101–110 of 177 posts
"Fine. You want to try and force us to carry local French TV, and fully pay for the production of said local TV programs? We will be cutting off all Netflix access to France, effective immediately."
It would take less than ten minutes for these cowardly bureaucrats to cave.
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Facebook is beneficial to society, it has dramatically changed how people organize and communicate. You can always tell the difference between facebook users and non facebook users now. The non-facebook users don't hang out as much and don't show up to group events as much. "Why wasn't I invited?" "I hit everyone in the FB invites" "Oh I don't have facebook" "You're not using the tool our entire social group uses to…
> Facebook is beneficial to society Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. That argument hardly obvious enough to take on faith however, the concepts of "widely used, willingly" and "beneficial to society" do not have a 1:1 relationship.
Haha, the philosopher arrives.
OK: Is civilization beneficial to society?
Was stopping hunting/gathering and loading ourselves up with long work hours and unhealthy civilization-required carb diets beneficial?
If you want to play the game of philosophy like this then we can just as easily argue that electricity, the internet, the internal combustion engine, coal-derived electricity, splitting the atom, computers in general, the Green Revolution of agricultural modification, all of this isn't beneficial.
But, if we dive under the clouds and use a bit more grounded definition of benefit, it becomes much harder to dismiss the benefit of real utility.
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Facebook is beneficial to society, it has dramatically changed how people organize and communicate. You can always tell the difference between facebook users and non facebook users now. The non-facebook users don't hang out as much and don't show up to group events as much. "Why wasn't I invited?" "I hit everyone in the FB invites" "Oh I don't have facebook" "You're not using the tool our entire social group uses to…
> Facebook is beneficial to society Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. That argument hardly obvious enough to take on faith however, the concepts of "widely used, willingly" and "beneficial to society" do not have a 1:1 relationship.
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The article starts by asking you to view things from another perspective. It's not asking you to "knock" Netflix, it's inviting you to consider the point of view of people who do. American media is subtly hegemonising. All media carries with it the culture of those who produce it, but US media also carries a very strong assumption of "defaultness": that everyone is a (mostly white) American at heart. What effect does…
None of the issues you cite are the fault of American media. They are at best due to lack of sufficient quantities of local production, and at worst due to local production just not being very interesting. Given that everyone learns English, material made in that language has a bigger market and can naturally be higher budget. But that's not anyone's fault per se and cannot be fixed with bureaucratic interventions. A…
And there are a number of reasons you can give for why people tend to prefer these behemoths: network effects, production quality (i.e. enormous infusion of cash to make things flashy and glossy and shiny with no real valuable content), youth tend to rebel against their culture and adopt an alternate culture only to, as they age, realize they lost a part of themselves and reclaim it, etc.
At least try to put yourself in their position and understand their argument.
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Facebook is beneficial to society, it has dramatically changed how people organize and communicate. You can always tell the difference between facebook users and non facebook users now. The non-facebook users don't hang out as much and don't show up to group events as much. "Why wasn't I invited?" "I hit everyone in the FB invites" "Oh I don't have facebook" "You're not using the tool our entire social group uses to…
Have you considered the "non-facebook users" coordinate offline, in-person and can use other technologies like SMS, email, phone calls, IM, chat apps, running into friends at the store, visiting a friend's workplace and "passing the word along" telling friend A who tells friend B?
The fact that they are not using these technologies to stay in touch after choosing to eschew the primary technology demonstrates reality.
It's not my job to cater to every individual persons tech interests.
If you don't want to use Facebook, thats fine, but you cannot complain when you don't get the benefit of Facebook.
If you don't want to own a car, that's fine, but you cannot complain when you don't get the benefit of a car.
These are personal decisions here. Conformity is disliked but presents great benefit to social cohesion. If you're a nonconformist, you don't get to have your cake and eat it. You have to deal with negative side effects of non-conformity.
They're welcome to use secondary technologies to communicate and stay in touch, but in practice, it takes dramatically more effort and brain space to do this, and as a result, they do not accomplish their goal
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Let's look at it the other way. Launching a movie cost a ton of money. So to keep a diverse culture ( we all agreee diversity is great isn't it?) and diverse way to think, you need to help less mainstream way to think. You spend years elaborating complex way to let mainstream exists and makes money, without disturbing it too much, but still keep a working amount of culture disruptor and new ideas growing. And you eve…
So to keep a diverse culture ( we all agreee diversity is great isn't it?) No, we don't all agree. Not when the "diversity" is someone looking at the market and saying "there are too many good movies. we need some shit ones". Nobody needs to diversify away from quality, which is essentially what the French laws do. Don't mistake the bizarre fetishes of a small number of French elite with some kind of natural law or e…
Or perhaps you'd like us to just assume the market is the best judge of what is good art? That was a joke -- the notion is laughable, the market is a clumsy and incompetent tool in almost all human affairs, especially where art is involved.
Every justification boils down to referring to something that is difficult to understand (culture, art, subjectivity, the point of view of another person) which you have chosen to label as sophistry.
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Have you considered the "non-facebook users" coordinate offline, in-person and can use other technologies like SMS, email, phone calls, IM, chat apps, running into friends at the store, visiting a friend's workplace and "passing the word along" telling friend A who tells friend B?
Your examples aside from chat apps are quite unrealistic. I don't even know when was the last time I invited someone to an event using any of the listed methods, it must have been years. But even if running into friends at the store was a thing, it doesn't mean that Facebook is not used by a billion people for organising social events and is therefore beneficial to them.
Almost all my friends are on Facebook, but about half don't check it with any regularity, so sending an invite via Facebook means a good chance that they won't get it until after the event.
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How is it not problematic when American tech form an oligopoly on internet services? Especially when these services need to bend to the whims of American government.
> How is it not problematic when American tech form an oligopoly on internet services? They are the best so they won. I have no problem with that and I don't think anyone should have as long as there's no abuse of power. > Especially when these services need to bend to the whims of American government. This is what I have a problem with.
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If the current crop of tech companies can supersede MS, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, etc. Why can't companies from other parts of the globe do it as well? It just takes one company to do something different and build inertia. That's all. What is keeping European companies from toppling Google or FB or Twitter? Edit: Keyboard fail.
Because competing in internet services gives a tremendous advantage to the first mover who can amass the largest network. Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a network (and, implicitly, how hard it is to topple) is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. https://stratechery.com/2014/uber-fights/