21–30 of 162 posts
Dont we see this with open source? More people show up. More people can find issues. Many more people can find issues than can fix them. The bug tracker bloats. Core team members get called incompetent every 2 hrs. As a counter reaction some core team members get it into their head, to share less or react in unhelpful ways that have long term costs and things go back and forth in waves. We have a few rules at work. 1…
Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in count…
“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something.
Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet p…
At least Yeltsin's (why Elzin?) observations are probably quite accurate. But nowadays it seems like people are getting mad based on partial information (sometimes just 140 characters) or lies and misinformation. For example the paranoia against Muslims is based on incorrect perceptions of how many Muslims there are: https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-re... , and this on top of the perception t…
I'd say common people are even better than them at making thought connections when things relate to daily life, and something obvious.
I highly, highly doubt that you can make somebody truly "mad with 140 characters," Most proletarians who go on fuming these days are ones who genuinely are pissed off at something very obvious to them about the government, but that something is not that obvious to people up on the social ladder, who only see what is on the surface, like the calls to "burn those A, or B, or C on the stake."
Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in count…
“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in count…
It is also possible that people in rural areas tend to have less contact with the government in general - after all, most government activity takes place in the capital and other big cities. And in absence of contact, people do not really have strong opinions. But once information arrives, things change. Prior to mass media, few Americans would be strongly opinionated on the internal dealings of Washington D.C. Simpl…
I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
[...]
Of all social roles, those of hierarchy are affected most by new patterns of information flow. The loss of information control undermines traditional authority figures. Further, because information control is an implicit rather than an explicit aspect of high status, the changes in hierarchy are surrounded by confusion and despair.
[...]
Many Americans are still hoping for the emergence of an old-style, dynamic "great leader." Yet electronic media of communication are making it almost impossible to find one. There is no lack of potential leaders, but rather an overabundance of information about them. The great leader image depends on mystification and careful management of public impressions. Through television, we see too much of our politicians, and they are losing control over their images and performances. As a result, our political leaders are being stripped of their aura and are being brought closer to the level of the average person.
– From Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place, 1989
Isn't this a modern version of Plato's Cave Allegory[1]? People being deprived of the truth and free information have no alternative but to blindly believe whatever you(the government) will tell them, North Korea style. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
Hitchens did interviews in the eastern block during the 80s. Everyone knew Kafka, it turned out, once they felt safe letting you know they knew it. Vice news did a tour of Assad's territory at the height of the civil war. Propaganda at the highest levels, with people expected to believe a fiction in extreme contrast to reality. A policeman said to the journalist: "this is 1984 and I am Winston Smith."
It's not easy to put people into Plato's cave.
Reality is more complex than this. When people learn the truth, get woke, take the red pill (note these are all modern references to the cave)... it almost always involves shaking or adopting a complex worldview. Facts play a part, but narrative plays a bigger part. So does emphasis, etc.
Or maybe we're all still in that cave, and the internet just projects some new shapes we haven't seen before. New shapes, new shadows, new wisemen telling us what they mean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
That should be a good hint to reconsider your assumption that misinformation is that big of a problem. This "fake news" nonsense has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, in line with satanic abuse of the 80s or terrorim radicalization of the 2000s. Not to say it's not an actual problem, but it seems to me to be more of an excuse for the ole' media gatekeepers to do whatever to hang onto their power.
I mean, you do realize that FB itself has admitted that it’s network was used and misused in the genocide of the Rohingya for example? Or that widespread fake news on its platforms in India has led to many a false murder? Or that malignant agencies used its network to manipulate people with false news in both US and UK elections?
The list is long, but the point is that unlike the satanic scare of the 80s there have been very real and negative effects.
Also, no “old media” outlet ever had billions of users, of which it was able to build detailed individual psychological profiles which they could then use to target for misinformation.
The idea that old media’s access is simply passing onto Facebook is beyond ridiculous. FB and the like have created an information and manipulation monster the likes of which the world has never seen.
It's kind of ironic that people educated in social science tend to have idealistic or just legible, few factor theories about something this complex. I mean complex in the strong sense. Early theories were about "access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation. " Current theories are about foreign and domestic intelligence manipulating social media. The internet is an era. Eras have a lot going on. The way…
Decentralization != chaos. On the contrary, it can be far more stable for the forces of coordination, allowing for greater production of knowledge and intelligent action.
See Wikipedia.