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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

#51

Post by 082349872349872 »

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?

1976 soviet TV docco about New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2_olezbbA Didn't see any supermarkets, closest I found in a quick scrub was a shopping bag at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2_olezbbA&t=1100

San Francisco supermarket in Little Italy getting plenty of deliveries? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swdtgcaFess&t=1085

California (1974) orchards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytE_RDrsmMg&t=445 and of course, the Mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytE_RDrsmMg&t=1127

Also no supermarkets along the 1976 Mississippi, but they did make it to the French Quarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7xo7rtSwwI&t=1615

Luxury shopping in Dallas (1978) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCQzMJd4kiM&t=1942

No supermarkets in Pittsburg (1975) but for some reason they went to the unemployment lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgfq1isLUUI&t=1200

Los Angeles, with more Disneyland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmZMJvFVKiA&t=2725 (and wide freeways with lots of cars)

1974 DC has plenty of monuments, white house, pentagon, protestors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvy2fYVs5iw (but the cars have changed in the intervening half century)

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#52

Post by agumonkey »

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'd question the notion of information, and how it used to be before free high bandwidth communications compared to now.

I feel we're sinking in a flood of noise dressed as information. There's more doubts and paradox of choice at every level. Add to this the fact that most people have only access to 'some' information .. they're not informed about some principles (like the paradox of choice) and will not be able to filter or integrate that much thus react on wrong information.

The old system was foggy and absolute truth was surely impossible but it feels structurally more sound to me.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#53

Post by op03 »

Super_Jambo wrote: post #21
op03 wrote: post #12

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…

Can you expand upon point 3? I do not really follow sports.

There are a lot of different things but basically in Team sports its "easier" to get agreement on division of labor, on leadership, coordination and communication, individual strengths and weaknesses etc because the group has someone external to beat or atleast there is agreement on what a team "win" is.

So we try to nail that down and keep having conversations about it. It then has effect on how we coordinate, give and take, decide who leads etc

Without those conversations to provide some framework, it turns into a free for all, which reduces trust/faith in the group, esp when some new group or individual joins that have their own ideas and goals.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#54

Post by mgkimsal »

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…

> What does it matter to the proletarians if a famous person (say an actor) says something pro or against Brexit (for example). You have your vote, you cast it and that's what really matters to your category: representation.

Sort of in agreement with you, but on this, I think there's good reason to be concerned with something like this. If people with social influence disagree with your position and are public about it, they are in a position to influence more people than you can, and your position is less likely to be heard/adopted/enacted/etc.

I'm not sure that's actually why people get upset/involved when famous people hold opposing views - I think it's probably something more visceral - but I can say I don't want views in opposition to mine to get amplified favorable treatment in the media.

Perhaps secondarily, people get upset with famous folks holding opposing views because it ruins our perceptions of them. We often think we 'know' famous people on some level, and when they break out of the model we have of them, it's bothersome.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#55

Post by ben_w »

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?

The spies would know, but would they risk taking their handlers for fear or being accused of being corrupted by capitalism? Ditto upward every level of the chain.

You don’t even need to fear being shipped off to Siberia; judging by the news, the current administrations of both the USA and the UK are making people afraid to tell them the inevitable consequences of their decisions, and that’s just fear of losing their current jobs.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#56

Post by refurb »

watwut wrote: post #47
refurb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. That's why I said "pissed them off even more" and didn't say "that's why they were pissed".

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#57

Post by solarexplorer »

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?

It is not the same to know something from a book or tv and experiencing it in first person. * Just ask any person from east Germany who went to the west after the wall came down. Even though they knew it all from tv etc, actually being there and seeing it themselves made a huge impression on everybody. After that the communist elites in the east were immediately powerless.

* I was one of those persons and I can assure you that it was very impressive and changed everything...

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#58

Post by LatteLazy »

People have faith in things because they need to, not because those things work. This is why people refuse to accept that prayer doesn't work. This is why in the 50s governments were corrupt, incompetent, wasteful, racist (plus all the other prejudices imaginable) and yet people had huge faith in them.

When you live in a rural village and can't really communicate or interact beyond the village, you NEED to believe there is a government out there keeping things working, keeping the enemy away and running stuff. So you do.

When you get a mobile phone and need to complain about something and talk about how you're a self made person and how those bozos in are IDIOTS, and it seems like you can access more resources by complaining louder, guess what you believe then?

That's a big part of the rise of neoliberalism: the modern economy requires us all to be self starters and entrepreneurial (or at least to switch jobs regularly and make out own way in the world). To do that, it really helps to think of government and other people as morons and obstacles and yourself the a randian hero of you're own story. So we believe that. Because belief isn't based on evidence, its based on utility.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

himinlomax wrote: post #24
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.

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.

> or terrorim radicalization of the 2000s.

I think this is interesting in context of "moral panic" - in that this actually happened, just not the way (I think) you mean. The misinformation surrounding the events of the first decade of this century has radicalized Westerners - made the western societies a couple orders of magnitude more afraid of terrorism than it's warranted. And this had political implications.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#60

Post by pydry »

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…

Time magazine once bragged on its cover how the US helped Yeltsin win the election: https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/yanks-to-the-rescue-time...

He was essentially Russia's Trump although a) probably a lot more in America's pocket than vice versa and b) it's difficult to overstate how much Russia suffered under him. They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously.

Now, if you imagine an alcoholic Trump who has wreaked massive havoc on the economy, driving Americans into poverty going on a state visit to Russia and fawning over, for example, a caviar tasting... how would you interpret that?

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