Yes. Media has been dead since the Kuwaiti girl testimony in 1990. It's done, it's over, today's scandals are just aftershocks of that turning point.
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Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
91–100 of 523 posts
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#92A meta comment on this article: I have posted this concept here, and on other social media platforms, and seen it posted as well... usually to the tune of a few upvotes... It reminds me of Keyne's General Theory, where most of the ideas had already been floated for quite a while but were always derided as "crackpot," or basically heresy. It took a well-connected elite, combined with a failure to explain the current s…
The social aspects of information propagation are anything but marginalized. The problem, as in the days of yellow journalism, is that sensation is easier to monetize than the truth and this creates opportunities for bad actors to flourish.
Of course there's a possibility for over-reaction and repression, but personally I think that the best solution is more information, in the sense of accessible trackbacks (not unlike country-of-origin food labeling) so people can see where stories originate and learn to be skeptical of stuff that comes from consistently unreliable or bizarre sources. This already happens to some extent, eg if you post content from infowars you'll be rightly mocked for using such a terrible source. The Web Annotations Standard will make this vastly easier as its deployed in browsers (anyone know about progress on that, BTW?).
As for the other problem of people choosing to stay in particular media bubbles where they're only presented with information they already agree with, that's not really going to change, but I think that's OK as long as it's easy to identify which cluster people are choosing to locate in.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#93I've been coming to resent my smartphone more and more, essentially because of this. I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful. I can compare this to the couple of tim…
I disabled all facebook notifications and I don't get wrapped in other notifications. I just check in on stuff from my desktop when I feel like it instead of feeling compelled to do so. If waiting in a lobby then I might do something on my phone or just cross my legs and meditate (yeah I'm odd).
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#94I've been coming to resent my smartphone more and more, essentially because of this. I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful. I can compare this to the couple of tim…
Don't check your work email on the go. Quit facebook. It is actually pretty simple!
I really don't understand the hate for facebook, it really is what you make it. For me, it's a glorified messaging app and nothing more. Well...Maybe also a museum of my less than attractive younger years.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#95> Choice is such a messy thing to dive deep into, because then you realize that nobody knows what it means to choose. Actually, I think I do know what it means, but I have the feeling that many people do not like the idea, that their decisions are based on past experiences and that their free will is actually just the evaluation of their perceptions (of their truth) and therefore, it is nothing that comes from some s…
>> that their decisions are based on past experiences and that their free will is actually just the evaluation of their perceptions (of their truth) This might be pretty close to the mark, actually. Our conditioning to past, even collective, social, experience can become so all encompassing that we cannot imagine something "other". Perhaps psychopaths can? And that's a pretty scary thought.
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Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#96I've been coming to resent my smartphone more and more, essentially because of this. I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful. I can compare this to the couple of tim…
For using Facebook for social events only, you can minimize your actual interaction with Facebook itself. I have my account set up to email me event invites, so it gets bundled together with other email-checking only. If you need/want to search for events, you can probably bookmark that page directly and visit it every week or something like that.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't check your work email on the go. Quit facebook. It is actually pretty simple!
This may work well for you but there are somethings that cause you to have to check email and Facebook for fear of external consequences which is what the OP is saying. For example Hangouts makes me lose at least half a hour of productity a day but if I uninstalled it and never checked it then I would never talk to all of my friends on Hangouts which is not a trade-off that I am willing to take. Same for email, if I…
For example Hangouts makes me lose at least half a hour of productity a day but if I uninstalled it and never checked it then I would never talk to all of my friends on Hangouts which is not a trade-off that I am willing to take.
A lot of people say this one (usually about Facebook), but I don't understand it. If you want to talk to those friends, why doesn't it suffice to schedule spending time with them in the same way you would have done it in 2000?
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>require major changes driven by the democratic process Marxists tell people what's best for everyone; they don't do what people want.
Funny, I would say the same thing about advertisers.
Yes but no one claimed advertising was 'driven by a democratic process'. Marxists keep telling people what they want, and of course lying to them, even as the bodies are piling up. At the centenary of Russian Revolution, with 50 million dead, it's hard to believe one can still see hammer and sickles around the place. Yet one can.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying to fix the problem of you voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities, we need to take free will out of the equation by introducing a system where resources would be centrally allocated and there would be no free will involved in what is offered for you and what you could consume, thus no distractions - you always read the content that the People'…
"voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities" That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article. "People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflate…
> go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower
That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers. If you don't like facebook, don't go there. If you don't like particular site, don't go there, of if you absolutely can't control yourself, install one of a thousand programs that let you block specific sites, and block that site. It's completely within your control. It's your responsibility to do it, to control your own actions and to bear the consequences.
You just don't want to bother - you want the Central Committee to take over, so whatever happens if not your responsibility but theirs. It is an extremely infantile approach.
> Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
OK, let it be People's Democratic Central Multi-Party Committee is that makes you feel better. The point is not how the committee is called, the point is that it would decide how resources are allocated, thus eliminating the whole pesky free will issue.
> Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.
Somehow socialist babies have been always surrounded by Soviet bathwaters, sooner or later. If one were empirically inclined, one would be tempted to conclude that there is some strong relation between the two. But of course one shouldn't forget that True Socialism (TM) has never been tried.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying to fix the problem of you voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities, we need to take free will out of the equation by introducing a system where resources would be centrally allocated and there would be no free will involved in what is offered for you and what you could consume, thus no distractions - you always read the content that the People'…
"voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities" That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article. "People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflate…
> There is an entire world of alternative possibilities out there for economic and governance systems.
Yeah, and in some way or another, every single one of them seem to end in a bloody dictatorship.
Thanks, but no thanks, please keep your "alternative possibilities" to yourself.