4 ms·

Sounds like a gigantic attention suck designed to stimulate addiction. Moreover, it’s unclear to me why opening the floodgates to more human expression without

Sounds like a gigantic attention suck designed to stimulate addiction. Moreover, it’s unclear to me why opening the floodgates to more human expression without any concern for the quality of that expression is desirable. The virtue of social media seemed self evident in 2006 when we had little experience of what it would mean in practice; in 2021 however, I think the premise that megaphoning unfettered expression is inherently good requires justification, particularly given the instability it has introduced at the societal scale and the addictive behavior, poor mental health, and loss of concentration it has often imposed at the individual level. Individual humans got along just fine for millennia without being able to broadcast the minutia of their thoughts for likes and subscribes: what are we really gaining by suddenly being able to do so in the course of two decades, and is it really worth the trade offs?

wongarsu 5y ago
Humanity as a whole has spent the last couple Millennia accomplishing preciously little. Not because there weren't people with bright ideas, but because pivotal ideas often took centuries to spread. Many see the introduction of coffeehouses as a place of conversation in the 17th century as crucial for the Age of Enlightenment [1]. The speed with which we can enact technological and social change is proportional to the speed of exchange of ideas. In the 20th century the power to spread ideas had largely monopolized, but now the internet gives us many-to-many interaction beyond the local level. And I will gladly concede that we haven't figured how to do that properly, Facebook and Twitter seem like mostly failed experiments. But that doesn't mean that cracking the code for global many-to-many interaction isn't worth it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
- periphrasis 5y ago
  I agree that precious little occurred in terms of technological advancement. However, I think it’s a more tendentious claim with respect to cultural achievement. For example, all the great epic poems of the Western tradition predate the Enlightenment (although there have been notable failed/incomplete epics since then). In terms of Humanism, it’s unclear to me that we’re doing better than our far less technologically sophisticated ancestors. That aside, my broader concern is with our civilizational stability. We are still too close to and to involved in the events of the past two years to achieve any kind of objectivity, but I am increasingly concerned that, at least in the American context, things are not going to work out. Between worsening climate change, an incipient and solidifying neo-Fascist mass movement, the disinformational chaos of social media, the mass death of a pandemic, and an increasingly sclerotic US hegemony, our civilization is experiencing profound pressures of the sort which historically presaged extended periods of violence and chaos. I hope that I am completely wrong, but it’s difficult to read the stories (and for that matter the crueler comments) of r/HermanCainAward and not come away with the conclusion that social media has broken our society to the tune of 2000 unvaccinated dead per day and counting.

wongarsu 5y ago

Humanity as a whole has spent the last couple Millennia accomplishing preciously little. Not because there weren't people with bright ideas, but because pivotal ideas often took centuries to spread. Many see the introduction of coffeehouses as a place of conversation in the 17th century as crucial for the Age of Enlightenment [1]. The speed with which we can enact technological and social change is proportional to the speed of exchange of ideas. In the 20th century the power to spread ideas had largely monopolized, but now the internet gives us many-to-many interaction beyond the local level. And I will gladly concede that we haven't figured how to do that properly, Facebook and Twitter seem like mostly failed experiments. But that doesn't mean that cracking the code for global many-to-many interaction isn't worth it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

periphrasis 5y ago
I agree that precious little occurred in terms of technological advancement. However, I think it’s a more tendentious claim with respect to cultural achievement. For example, all the great epic poems of the Western tradition predate the Enlightenment (although there have been notable failed/incomplete epics since then). In terms of Humanism, it’s unclear to me that we’re doing better than our far less technologically sophisticated ancestors. That aside, my broader concern is with our civilizational stability. We are still too close to and to involved in the events of the past two years to achieve any kind of objectivity, but I am increasingly concerned that, at least in the American context, things are not going to work out. Between worsening climate change, an incipient and solidifying neo-Fascist mass movement, the disinformational chaos of social media, the mass death of a pandemic, and an increasingly sclerotic US hegemony, our civilization is experiencing profound pressures of the sort which historically presaged extended periods of violence and chaos. I hope that I am completely wrong, but it’s difficult to read the stories (and for that matter the crueler comments) of r/HermanCainAward and not come away with the conclusion that social media has broken our society to the tune of 2000 unvaccinated dead per day and counting.