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Why we crave internet justice

nytimes.com

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Re: Why we crave internet justice

#31

Post by noduerme »

Ambolia wrote: post #7

Consensus building doesn't work without centralized mass media. People just have to get used to have different groups with different values inside the same country and be ok with that. Decentralized chains of trust will grow, which was the norm before mass media appeared. Either that, or centralization will reassert itself brutally and force a new consensus.

I don't think democracy can survive if people in a nation can't form a consensus on basic features of shared, objective reality.

This type of consensus did exist, and could be reached, in the 1770s, long before centralized mass media. The creation of competing "chains of trust", which see an election as legitimate or illegitimate, a virus as dangerous or fabricated, is actually only possible by the manipulation of mass media. And social media very much is mass media. It's just a version in which propaganda is funneled through the mouths of its target audience.

Re: Why we crave internet justice

#32

Post by hrh »

Ambolia wrote: post #7

Consensus building doesn't work without centralized mass media. People just have to get used to have different groups with different values inside the same country and be ok with that. Decentralized chains of trust will grow, which was the norm before mass media appeared. Either that, or centralization will reassert itself brutally and force a new consensus.

See Fareed Zakaria's work on the importance of responsible elites. Or Plato, if you're feeling frisky.

Re: Why we crave internet justice

#33

Post by hrh »

noduerme wrote: post #31
Ambolia wrote: post #7

Consensus building doesn't work without centralized mass media. People just have to get used to have different groups with different values inside the same country and be ok with that. Decentralized chains of trust will grow, which was the norm before mass media appeared. Either that, or centralization will reassert itself brutally and force a new consensus.

I don't think democracy can survive if people in a nation can't form a consensus on basic features of shared, objective reality. This type of consensus did exist, and could be reached, in the 1770s, long before centralized mass media. The creation of competing "chains of trust", which see an election as legitimate or illegitimate, a virus as dangerous or fabricated, is actually only possible by the manipulation of ma…

We can with a shift towards the Switzerland model, but practically, that's very difficult to do.

Re: Why we crave internet justice

#35

Post by haswell »

hrh wrote: post #33
noduerme wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think democracy can survive if people in a nation can't form a consensus on basic features of shared, objective reality. This type of consensus did exist, and could be reached, in the 1770s, long before centralized mass media. The creation of competing "chains of trust", which see an election as legitimate or illegitimate, a virus as dangerous or fabricated, is actually only possible by the manipulation of ma…

We can with a shift towards the Switzerland model, but practically, that's very difficult to do.

Will you expand on this? Switzerland's model of what?

Re: Why we crave internet justice

#37

Post by lanstin »

Lendal wrote: post #16
exo-pla-net wrote: post #10

This article doesn't tell you why people are awful online. It hypothesizes that we respond to petty wrongdoers the same way we'd respond to war criminals, and that we further have been corrupted by exposure to too much bad news.

This story belongs to a greater category of stories with headlines that start with the word "Why..." promising an answer but never delivering. They're very nice stories. Very descriptive and well-written. But the headline is a bait-and-switch. The honest headline here would be, "Why Are People So Awful Online?" but the honest headline wouldn't get as many clicks. I hate the Internet.

Just so you know, even in print media the author does not generally pick the title. The title might tell you something about the general subject of the essay but you shouldn’t take it as a precise metadata. The predates the internet. Start reading based on the general topic. The first few lines (the “lede”) will tell you if you want to read the whole thing.

Re: Why we crave internet justice

#40

Post by tomjen3 »

Ambolia wrote: post #7

Consensus building doesn't work without centralized mass media. People just have to get used to have different groups with different values inside the same country and be ok with that. Decentralized chains of trust will grow, which was the norm before mass media appeared. Either that, or centralization will reassert itself brutally and force a new consensus.

Before mass media you had media delivered via Mass through the Catholic church, which was substantially the same in not just the entire country, but in all countries.

Getting out of this was a century of real and cultural warfare that ultimately resulted in some of the first rights of countries, because forcing the centralization at the point of a gun was just not worth it.

Mass media is a much more recent, much more short term and much less powerful (there never was a newspaper czar and Walter Duranty could at most destroy your career, not burn you at the stake for telling the truth).

My point is that humans have had different groups with different values living inside the same countries for a long time before they considered themselves to be members of that nation, this is going back to what was normal, not reverting to something that is new.

Of course living with these separate groups wasn't exactly peaceful or without discrimination.

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