Media has always been a way to manipulate people. What’s different ? People love to reinforce their own beliefs on the world and what they read. They will select what to read and what to ignore. People read newspapers and would believe the things that appeal to them.
Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
21–30 of 523 posts
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#22Knowledge is the food of the soul. Problem is we are all binge eating. Edit : Good TED talk on this topic https://www.ted.com/talks/jp_rangaswami_information_is_food [2012]
I wouldn't put it that way. The problem is that a ton of the stuff impinging on us is not knowledge. It's propaganda, fluff, stupid memes, click bait, and systems with interfaces designed to be addictive and to act like Skinner boxes. What I really see happening is a "part 2" repeat of the spam apocalypse that hit e-mail, Usenet, and other federated systems on the early Internet. In the late 1990s spam destroyed most…
This is an insightful comment and I can't understand the down-votes.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#23As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we're effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like "distraction". But when you look at it…
> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or pr…
In London there are adverts on the steps I walk up on the underground. The busker spots are "sponsored". It's like the Clockwork Orange "aversion therapy" in terms of making you watch. I'm very aware of what the media is doing but it has to get through on some level. Much of advertising is telling you that you are incomplete and product x will complete you / cement friendships etc. Of course that is crap, but even just being told the first part has to have an effect.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or pr…
That raises interesting questions -- how much free will does an addict have? Are those who exploit an addiction for profit complicit in that addiction?
>Are those who exploit an addiction for profit complicit in that addiction?
When it comes to drug law, precedent would show that they are far more culpable than the user/addict.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#25One can argue that this isn't really anything new - look back at the media hype for war surrounding an explosion of a certain U.S. warship. In 1898. Amusing, how the most vaunted prize in journalism is named for one of the most famous perpetrators of yellow journalism. Social media is merely a slimmer middle man in that frenzied feedback loop, and the legacy media is upset that their slice of the pie is shrinking.
Or the way that religions dominated the attentions of earlier times--with the occasional social surplus being squandered on cathedral building, crusades, heresy and it's suppression, pilgrimages, self-mortification etc.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#26As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we're effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like "distraction". But when you look at it…
> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or pr…
Exactly. If you can't consciously choose to turn off your phone and go read a book, you never had anything that remotely resembles free will.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or pr…
In London there are adverts on the steps I walk up on the underground. The busker spots are "sponsored". It's like the Clockwork Orange "aversion therapy" in terms of making you watch. I'm very aware of what the media is doing but it has to get through on some level. Much of advertising is telling you that you are incomplete and product x will complete you / cement friendships etc. Of course that is crap, but even ju…
First company that integrates something like Google glasses and adblock gets my money.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#28People build a model of their world based on stimuli.
You cannot be present everywhere so you trust other people to perceive things for you.
That trust is often abused by injecting bias. And this is done to exert influence over people.
Same trust is abused to certain extent by historians through revisionism.
Same trust is abused by organized religion, where they control the rules of how you get favored by supreme beings. In some cases those rules are intrincated and arbitrary, like wasting your life building a pyramid, or entering a structure designated as temple every week, or believing other people belong to a better caste (where coincidentally the religious caste is usually at the top).
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#29> 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.
Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will
#30Reminder: you have a choice. You can turn off Facebook, the media, et. al. and regain your focus.