You’re so right about that. A while ago I told someone that everyone worries about the things in 1984 happening but the real danger and what we’ve gotten, is Brave new world… and they didn’t see that as being true
My dad used to say “religion is the opium of the masses” and now it’s social media. I read a lot, I watch a lot of YouTube channels and the vast majority of the things that people are hawking are not the real things to worry about. So many YT channels and social media groups have become echo chambers which target specific audiences (esp democrats vs republicans) knowing they can use people’s fears to increase engagement. Much of what I see going going on in social media and even conventional media just is not an accurate representation of what’s going on in society, it’s a dramatized version aimed at driving viewership and getting clicks and likes. I think that to a large degree, it’s an evolution that started with 24 hr news channels.
I recently started watching some 3D modelling YT channels to brush up on some stuff for a project. I hadn’t watched any of them since about 2017 and at that time there was probably half a dozen really good channels to stick to. Now, there are dozens of channels, all covering the same things and much of the content is shorter and less detailed than it once was. There’s just so much stuff now that I hardly watch any of it and I’m sticking to skillshare, LinkedIn learning and udemy. I’d rather buy comprehensive courses for $15 on udemy than have to watch a bunch of YT videos that don’t cover a topic nearly as well.
Everything has gotten so much worse since the beginning of covid. Many people realized just how much they could use people’s anger and fear to drive engagement. I took about a year and a half off from posting on fb, from about the beginning of 2021 to mid last year… Not intentionally but because I was busy and I didn’t have much to share. When I came back, many of the funny/intelligent pages I used to enjoy had just turned into mills catering to angry people. I used to enjoy someecards for their funny posts but now they mostly just repost AITA threads from reddit to anger women. I F love science has gone down the drain too, it use to be actual science stuff but now it’s click bait crap that they repost every few months. It’s unfortunate that humans are so predictable and some pages have figured out the formula to manipulating them. People are so lacking in self awareness that they don’t even see what’s going on and how they’ve become the product
There will always be an opium for the masses, and whoever is the pusher du jour promoting it will be very well off indeed. We are simply getting better at it over time, but the problem has always been there
Or it could all just be part of the natural ebb and flow. Every time there’s a major change in technology society tends to fall apart a bit. Happened when the rigid horse collar was invented, and the water wheel. A historian could argue it’s what is going on now.
I personally don’t buy into the dystopian stuff, to me it’s opium for the masses as much as religion. People want something not to believe in.
But it makes great reading.
Of all the Sci Fi stuff, I think Heinlein’s Future History will be the most accurate when we look back in a mirror.
Oh this is one of the really interesting things about Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (yes, like the album). Briefly, he assumes that technology is a metaphor (for example, a clock is a metaphor insofar that it represents time in a way we can inderstand it), and each different type of technology represents a phenomenon in a different way.
For example, he notes that 150 years ago, the predominant medium was the book - long sentences, complex arguments, abstract subject matter etc. This changed with the development of the telegraph into shorter, more trivial information that would be used in newspapers. Finally (the book was writen in the 80s) the develpoment of TV news meant that for something to be valid, it had to be short, visual, glamorous, and most of all amusing (hence the title).
Of course music has also gone through these transitions which have been driven by technology: from live classical music, which was long and complex, to pop music recorded on vinyl, which had to be short and clearly structured. God knows what kind of effect streaming services and smartphones are having on music these days…
Interesting to see how media will develop after tiktok etc, although personally I think we’ve reached the limits of the smartphone as a medium unless VR really takes off…
I have deliberately cut myself off from FB now @sshoihet - it was getting insane during Brexit and worse during COVID… These days, when I think of diving into social media and newspapers, I think to myself “how will this information affect me personally today”. If the answer is "it probably won’t " I don’t bother reading it. It’s just too rage inducing…
Maybe. I’ve seen some comparison of social media/ad attention businesses to cigarettes in that both are addictive and harmful, just one to lungs and the mouth/throat and the other to mental health and social lives.
I thought that take was absurd a few years ago, but enough evidence has come in that I think it’s worth considering now. If over the next five years the evidence increases at the same rate as the last five I’ll be convinced, although I’m not sure I’ll have any solution in mind.
There is an absolute link between technology and writing. Dickens used to write the way he did for example because people read by candlelight, and they could only do so comfortably for so long before their eyes got tired. And his chapters were a certain length because of that. And because they were printed in a newspaper, and people would read one chapter a night to their families out of the paper, they didn’t have books. That era of stories and florid writing is much easier to digest one chapter at a time. As it was intended.
Now we got tik tok. FB is for granpa’s generation lol
I agree about the social media and anger.
I got dragged down the Quora rabbit-hole.
Started as a Google search, seems there is good info there.
But now it is a random question from a bot, an answer and then endless insults on political, racial, gender, pick one grounds. Even worse if you respond.
Gad, Quora is just a cesspool of rage bait. There seems to be a large number of posters on there who just write outrageous (and obviously fake) posts to try and get angry responses from people. It’s worse (and less entertaining) than most of the AITA posts that make the rounds.
I disagree. In the past journalists had more time to proof if the informations they got is true before they published it in the newspaper. Nowadays they forced to publish it as soon as they got the information, before other publisher do it and they lose clicks.
