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Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

economist.com

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Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#41

Post by mjburgess »

yadco wrote: post #35

The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.

Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith.

We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government.

This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often warrented and needed.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#42

Post by daleharvey »

I remember back in the AOL days being excited about the internet and choosing it as a career because I was convinced that when it was possible for everyone in the world to openly communicate and share information that things like corruption and inequality couldn't possibly survive. Funny how that turned out.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#43

Post by 0xmohit »

> A new study finds that incumbent parties lose votes after their citizens get online.

It appears that the study doesn't factor in cases where the governments indulge in mass propaganda. Mobile internet helps disseminate information at scale instantly, and people usually don't tend to ascertain authenticity of information.

Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also do little do prevent spreading misinformation. If a government is "committed" to spreading misinformation, mobile internet makes it much easier to have a much wider reach that would be easily possible otherwise.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#44

Post by refurb »

roenxi wrote: post #36
mhoad wrote: post #3

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.

> firehose of misinformation Relative to what? The last decade has been devastating to the credibility of conventional news sources. With the advent of the internet, they are literally just ordinary people voicing badly thought out opinions and generating gossip. The number of stories that turn out to be low-key hoaxes where the story was fabricated are probably the same now as they ever were, but an order of magnitu…

I tend to agree with this take. The internet has allowed people access to alternative news sources that often cover stories that the mainstream media have deemed "unimportant". You can also get a lot more detail from well researched sources, and like you said, it often shines a spotlight on how poor a job the mainstream media does.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#45

Post by bonoboTP »

baybal2 wrote: post #5
cujo wrote: post #2

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…

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…

That Yeltsin story is a great anecdote but surely the Soviets did enough (and way more) spying to know basic and everyday facts about the US, like whether supermarket shelves are stocked. I mean, how much does it take to know this fact?

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#46

Post by C1sc0cat »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #25
inglor_cz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know. Rural areas have farms, and there are plenty of government regulations about farming - and your money is tied to these. Government is less convenient too: Just a trip to the DMV or courthouse might take 30-60 minutes of driving. 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 m…

And pretty much all developed nations have subsidy programs for farmers who are a well organised political bloc.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#47

Post by watwut »

refurb wrote: post #40
baybal2 wrote: post #5

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…

This story reminds me of when the Soviets fought their way into Germany in 1945, and eventually Berlin. The Red Army soldiers saw the wealth that Germany possessed and it pissed them off even more. They thought "why would a country this rich invade a poor country like ours?". The theory is that it was a contribution to the brutal treatment of Germans immediately before and after the end of the war (beyond the retribu…

Given how many villages were burned out as part of German expansion and ethnic cleansing, also given the nature of Stalin regime, it is quite unlikely that Russians needed to see German riches to get pissed and violent.

The second world war in the East was brutal, even more brutal then the one on the West, which was super brutal anyway.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#48

Post by baybal2 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #45
baybal2 wrote: post #5

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…

That Yeltsin story is a great anecdote but surely the Soviets did enough (and way more) spying to know basic and everyday facts about the US, like whether supermarket shelves are stocked. I mean, how much does it take to know this fact?

> I mean, how much does it take to know this fact?

I believe nothing can dispel the disbelief people outside of ex-Union feel about what you point to, other than living through that surreal time, but it was really like this.

Out of all Soviet defectors to the West, the biggest groups were: 1. diplomats, 2. spies, 3. military. All who were entitled to see that.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#49

Post by romanoderoma »

baybal2 wrote: post #34
romanoderoma wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and in fact, there are revolutions happening. it would be interesting to know who's benefiting from these revolutions it would also be interesting to understand if they really are revolutions or not I am more inclined to call them riots and I am afraid that a number of them are steered by people with very bad intentions Internet simply made propaganda easier and more effective, for the good but also for he bad p.s:…

> p.s: It's a good story, but Yeltsin went to Texas less than two months before the Berlin wall was taken down, people in USSR already knew about supermarkets at that time. Especially in East Germany. That's not the reason why they teared the wall down. I beg you thing otherwise. I spent my first 5 years of life, 1990-1995, with my mother shuttling in between a country which I would rather not name, and Russia, where…

I'm from Italy, my grandfather lived in Russia, during and soon after WWII.

