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How Twitter poisoned politics

prospectmagazine.co.uk

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Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#6
post #4

The medium is the message.

I'd love to re-read McCluhan with Twitter and Facebook in mind – but I'll be honest: I've struggled every time I've tried to get through his writings.

I took a stab at a more readable McLuhanite interpretation of Facebook a few years ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#7
Whatever is broken is an opportunity to create something better. Problems wont cause a retreat to three TV networks. It wasn't long ago that we had Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities.

The next 20 years will see a fascinating evolution in this space. Nobody should think that competition is over, or that these platforms have won. These issues should feel very exciting to folks in technology.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#9
Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet. I know enough people that have gone from "totally outwardly normal" to "detached-from-reality, Hillary Clinton is a lizard person" (this isn't an exaggeration, yes, people I know in real life appear to sincerely think this) and I'm struggling to think of what else could contribute to such seeming mass psychosis. It's more than just propaganda, it's people deliberately abandoning critical thinking.
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