sus

Well-known member
I mean, I think the internet is a miracle too, but I also see that, say, the average online American’s scope is much more simple and surficial than ours.

So really I shouldn’t have asked for your own experience, but what you think of the average experience of the digital native, I.e those who did not experience socializing before the internet.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if we are missing important cultural infrastructure to deal with social media. And that there's gonna be significant growing pains in developing that cultural infrastructure. I guess I just don't see yelling at tech companies about how they're evil destroyers of the social fabric (not pointing fingers at you; pointing fingers at many) as productive. Because these tech companies have also done a ton to help bring together a social fabric that, in America at least, wasn't doing so well to begin with. It's not like "Bowling Alone" got written in 2011. They've been enormously instrumental in helping organize, from activism to local sports teams to friend groups. And we've all plugged into them voluntarily. And we've all poured hours of our day into them. And then we go and try to pawn off all that responsibility on Daddy.
 

sus

Well-known member
If you remove the kind of (IMO) magical-thinky "neurochemical manipulation"/"addiction" element from the Facebook controversy, which I don't believe in, you're kinda just left with the boring answer that people should be responsible for where they spend their time and attention. That's front and center. Yes, it's true gossip and rumors spread much faster online than before. But that kind of global connectivity was inevitable. It would've happened with GMail, for chrissake, if all we had was Gmail. This goes to @version's point about medium & message, I think. This level of connectivity was always coming. We're all to blame.
 

version

Well-known member
The medium really does feel like the message. The way we interact with something like the news on social media feels much more important than whatever the news itself actually is. The way it prompts you to respond to and share information, the speed with which it reaches you, the brevity of most reporting, the increasing impact of headlines as a result of the above.

Virilio's “synchronisation of emotions,”.
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sus

Well-known member
The research could be pseudo-science and disregardable as such along the lines of science, but it sure seems like almost everyone, even on this board, admits to consciously recognizing how getting a positive emote reaction feels good, good enough to occasionally impact the conscious decision-making regarding posts, etc.
You make a great point Stan, and it was brilliantly phrased.






(Did that feel good? This is called human interaction and social feedback)
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It wouldn't surprise me at all if we are missing important cultural infrastructure to deal with social media. And that there's gonna be significant growing pains in developing that cultural infrastructure. I guess I just don't see yelling at tech companies about how they're evil destroyers of the social fabric (not pointing fingers at you; pointing fingers at many) as productive. Because these tech companies have also done a ton to help bring together a social fabric that, in America at least, wasn't doing so well to begin with. It's not like "Bowling Alone" got written in 2011.
Yeah I don’t see pointing fingers as productive either, in and of itself. But I do see blame, in general, as useful insofar as it can inform policy, I.e learning from precedent where an actor in X capacity pursued Y ends without sufficient accountability

But in this case I don’t see a crucification of Zuck being productive either. Hoagen herself said that rehabilitating Facebook could be in facebooks long term single-bottom like interest, and this rehabilitation I presume would be via some kind of compliance mechanism like an inspector general assigned to Facebook with some degree of executive clearance, who would ultimately report to the pertinent congressional committee, which may or may not be the commerce one.

Although here I don’t know what practical differences in oversight there would be between senate and the house.
 

sus

Well-known member
I'm slightly being a jerk to Stan in this thread but it's because I want to performatively display dismissiveness toward the ideology and arguments which already exist in the public sphere, the water supply, etc, which he's doing a good job presenting. So, sorry Stan.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I think you @suspended are assuming too much rational sovereignty on behalf of young normies, who I do believe are subject to more intricate and intimate emotional turbulence than perhaps any generation of humanity before.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I personally don’t understand neuroscience enough to intuitively navigate these phenomena and the data derived therefrom, but there seems ample reason to believe that the major social media platforms are in over their heads in terms of psychic influence, and may perhaps even benefit from some regulation (a comparison here is to how the automobile industry benefited from the regulation that ultimately resulted in traffic lights and highway systems, but I don’t have an understanding there either).
 

sus

Well-known member
I personally don’t understand neuroscience enough to intuitively navigate these phenomena and the data derived therefrom, but there seems ample reason to believe that the major social media platforms are in over their heads in terms of psychic influence, and may perhaps even benefit from some regulation (a comparison here is to how the automobile industry benefited from the regulation that ultimately resulted in traffic lights and highway systems, but I don’t have an understanding they’re either).
What psychic influence do they have? What do they cause people to do that they can't control?
 

version

Well-known member
I think it's less that they have a unique psychic influence and more that they ruthlessly intensify the already potent influence of media and that information moves through their networks more quickly than they can hope to keep up with.

What they can't control would be the irl consequences of people reacting to said information.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
What psychic influence do they have? What do they cause people to do that they can't control?
But this insistence that their will can overcome the emotion, the fomo, the aversion to being ostracized, etc.

As I understand it, they control, via pattern-recognition algorithms, what novel content users get exposed to, and what advertisements they receive. Sure this may vary operationally across social media platforms, but in general this practice is one that I would consider psychically influential, I.e all but determining the information consumption pathways of unscrupulous people (as opposed to we geniuses who end up on the likes of Dissensus).
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I think it's less that they have a unique psychic influence and more that they ruthlessly intensify the already potent influence of media and that information moves through their networks more quickly than they can hope to keep up with it.

What they can't control would be the irl consequences of people reacting to said information.
Could be a matter of semantics around “psychic influence” but the ability to control what new information gets introduced to users, even indirect control through machine learning suggestions, does strike me as non-trivial power in terms of the development of minds.

Which isn’t to say that social media platforms that use these techniques are comprehensively steering the development of minds, just that their financial self-interest is liable to lead such incidents, and that the remedying of these incidents may not be a priority for single-bottom line optimization.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I’m not against big tech @suspended I’m for the advancement of organized matter through and beyond organic matter, so long as certain humanist axioms are observed.
 
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