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Was everyone stupid back then?

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Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#61

Post by chris_wot »

unconed wrote: post #47
lotu wrote: post #18

The unsaid implication of this comic is that getting rid of the internet would make society better. It would NOT. The ability to have rapid peer to peer communication with anyone on the planet is a good thing. BLM, LGBT rights, disability rights are causes that have thrived thanks to the Internet. The Internet did not cause fascism and any suggestion that it does ignored all of the 20th century.

Quoted post unavailable.

That “drug addict” was murdered.

LGB rights aren’t being curtailed by transgenderism, but I’d argue that if a large part of your identity is wrapped up around ideas of gender, then you might not want the “T” part of LGBT to gain any traction.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#62

Post by bragr »

YazIAm wrote: post #17

"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?" I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became op…

>The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.

Yes it is crazy and we need to wake up to that. Just look around, people have access to all sorts of information and divergent opinions but that doesn't help. Trumpers have access to CNN. Liberals have access to Truth. Antivaxers can go read all the vaccine studies and doctors and academics could lurk in forums skeptical of modern medicine. Simply making these available online does not force people to seek out the correct information or interact with people with diverging opinions.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#63

Post by eru »

what_the_h321 wrote: post #25
jfengel wrote: post #16

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” Douglas Adams thought he was joking.

Do you have an example of a bloodier war than the World War 1 and 2?

You might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Though you might want to look at your wars by death toll as percentage of total population?

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#64

Post by lob_it »

Shared404 wrote: post #51
lob_it wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social problems == culture divide It makes it funny when illiterates try to culture clump :)

There's more than just culture divide. People being manipulated by giant propaganda networks to hate each other more and more and prevent progress from being made is an age old social _problem_. E: Removed comment about being a throwaway, appears to just be a new account. Sorry about that.

No post body was provided.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#65

Post by smolder »

pharke wrote: post #29
newZWhoDis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”

I think the problem with this vision isn't that "people talking to each other won't prevent violence" it's that people posting text, images, and video is not the same as people talking to each other. Even a video call is not the same as talking to someone in person. It's hard to build empathy and connection with someone you can't make eye contact with.

I think that the medium of communication is not the main problem with this idea. I say that as someone who has had & still has strong relationships formed and maintained almost entirely through text. This has been going on for centuries, with pen pals and written correspondence in general. People vary and I think not everyone has the same need for physical proximity and nonverbal comms like eye contact. (In my case you could probably go further to say I don't interpret well or express well in non-verbal communication channels.)

Rather, while bringing people together in virtual spaces does probably help different peoples see each other with empathy, and diminish tribalistic attitudes... The wrong people are in the chat. Every nation that goes to war is itself fractured into classes. The people who send a nation to war are different from those on the battlefield. Empathy for the enemy on the part of soldiers doesn't prevent them being compelled to violence.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#66

Post by blackshaw »

what_the_h321 wrote: post #25
jfengel wrote: post #16

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” Douglas Adams thought he was joking.

Do you have an example of a bloodier war than the World War 1 and 2?

WWII wasn't the bloodiest conflict when you adjust for world population at the time. E.g. the Mongol Conquests or An Lushan Rebellion probably killed more.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#67

Post by c7b »

ktwbc wrote: post #4

This actually reminds me of a quote in the book The Victorian Internet about the development of the telegraph. Part of the push of the first undersea cable to connect the US and European countries was a belief that with more instant communication there would be no misunderstandings and therefore no more wars. So this belief has been going on a long time.

My understanding was that the primary motivation to build those communication channels was to gain an edge on the stock markets. I don't know about the telegraph, but for radio I remember reading that that was the reason JP Morgan was financing Tesla, and he was mightily annoyed when he got scooped by Marconi.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#68

Post by spiffytech »

derbOac wrote: post #30
shubhamjain wrote: post #6

Did people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world fro…

I think you'd get different responses from different people but this comic didn't ring true for me because I don't recall the sort of optimism about information sharing it claims. I'm sure someone could point to some quotes and some evidence of it happening but I don't remember that being the dominant theme. For every techno optimist there were probably an equal number of people terrified of their kids downloading po…

The final panel in the comic is an allusion to the "wisdom of the crowds". To my recollection, for a while people were very excited about how it was going to make a lot of everyday things better.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#69

Post by clolege »

> We thought anonymous people saying what they thought in a public forum would lead to the best idea getting shared the most

This is true in some parts of the internet, such as Hacker News and Reddit. The key seems to be good signal/noise moderation and users able to amplify content with cardinal voting (upvotes/downvotes).

I'm constantly finding great, new ideas between the two websites (especially when combined with search) and sharing them with others.

On other sites.. it seems as though the drive to engage users ($$) and a lack of a "downvote" option allows the flame-bait/low-brow/spammy content to take center stage. Which eventually drives users away (-$$).

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#70

Post by photochemsyn »

I don't know if anybody really thought this about the Internet back in the early days, say the 1980s, when networks were mostly restricted to academic institutions, large corporations and banks, and military communications:

https://networkencyclopedia.com/networking-history-1980/

The military had in past decades (60s and 70s) funded a lot of research into a networked system that would hopefully allow communications to survive a nuclear war, not exactly a utopian future vision:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET

Few if any were thinking that networking was going to lead to some social utopia due to the ease of communication among groups of people online - although ease of information sharing was recognized as a big plus in academics, at least. The introduction of the bulletin board system, and then usenet, mostly seemed to be about technically savvy people sharing information, some games, etc.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-we-talk-online-a-history-o...

Then came the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the sale of ads, the rise of engagement metrics, and realization that there was nothing quite as effective as outrage porn (i.e. 'look at these terrible people and what they're doing! Tell everyone what you think about it!' )for drawing repeat users to your site. That's really when it went all sour.

I think the whole 'the Internet will bring people together in a beneficial way' theme was just a revisionist history put out by the PR people at outfits like Twitter and Facebook to put a patina of do-gooderness over what was essentially a predatory business model. I don't think such views were being widely promoted in the 1980s or early 1990s, at least I can't seem to find any such optimistic articles from that period.

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