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I agree with this, with one exception. > Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change. To me, this part comes off as i
by Eupolemos 8y ago
I agree with this, with one exception.
> Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.
To me, this part comes off as implicitly defeatist. I don't think "people" change, and while general education makes a difference, it isn't a solution we can rely on on its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment).
But I think we can make a difference when shaping how people communicate on the internet. Facebook is - as I see it - made to make us interact in the most basic, emotional way, so the company can farm our dispositions. That doesn't make for healthy conversation.
If we shaped and popularized the means of being social on the internet in a more responsible way, we might see people acting in a less soulcrushing manner.
The trick, of course, is to make people like such a social platform.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoIt's not about conversation so much as the easy industrialisation of propaganda and election fixing. FB and TW make it far too easy to set up bots and troll farms to influence public debate for relatively tiny amounts of money. And FB has also been used to supply individually targeted political advertising - which makes it easy to swing an election or a referendum by influencing a few million, or even just a few hundred thousand, people - by lying to them. This is part of a bigger problem in the Western democracies, where it's considered perfectly okay for billionaires to use media empires to influence voters with knowingly fake outright propaganda. The conversation part is largely irrelevant. A lot of people will simply parrot talking points they're given by the media, so there is in fact no real conversation or debate happening.