3 ms·

I don't think it's contentless, because for a long time there was an idea that Social Media would free the general public from manipulation by a small group of

• ekianjo 7y ago
  Why would it be different? It is about how the brain works, and it applies across several forms of media.
  • mattnewton 7y ago
    I personally held the (probably mistaken) belief that by democratizing publishing information, it would be harder to create a false signal. Ie, if everyone has a printing press, then nobody can control the entire narrative, the way a handful of newspaper barons could. Instead, it seems to me now that giving everyone a printing press made so much noise that we still rely on centralized authorities to sort, rate and surface those that we want to read. And it made it cheaper, in terms of both reputation cost and money, for someone to create a bunch of false signal. The parallel to the printing was misleading, and the true outcome is much more complicated and mixed. The scale really changes how these things work, in terms of the incentives created and the sheer amount of content possible to consume.
    • jessaustin 7y ago
      Another possibility is that the "new" media threatens the "old" media so much that the old media feels compelled to exaggerate the problems with new media. Sure it's different. There is more noise than consensus. The next generation of humanity might well consider that a benefit. Don't expect old media to figure that out; all of their incentives pull in the other direction.