I wasn't saying that Russia in the 90s was an happy place like the cocaine driven USA of the 90s.

Russia in the 90s was dealing with the ruins left by the regime.

I know of people that died because they poisoned themselves with home made vodka.

In Italy people were going crazy from all the novelties too, like any novelty people are attracted to them, you could see kids walking down the streets all dressed like Andre Agassi, all with the same haircut, even those that had no money to afford them, a friend of mine was caught many times stealing from the new mall that had recently opened in Rome.

It might surprise you, but the first mall in Rome was opened in 1989. Not so long ago.

It was fun at first, it soon became the most boring thing to do.

The first Mc Donald's in Italy was opened in Piazza di Spagna (Spanish steps) in 1987, 40 years after their first opening in the US.

The first Mc Donald's in Russia opened in 1990, not a lot of difference there.

Ironically, probably thanks to the strong US military presence, Germany had its first Mc Donald's in 1971.

There were people that saw one in Germany (probably agents from East Germany as well) 16 years before us.

Of course the difference is we could travel to US, there was no restriction for us to go there.

But on average people didn't know much about US culture up until the middle 80s.

We actually knew USSR a lot better than the US of A, just as an example see the story of Togliattigrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolyatti

They mainly knew stories about their grandfathers who went to America between the two wars.

Most of them never came back, the only read about it from letters.

But what brought USSR down wasn't the discovery of the supermarkets, it was the war in Afghanistan that left the once powerful Eastern Block with no money and forced them to declare bankruptcy.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

romanoderoma wrote: post #39
baybal2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Intellectuals" in the West think of commoners no better than CPSU members though of their "prole" chattels. 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 so…

> but that something is not that obvious to people up on the social ladder. I think that's a bit of simplification. The idea that people in charge cannot understand them it's as old as modern humanity (hence 5-6 thousands years old) I believe that a good part of that "being easily pissed" has been engineered by the same people you think are too up on the social ladder to understand. What bothers me is that most of th…

Exactly. I've noticed two types of outrage most commonly voiced by the general population on the Internet:

- Outrage about things that have no bearing on their lives. That's, in a big part, continuous dramas about what a famous person said, or - if no celebrity said anything controversial this week - about what some random people are saying. This includes drama as spectator sports - like few people get offended at each other, but it gets magnified to a million-large audience, because everyone gets offended at an offense.

- Outrage about things that have bearing on their lives, but misguided and misdirected. Knee-jerk reactions to government decisions, as well as general politics, are a lion's share of that. This is the problem with simplistic views, that manifest on the social media. If you talked with any random person individually about an issue that affects them, you could likely help them reach a nuanced position - that takes into account second-order effects, and reflects the understanding that most policy decisions involve optimizing across the entire population. But on social media, almost all you see is repeating soundbites and arguing in circles.

To a large extent, both of those types I can confidently classify as manufactured by media, traditional and social alike. Not entirely intentionally - it's a bunch of feedback loops we're stuck in[0]. But the consequence is that exposure to the hivemind can easily drag you way past "declining faith in government", and all the way to idiocy.

--

[0] - Some of the pieces from which the loops are assembled: traditional media earns money through ads, so will systematically prioritize things that generate more pageviews. Algorithms on social media optimize for engagement, which also means promoting things people are statistically likely to engage with. Humans seem to have a natural tendency to pay attention to the gossips about people of highest status. Thinking is hard, knee-jerk reactions are easy. Soundbites are easier to digest and have more immediate emotional impact than well-thought-through, nuanced arguments. Add all that together, and you get a strong, sustained pressure to dumb down our social discourse.

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