Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, I ducked out. The title as well.
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What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
181–190 of 232 posts
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#182This article has some good points, but it also suffers a lot from the author's extremely narrow horizons: - It's very US-centric. Public universities are AFAIK free or very cheap in Germany for example. The reason for rising costs in the US is in large part about cuts to government support for higher education. - It's very upper-middle-class in perspective, with no understanding of anyone who isn't doing well. Americ…
> In the 20th century, in the US alone, you could point to the suffragettes, organized labor at different times, the KKK (4 million members at peak in 1920s!), the multitude of different workers' groups of all political stripes (from veterans' march to IWW organizers to wacky retirement-lottery scheme whose details I forget) who pushed FDR to eventually offer the New Deal to counter-act the rising tide of protest, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam-war protests, Stonewall and the gay rights movement... on and on and on.
Most of these were borne from trusted institutions:
* Organized labor WAS an institution of its own.
* The resurgence of the KKK in the 20th century was inspired by the Hollywood film Birth of a Nation.
* The Civil Rights Movement was largely organized by institutions like the NAACP and partially borne out of organized religion.
* Popular opposition to the Vietnam War, as explicitly addressed in the article, came largely from the influence of mass media, Walter Cronkite in particular.
* Most of the political movements of the late 1960's and early 1970's were comprised primarily of university students--in other words, they were also incubated (unwittingly, to be fair!) by established institutions.
Many of the rest is stuff that probably seems bigger in retrospect. For example, the Stonewall riots took place in 1969, the same year as the moon landing and Woodstock and one year after the Tet Offensive and the assassinations of both RFK and MLK. It probably didn't make a big impact on the culture at the time. According to a Google ngrams search (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=stonewall%2C%2...), the phrase "Stonewall" didn't have a large uptick in terms of being written about in books until the 1980's, over a decade after the riot itself. (Most of the usages prior to then, and probably many of them even after, are likely references to General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.)
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get why you'd think it's rude/unnecessary, but I don't think it's a generalization to say it's very unlikely that anywhere near half of the audience of a blog post like this is on Team Trump. I'm sure there are Trump supporters that read and digest this kind of content regularly, but any familiarity with the typical cultural attitudes and media consumption patterns of Trump supporters makes it obvious that that's f…
There's plenty of Trump supporters in silicon valley. We may be democrats previously, but we really like what Trump did against China, even though the large corporations (who owns mass media) hated the move. Trump rejuvenated the economy, increased competitiveness of American firms, and helped to increase jobs and wages for American workers. He stood up against dictatorship China and is winning the trade war. He is a…
He didn't "rejuvenate" the economy. He doubled the deficit and the economy is still growing more or less as fast as it was under Obama. His actions are going to make the next recession worse.
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask yourself this: how do you know what the average Trump supporter's media diet consists of?
I know that every Trump supporter I know gets a hell of a lot from Fox and Facebook. They tend to spout off talking points about how Liberals are bad and this is bad and that is bad, without solutions or actual, practical proposals on making the country better. The status quo on healthcare is not an option. Deporting every "illegal" is not an option. Banning Muslims is not an option. I don't think Trump supporters ar…
Do you ever stop and check how closely the things you believe line up with reality, or if there might be some things you're overlooking?
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? You genuinely think it's plausible that roughly half of the readers of this blogpost are Trump supporters? I'm really not taking an outlandish stance here... this post will have most of its traffic driven by HackerNews and Reddit, where California is an outsized plurality of the American audience, which went overwhelmingly to Clinton in 2016 (and even more overwhelmingly so in the densest parts of California…
Ask yourself this: how do you know what the average Trump supporter's media diet consists of?
I've read internet comments from many of them, met a few of them, and am friends with one. My friend regularly sends me articles from Brietbart and other conspiracy mongering outlets who write entire articles based on Jason Wohl tweets. People who consume /r/The_Donald, chain emails, and propaganda outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and the like are Trump's base. They are typically not podcast-listening thinkpiece-reading latte-sipping yuppies.
Here, watch this BBC video [1] where they interview Trump voters about their views on the "mainstream media" (by which you quickly realize they mean anything that doesn't deal in pure pro-Trump anti-librul propaganda). Here's an article [2] on a study showing that pro-Trump people specifically like to consume fake news shared via Facebook.
But personally I didn't really need a study to tell me any of that -- how do I know? I live and breathe and observe the world and people around me...
And yes, this is a generalization and not true of every single Trump voter. Obviously. All I really claimed was that Trump supporters will definitely be a minority of readers of a blog like this.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-38191313/no-tr...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/06/sharing-f...
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the core issue here is the elephant in the room in tech that noone wants to talk about. The tech industry has put most of it's money making eggs in the ads basket. This means companies selling ads are promoting the kind of mass information spread that is sensationalist because it gets their ads the most views, and the tech community makes money off of this. How well do ads actually work? I really don't know.…
I agree with you that the ad models which are all about maximizing engagement are a problem, but I think that the article is trying to say that those sorts of models are inevitable given how the internet works. Like suppose no websites did ads at all and they all worked on a subscription model or something similar. Then you'd still have websites trying to get more eyeballs, because more attention means more subscribe…
I get your point, but I think it's lazy (not of you, I mean the entire tech community) to take on this assumption "those sorts of models are inevitable given how the internet works" How does the internet work where the only way to make money is to make money off of ads? That's the only ranking system possible? That's now how y combinator works yet there's a pretty aggressive ranking system on how even these comments are ranked and what is shown first to the user. What if we are were rewarded directly based on the quality/relevancy of our comments using a ranking system similar to this one or in general a quality based ranking system, or really anything with even a slightly democratic approach to it.
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#187For anyone just skimming comments - this is a very well written, well researched, thoughtful, and objective piece. That's pretty rare in today's climate. Definitely worth the read. It's the first time I can remember signing up for a newsletter voluntarily, despite my general distaste for those types of popovers.
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Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#188> Big brands are losing share of America’s GDP pie
A data about GDP share would be very nice but is missing.
Companies who own these brands are not losing anything. Brands are imaginary things, they aren't real. The real P&G company who manufactures and sells stuff is doing OK.
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're taking a characterization of Trump supporters created by the media for entertainment assuming that is the world writ large.
Really? You genuinely think it's plausible that roughly half of the readers of this blogpost are Trump supporters? I'm really not taking an outlandish stance here... this post will have most of its traffic driven by HackerNews and Reddit, where California is an outsized plurality of the American audience, which went overwhelmingly to Clinton in 2016 (and even more overwhelmingly so in the densest parts of California…
> long-form data driven thinkpieces
That's not the same as "content posted to HN and Reddit".
TBH, you're probably right that this article is going to have a viewership where supporting Trump is less likely.
The pushback you're getting is that you didn't make that claim, you made a claim that implied the Trump voter base was not interested in "long-form data driven thinkpieces", which is a brand of hubris that many are getting tired of.
Re: What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, the underlying assumption is that the revolt against elite policy preferences, not only in the U.S. but in Europe and elsewhere, is entirely devoid of rational motivation. It discounts without comment the possibility that the pre-internet style of governance had substantive problems which the working class didn't like (e.g. globalization leading to a race to the bottom in manufacturing wages). I…
I didn't get that from TFA either. If anything, the author seemed somewhat positive about the implications.
"we’re moving from a narrative oligopoly to a narrative democracy"
That was pretty clear to me that the past had plenty of problems.