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> I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives. Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of new

> I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives. Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of news or contemporary entertainment, Twitter is absolutely impacting their lives. The degree to which it quickly propagates groupthink and shared narratives is difficult to overstate.

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jakelazaroff 5y ago
Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives? We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?
- moduspol 5y ago
  > Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives? It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself. Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes. But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.

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jakelazaroff 5y ago

Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives? We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?
moduspol 5y ago
> Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives? It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself. Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes. But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.