3 ms·

I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere.

I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came along. And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio, or the BBC spaghetti harvest april fools was believed by so many.

donkeyd 5y ago
> Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs. Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.
- schnebbau 5y ago
  This is it. Whoever builds a study around this phenomenon will have it named after them.
- tzs 5y ago
  I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press. For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest. We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it. Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us. For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press. It was like the discovery of fire. [1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
  - jmercouris 5y ago
    Could you please expand upon how it was like the 'discovery of fire'? There are many ways to interpret this, and I'm not certain I know what you are saying.
    - tzs 5y ago
      Giving fire to a society that does not have it greatly increases their power and efficiency to a much greater extent than does giving the printing press to a society that not have it. So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    Notably, the printing press didn't immediately make good knowledge more accessible. A press was a very expensive, risky investment, and so was the typesetting of any particular content. The first killer apps were indulgences and polemic pamphlets. So basically a money racket and influencer content. Not much has changed.
  - quantified 5y ago
    So Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Andreesen are our modern Prometheus? Eagles picking their livers at dusk forever more?
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  The "peer to peer idiot networking and amplification" effect you mention is real but it's dangerous, or at least wildly inaccurate, to explain the rise of our "disinformation society" by dismissing the culprits as "idiots." Many of them are, but... Look at the politicians and others pushing blatant disinformation and profiting from it. They are doing this with a great degree of skillful malice. Nobody listens to actual idiots; they want to emulate and follow the successful/powerful people who are savvy enough to hone their message and their image. Look at the people swallowing these lies. Many of them are generally intelligent and/or successful people. Many Trump supporters are quite successful and affluent. However, their faith in actual academics, experts, and traditional institutions has been shattered, leaving uniquely susceptible to malignant influences who are eager to fill this "trust vacuum."
sho_hn 5y ago
> War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid. I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness. On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time: "[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." - "Yes? Why is that?" "Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]" When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  I don't know enough biology to know if the metaphor is apt, but I think he's wrong. Small groups in isolation speciate faster, but that's not the same as evolving faster. I would expect that larger groups spanning many diverse ecological niches would feature greater diversity within the group and are able to explore more evolutionary avenues. Perhaps that's what we see intellectually as well.
fortran77 5y ago
> And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio But it didn't: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...

donkeyd 5y ago

> Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs. Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.

schnebbau 5y ago
This is it. Whoever builds a study around this phenomenon will have it named after them.
tzs 5y ago
I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press. For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest. We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it. Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us. For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press. It was like the discovery of fire. [1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Could you please expand upon how it was like the 'discovery of fire'? There are many ways to interpret this, and I'm not certain I know what you are saying.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Giving fire to a society that does not have it greatly increases their power and efficiency to a much greater extent than does giving the printing press to a society that not have it. So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  Notably, the printing press didn't immediately make good knowledge more accessible. A press was a very expensive, risky investment, and so was the typesetting of any particular content. The first killer apps were indulgences and polemic pamphlets. So basically a money racket and influencer content. Not much has changed.
- quantified 5y ago
  So Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Andreesen are our modern Prometheus? Eagles picking their livers at dusk forever more?
JohnBooty 5y ago
The "peer to peer idiot networking and amplification" effect you mention is real but it's dangerous, or at least wildly inaccurate, to explain the rise of our "disinformation society" by dismissing the culprits as "idiots." Many of them are, but... Look at the politicians and others pushing blatant disinformation and profiting from it. They are doing this with a great degree of skillful malice. Nobody listens to actual idiots; they want to emulate and follow the successful/powerful people who are savvy enough to hone their message and their image. Look at the people swallowing these lies. Many of them are generally intelligent and/or successful people. Many Trump supporters are quite successful and affluent. However, their faith in actual academics, experts, and traditional institutions has been shattered, leaving uniquely susceptible to malignant influences who are eager to fill this "trust vacuum."

sho_hn 5y ago

> War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid. I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness. On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time: "[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." - "Yes? Why is that?" "Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]" When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.

kybernetikos 5y ago
I don't know enough biology to know if the metaphor is apt, but I think he's wrong. Small groups in isolation speciate faster, but that's not the same as evolving faster. I would expect that larger groups spanning many diverse ecological niches would feature greater diversity within the group and are able to explore more evolutionary avenues. Perhaps that's what we see intellectually as well.

fortran77 5y ago

> And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio But it didn't: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...