The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_She...

I can't see how this is valid at all. We know that polls give biased results unless you are very careful with the sampling. Here people are self-selecting for a poll (eg via mechanical turk). Then you apply a highly contrived scenario that they are googling about a candidate. Then you ask them a bunch of questions, immediately, and proceed to draw wide ranging conclusions designed to increase your self-importance as much as possible. I mean, seriously, it's worse than useless.

This article is also written as if these findings are earth shattering. After conducting a small, biased, invalid study (Asking people in San Diego about an Australian election? How does that generalize to anything?) and finding a large effect Epstein says 'We did not immediately uncork the Champagne bottle'. Is that how psychology research is conducted? Researchers toasting large implausible effects in small biased samples that have no external validity?

Flagged.

What a quaint boogey man this "Search Engine Manipulation Effect" is. It even has it's own obscure little acronym, SEME, to appear more relevant.

I learned about the subtle effects of advertising by the time I was in fourth grade, and certainly understood how to ignore them by middle school.

Back when special holographic foil comic book covers and trading cards were new, I had already figured out that all of these "collectibles" were mass-produced, and would never wind up as valuable as, say Action Comics Issue#1, despite so many claims otherwise. This was something you could kind of figure out on your own. If your were easily amused by shiny objects though, you might not arrive at the same conclusion.

Meanwhile anyone could figure out that the influence of single frame inserts in movies was as potent and realistic as the subliminal messaging in John Carpenter's Sci-fi movie, THEY LIVE.

So too, with Search Engines.

Figure if a fourth grader can figure out the shenanigans of opinion and belief influence in advertising, and unravel the bullshit of religion before high school ends, then this other newer form of bullshit is similarly debunked by comparable intellects. If you're so stupid that you buy into bullshit, without multiple channels of factual verification, you're your own worst enemy.

Okay, okay, maybe this is good reading material for an elementary school classroom assignment, focused on current events. Sure, why not?

I was hoping this would be about technological manifestations of psychic telepathy through malicious use of functional MRI systems.

Bah!

I agree that in many ways the internet looks sad compared to what it was, but I don't think hope is lost.