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There was a time when making people more connected was seen as an unqualified good thing. No, really. And it does still have some upsides, such as connecting pe

There was a time when making people more connected was seen as an unqualified good thing. No, really. And it does still have some upsides, such as connecting people with rare interests or conditions, or enabling members of marginalized groups to support each other. But we're also hyper-aware nowadays of its downside - conspiracy theories, actual conspiracies, stalking and invasion of privacy. Maybe on balance it's still good, but it does plenty of harm as well. Same thing with information. We've turned a problem of access into one of curation. Disinformation is a serious problem, no matter which side of any particular issue you think represents truth. Along with real information we get flooded with clickbait, manufactured outrage, influencer nonsense. Some of these cause far more psychological damage than their minimal information content could justify. Again, the good is there but there's also plenty of harm. The solution most emphatically is not the kind of intellectual nihilism (misrepresented as curiosity) of the OP. That's just "believe whatever you want" nonsense wrapped in pretension. What's needed is better education about how to separate the wheat from the chaff - a skill most people quite demonstrably do not learn for themselves. It's like putting a first-time driver who can barely see over the wheel right onto the trickiest freeway interchange you can think of. By denying the value of education - by which I mean education guided by someone who understands the scientific principles of pedagogy - we're also denying people the very tools they need to survive. Once they can do that, then we can set them loose with some confidence that they will fill their heads with signal instead of noise.

zozbot234 4y ago
> a skill most people quite demonstrably do not learn for themselves. Citation needed. I'm pretty sure that the people who take conspiracy theories and urban legends seriously are a tiny minority, same as they always were. The Internet has just made this stuff more visible, not more common.
- notacoward 4y ago
  Depends on what you consider a conspiracy theory - it doesn't have to be QAnon level to qualify - and that's not the only problem anyway. If you've ever studied information warfare, you'd know that it's not necessarily about making people believe one specific thing. More often it's about making people uncertain, creating/heightening conflict, or just getting people to disengage out of sheer fatigue. It's paralysis, not a kill. Even when IW is not involved, it's reflected in "both sides" and "voting doesn't matter" and "choose your own science" (not in so many words but absolutely rampant right here) and calling people "sheep" and so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam. Do you really need me to cite examples? Do you really believe the quality of public discourse has not degraded over the time social media have become ascendant, or that people weren't easily fooled even before? Are you asking because you're actually curious, or because you already believe the contrary and it's easier to make demands of others than of yourself? "I'm pretty sure" the answer is clear.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    > Do you really believe the quality of public discourse has not degraded over the time social media have become ascendant, or that people weren't easily fooled even before? Previous generations had TV mainlined into their brains.

zozbot234 4y ago

> a skill most people quite demonstrably do not learn for themselves. Citation needed. I'm pretty sure that the people who take conspiracy theories and urban legends seriously are a tiny minority, same as they always were. The Internet has just made this stuff more visible, not more common.

notacoward 4y ago
Depends on what you consider a conspiracy theory - it doesn't have to be QAnon level to qualify - and that's not the only problem anyway. If you've ever studied information warfare, you'd know that it's not necessarily about making people believe one specific thing. More often it's about making people uncertain, creating/heightening conflict, or just getting people to disengage out of sheer fatigue. It's paralysis, not a kill. Even when IW is not involved, it's reflected in "both sides" and "voting doesn't matter" and "choose your own science" (not in so many words but absolutely rampant right here) and calling people "sheep" and so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam. Do you really need me to cite examples? Do you really believe the quality of public discourse has not degraded over the time social media have become ascendant, or that people weren't easily fooled even before? Are you asking because you're actually curious, or because you already believe the contrary and it's easier to make demands of others than of yourself? "I'm pretty sure" the answer is clear.
- HKH2 4y ago
  > Do you really believe the quality of public discourse has not degraded over the time social media have become ascendant, or that people weren't easily fooled even before? Previous generations had TV mainlined into their brains.