening income inequality.
The internet popularized cynical narratives about the world that remind me of Noam Chomsky or Hunter S Thompson. Those narratives usually strike me as correct, but I'm mindful that it might just be the zeitgeist that makes them seem so.
I've recently started thinking about how much of this societal dysfunction is real, how much is hype, and how much is real but real as a result of hype (a vicious spiral of dysfunction). When we talk about the effect of the internet on public consciousness, it's easy to forget that the internet has warped our own consciousness, too.
It never ceases to amaze me, that despite the pattern of behaviour, people continue to be willing to consider that Google/FAANGs/politicians/etc are just a bit thick and don't get it.
(Not a dig incidentally, just that at some point the pattern of behaviour must reach a point that swings Occam's Razor to malevolence being the most likely explanation)
It is worth noting that before the early 2000s, the same messages of distrust came from citizens. Forums, IRC, Internet culture in general promoted distrust of the government, distrust of businesses small and large, and an attitude of "we are smarter than normal people".
All across the Internet, people like you and me would post about how incompetent the average American is. We would aspire to be independent, logical thinkers, but unfortunately, this mindset almost requires the distrust of other people.
Now that the Internet has become widely adopted in the mainstream, this type of thinking pervades, and perhaps has penetrated the mainstream attitude.
From my perspective, the web analogy fails immediately. I might trust somebody on one topic, but eyeroll at them on another. And that trust is also subject to change, and often does. Sometimes it's because the person changes, and sometimes because I change. So, for me at least, it's one node with a zillion flickering 1-depth connections.
And I think most people are also of a similar mindset, even if they might not necessarily realize it. It's how you get things like a democracy where everybody ostensibly votes for the candidate they want to win, and then we get a congressional approval rating that's trending to the single digits. [1] That's only possible because are extremely dissatisfied even when their guy and his party are both in control, otherwise it'd at least hover around 50%.
Articles like this may seem obvious and redundant to you, me and other people that actively reach into the web for information. But there is a large...LARGE community of people that do not actively go looking for new information. They are fine or even scared to see what is beyond there bubble. So just like raising children. Constant reinforcement needs to happen to make things stick and let this information sink in. Eventually the light bulb flickers on for everyone.
Yeah; I think it just speaks to the fact that there is no substitution to being a well-informed individual. If you're cognizant about understanding the world around you, you're generally pretty good at weeding bad information out and bringing good information in. Unfortunately, I think the internet has a siloing effect and the most sensational voices rise to the top. People get caught in their silos and don't have an easy way to peek outside. Misinformation spreads; and that's scary when trying to quantify the future of our society.
I've noticed a trend across the internet at large that I think stems from the increase in junk information:
People have to be suspicious by default when it comes to information they see or hear online. More so over time. This has lead to the need for people to be increasingly defensive of their own views. There are two knock-on effects of this:
It's easy to click 'reply' without actually replying. When someone leaves a comment, they are trying to say something. When someone responds, they aren't necessarily responding to what the person is saying. Subsequently, people talk past each other, both not feeling heard, both increasingly entrenched in the own views because the other person isn't formulating actual replies to their message. If we perceive someone trying to rebut our ideas, but failing miserably to do so, we become really sure those ideas are good.
It's easy for defensiveness to turn into vitriol, because people tend to have conversations on the internet in a very off-the-cuff fashion, which doesn't lend itself to deep, considered, reasoning. It's very easy to miss, and subsequently ignore, holes in our arguments as we make them, and our suspicion prevents us from reconsidering them in the moment.
What all of these pearl-clutching arguments amount to is former gatekeepers kvetching about there no longer being a gate for them to keep.
The information dissemination landscape is evolving, and we are only being held back by those too cowardly to let go of their control and let us grow and ascend.
Fascinating. I agree with the analysis that the Internet is giving more power to 'voters' because the content that gets talked about the most (and thus voted on) is the one they consume the most. However, I think there's some nuance needed with that model.
The collective group of US megamedia companies have the means to focus public attention on topics they want, even if the population normally wouldn't be amenable. I don't think it's as cut and dry as 'I, a rational person with wholly my own thoughts and feelings, consume and internalize the media I want rather than what's shown to me.' Rather, the media I am exposed to plays a part in shaping my beliefs, even if it's subconscious, and media companies have strategies to get their stuff in my face.
As a population, the Internet has both given us a wealth of information and taught us to rely more and more on intuition as the sheer quantity of knowledge is far too much to handle.
As a side note, Facebook has already admitted to toying with its users emotions. I would not be very surprised if they have some 'variables' they can 'tweak' to bias their users. The authors benevolent assumption could just very well be wrong.
The really weird thing about this is, that the same people had a few years ago been talking "the internet" down a few years ago. Now the same people believe all kinds of crap from "the internet".
I wonder if it may be our fault somehow by telling them that not everything on the internet is crap.
"people on HN react like some grand conspiracy theory was unveiled while it takes 15 seconds on google" is garden-variety internet snark
Such a factual situation is often the subject of such snark. In this age of search bubbles and personalized (read algorithm distorted) views of information the observation is often true. Such reactions are exhibited by one group even to factual information. This results in frustration on both sides of the statement, creating the state of "War," which, "is not a place from which people find it easy to climb down." This is particularly bad because such information is particularly valuable. It's precisely such mental model breaking information which is the most valuable.
It's very easy to see how a group like, the Flat Earthers, or Anti-vaxxers have such model-breaking information blindness. Throughout history, we've seen that it's particularly hard for privileged knowledge workers -- who have been validated by society through high pay and social status -- to see the model-breaking information. (Witness the struggle to get germ theory recognized by gentleman doctors.) In short, we tech folks need to acknowledge that there are factors acting to make us the most blind.
In 2019, we all have it. We've always all had it. The question is how do we communicate this without being in the mental state of "war."
I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
because we are being socialized to over-react to even the hint of hypocrisy as invalidating rather than engaging in meaningful evaluation of information sources quality.
Exactly. There are so many people who have an extremely cynical view of the world based on what they learned online. The idea of an honest politician or company seems impossible to them. I just hope that it doesn't lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.
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