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A long time ago, the printed word was the way to influence and disseminate ideas. Some ideas good, some less and most people could not read. Then came Radio w

A long time ago, the printed word was the way to influence and disseminate ideas. Some ideas good, some less and most people could not read. Then came Radio with it's ads and shows. It was another way to nudge the masses and shape the 'public' opinion. Everyone who had a radio could tune-in. Television, the moving image! The joy: everyone could watch an endless stream of shows. This was not lost on advertisers ,corporations and propaganda arms of the states. Now comes FB, Google, Twitter and all these attention hoarding 'services'. I am not a user of any social medias (not do I condone their use), but how is that different from the previous innovations which allows mass communication? If anything it seems to me that Soros and others might find it decentralizes and weakens their power of media convergence? Would Soros think the same if he had been CEO of FB? Of course I am sad of seeing so many young people wasting their attention on their illuminated mobile screens, and certainly see the harm in it. But Soros, what is you 'beef' with FB? I doubt that the devolution of humanity makes him loose sleep at night.

saiya-jin 9y ago
exactly... he didn't mind times > 20 years ago, where 99% of the population blindly consumed what was said in TV/radio without questioning, without having any means to cross check it with any other alternative. I don't think anybody here considers those 2 companies as something holy and pure good, but they are pretty clear in their mission. While doing it, they provide extremely useful tools to billions and ways to communicate with other human beings or learn anything known to human species, for free. Just use parts of the toolset that help you, ignore the rest. Oh, and use good ad-blocker. None of these companies will prevent you from using their products, although ad revenue is their biggest source of income. Or if you are bloody pissed off at them, don't use them at all. Good enough alternatives exist.
sorokod 9y ago
In the same way poppy juice differs from oxycontin.
jacksnipe 9y ago
David Foster Wallace addresses this in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" [1]. The essay was written just as computing technology was starting to get to the point where it was clear it was about to be ubiquitous. For context, DFW is attacking Gilder's hypothesis that the decentralized nature of the next big medium will give people some measure of control over their reality, and he is using a novel by Leyner about a future in which everybody can slice and dice their experience of reality at will to illustrate his point. "Leyner's world is a Gilderesque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience." I found it disturbingly descriptive of today's cultural landscape. (NOTE: Obviously fiction analysis != analysis of reality, but the essay has some very good points.) [1] https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
vanderZwan 9y ago
Did you even read the article? > “The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies” (...) Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance (...) “This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined. (...) The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them” You're talking about the decentralisation effect of the internet. He is talking about the centralised power of surveillance and influence attained by these companies, so the exact opposite. But even if we pretend he argued what you imply he's arguing: the printing press gave us protestantism followed by the Thirty Year's war. Nazis partially came to power because they were the first to master mass media propaganda. So yes, the Internet is a menace to society, in the sense that it causes social upheaval and enables good and bad things to happen. Like with the printing press and mass media, we need to figure out as a society how to avoid the bad influences and keep the benefits. > Would Soros think the same if he had been CEO of FB? That is an absurd proposition: if George Soros had been CEO of FB, he would be a different person from who he is now. That is like asking "would you think that fast food is unhealthy if you had been the CEO of MacDonald's?" Probably not, but the fact that I believe fast-food is unhealthy is probably one of the reasons that I didn't seek a career at McDonalds in the first place.

saiya-jin 9y ago

exactly... he didn't mind times > 20 years ago, where 99% of the population blindly consumed what was said in TV/radio without questioning, without having any means to cross check it with any other alternative. I don't think anybody here considers those 2 companies as something holy and pure good, but they are pretty clear in their mission. While doing it, they provide extremely useful tools to billions and ways to communicate with other human beings or learn anything known to human species, for free. Just use parts of the toolset that help you, ignore the rest. Oh, and use good ad-blocker. None of these companies will prevent you from using their products, although ad revenue is their biggest source of income. Or if you are bloody pissed off at them, don't use them at all. Good enough alternatives exist.

sorokod 9y ago

In the same way poppy juice differs from oxycontin.

jacksnipe 9y ago

David Foster Wallace addresses this in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" [1]. The essay was written just as computing technology was starting to get to the point where it was clear it was about to be ubiquitous. For context, DFW is attacking Gilder's hypothesis that the decentralized nature of the next big medium will give people some measure of control over their reality, and he is using a novel by Leyner about a future in which everybody can slice and dice their experience of reality at will to illustrate his point. "Leyner's world is a Gilderesque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience." I found it disturbingly descriptive of today's cultural landscape. (NOTE: Obviously fiction analysis != analysis of reality, but the essay has some very good points.) [1] https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

vanderZwan 9y ago

Did you even read the article? > “The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies” (...) Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance (...) “This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined. (...) The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them” You're talking about the decentralisation effect of the internet. He is talking about the centralised power of surveillance and influence attained by these companies, so the exact opposite. But even if we pretend he argued what you imply he's arguing: the printing press gave us protestantism followed by the Thirty Year's war. Nazis partially came to power because they were the first to master mass media propaganda. So yes, the Internet is a menace to society, in the sense that it causes social upheaval and enables good and bad things to happen. Like with the printing press and mass media, we need to figure out as a society how to avoid the bad influences and keep the benefits. > Would Soros think the same if he had been CEO of FB? That is an absurd proposition: if George Soros had been CEO of FB, he would be a different person from who he is now. That is like asking "would you think that fast food is unhealthy if you had been the CEO of MacDonald's?" Probably not, but the fact that I believe fast-food is unhealthy is probably one of the reasons that I didn't seek a career at McDonalds in the first place.