4 ms·

And what if Twitter is partly causing it (along with other media).

malermeister 3y ago
It's both, in a feedback loop from hell.
somenameforme 3y ago
You can also go the other way. There's always going to be the possibility of a chicken/egg type question, but it seems clear that a lot of the insanity and division started to happen about the time people started trying to control (and started caring so much about) what other people say and think. It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this. It's not hard to see how this is going to drive people into deeply divided groups. You immediately end up with an in-group and an out-group, both with good reason to avoid the other. And then in this division, both groups characterization of the other drifts further and further from reality, further cementing such divisions. This site [1] demonstrating the scale of the perception gap among various groups is quite telling. I don't think it was like this, at all, not that long ago. [1] - https://perceptiongap.us/ https://perceptiongap.us/
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this. I locate this moment quite precisely. It was when either Richard Perle or Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist's live TV question about 'the reality' in Iraq II, and said "We control reality". That was when narrative paradigm took a dark turn in the West and I see the PNAC as taking internal psyops to a whole new, overt level. All politicians _know_ this, but you never _say it_ !! Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company publicly burned the precious veneer of good faith. They didn't just want to construct the Iraq War, they needed to rub our noses in the blatant cheek of it. That was the birth of "post truth" for me. After that it naturally followed that every organisation, business, or individual could legitimately construct their own "narrative reality" through social media or whatever, without any regard for facts.
  - simbolit 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
  - nuancebydefault 3y ago
    On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> with _something much better_'. I don't believe a majority believed it but they acted differently. So my tentative conclusion would be, the public is the problem. Which is sadly even worse than 'platform X is the problem'.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed. If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.
      - nuancebydefault 3y ago
        I believe you are referring to the N/S civil war? What do you mean about the collapse 100 year thereafter?
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        somenameforme 3y ago

It's both, in a feedback loop from hell.

You can also go the other way. There's always going to be the possibility of a chicken/egg type question, but it seems clear that a lot of the insanity and division started to happen about the time people started trying to control (and started caring so much about) what other people say and think. It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this. It's not hard to see how this is going to drive people into deeply divided groups. You immediately end up with an in-group and an out-group, both with good reason to avoid the other. And then in this division, both groups characterization of the other drifts further and further from reality, further cementing such divisions. This site [1] demonstrating the scale of the perception gap among various groups is quite telling. I don't think it was like this, at all, not that long ago. [1] - https://perceptiongap.us/ https://perceptiongap.us/

nonrandomstring 3y ago
> It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this. I locate this moment quite precisely. It was when either Richard Perle or Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist's live TV question about 'the reality' in Iraq II, and said "We control reality". That was when narrative paradigm took a dark turn in the West and I see the PNAC as taking internal psyops to a whole new, overt level. All politicians _know_ this, but you never _say it_ !! Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company publicly burned the precious veneer of good faith. They didn't just want to construct the Iraq War, they needed to rub our noses in the blatant cheek of it. That was the birth of "post truth" for me. After that it naturally followed that every organisation, business, or individual could legitimately construct their own "narrative reality" through social media or whatever, without any regard for facts.
- simbolit 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
- nuancebydefault 3y ago
  On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> with _something much better_'. I don't believe a majority believed it but they acted differently. So my tentative conclusion would be, the public is the problem. Which is sadly even worse than 'platform X is the problem'.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed. If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.
    - nuancebydefault 3y ago
      I believe you are referring to the N/S civil war? What do you mean about the collapse 100 year thereafter?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - somenameforme 3y ago