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Facebook is an attack on society itself. Ignorance of other people's stupidity, bigotry, and pettiness is a necessary lubricant for society to function.
by knieveltech 9y ago
Facebook is an attack on society itself. Ignorance of other people's stupidity, bigotry, and pettiness is a necessary lubricant for society to function.
- camillomiller 9y agoTotally agree. Especially if the expression of such ignorance comes with a sense of pride and entitlement. It's easy to get entitled and proud, because nobody in real life would give you 200 nods to your racist musings while in line at Walmart. But 200 people press a stupid like button, and suddenly you feel like your idiotic and uneducated opinion has a great meaning. This is straightforward dangerous for representative democracies, which are founded on the subtle concept of an elite of better people that have a mandate to lead society. The fact that this mandate has been misused so many times is no excuse to suddenly drop all the good that comes from having someone who knows more in a position of power.
- makecheck 9y agoThe interesting thing to me is how online numbers are nowhere near statistically significant and yet they "matter" to people. There are billions of people, thousands just in your neighborhood (probably) and yet most people interact with a few dozen network links and the few dozen comment posts they are likely to read. That skew is gigantic, and it should terrify people that they are not relying on more professionally-edited sources.
- camillomiller 9y agoWhat makes the difference, I guess, is the fact that you can actually measure "agreement" in a direct way, with numbers of "agreement units" such as likes. Very easy to misread and blew it out of proportion. Facebook KNOWS that and definitively leverages that. The mission of the company is inherently broken and Mark Zuckerberg, if he's really being honest when he talks about it, well then he's in full blown denial.