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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

#81

Post by x87678r »

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 think about this a lot, esp with wars. In the old days it seemed easy to get everyone to sign up and attack some other country where now people are more likely to know someone from other countries/races/religions and get to see what is actually happening.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#82

Post by chasd00 »

daleharvey wrote: post #42

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.

technology can't fix the refined brutality in humanity's DNA overnight.

Deep down at a very basic level humanity probably perceives this level of connectedness as a threat and that's a very bad spot for anything in the universe to find itself in.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#83

Post by AI_WAIFU »

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…

I think you also need a 4th point.

4. A clear and unambiguous heirarchy of power.

When who's in charge of the project is unambiguous, the head committee/bdfl can (relatively) easily tell all the haters to fuck off and focus on the main objectives of the project. But with IRL governments, people who appear useful are put into power rather than those who actually are useful, because they're accountable to a massive hoard of people who often barely understand the complexity of the issues that the people in charge face.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#84

Post by tzs »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #22
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.

With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example). Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your scho…

> With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though.

No, with internet you have a much higher chance of being able to find out that a particular thing is misinformation if you put in the time and effort to research it.

But also because of internet you are exposed to a much higher percentage of false information than before, because internet lowered the cost of producing and disseminating false information much more than it lowered the cost of producing and disseminating true information.

And with social media, which is one of the biggest ways false information gets spread, taking up a large fraction of a lot of people's time outside of work they rarely find the time to research the information they get.

Even if you do take the time to try to research the latest false information, there is a decent chance you won't find anything because refuting a false claim takes longer than making a false claim. By the time the debunking is available, there is a good chance you've moved on to something else and are no longer interested. When the false information shows up again on your social media, it is no longer new to you and the chance you'll try again to vet it is much lower.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#85

Post by gameswithgo »

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…

I think it has more to do with how quickly trolls can spread insane memes than anything like this. Flat earth, QAnon, pizza pedos. People have insanity trying to get in their heads all day.

I bet it isn't just government people trust less since mobile internet, but everything.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#87

Post by save_ferris »

mjburgess wrote: post #41
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 wa…

We also have no interest reading about when government performs a task ahead of schedule or under-budget, and almost nobody takes the time to actually look through government reports, budgets, etc. to see what’s going on, even though almost all of it is public.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#88

Post by classified »

ergl wrote: post #26

Authority rests on information control. High status roles generally depend on access to and control over the dominant communication channels of the time. [...] 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…

That's very insightful. He practically predicted The Donald and his wrestling with social media over how much he can lie and spread hatred online unchallenged (although that latter part is very much explicit).

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#89

Post by mjburgess »

luckylion wrote: post #78
mjburgess wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

> Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be,…

The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working.

It is incredibly difficult for a society to function as smoothly as any western country does. It is miraculous to people in many nations that there can be such things as timetables at all.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#90

Post by AlexandrB »

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…

> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"

This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.

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