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. Focus on solutions over reactions.
2. It becomes easy to take advantage of weaknesses in people and squander their strengths, so try as much to do the opposite.
3. Have a plan to handle highly ambitious people before they show up. Don't start wondering what to do after someone with more energy/drive/talent/resource shows up and wants to take over everything, which will keep happening as networks expand.
For this we treat things like sports teams, which have to deal with a whole spectrum of highly driven people and get them to work in sync. Works out some days and blows up in our face on others.
There is no free lunch with transparency and growing networks. Just lot of tradeoffs.
I don't know if government is comparable with open source. Open spurce is like an ideal utopian society where everyone wants to see the project work well and have different ideas for how.
Government has a lot of corruption, people who don't care about their jobs and the stakes are much more personal - greater personal wealth and power at stake.
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.
People who consider themselves driven, ambitious, and intelligent often struggle to deal with teams/projects where results come from people working together instead of from one gracious person heroically dragging everyone through to the end. They have to learn to trust that everyone is there for a reason and it's not always immediately obvious.
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.
I'm inclined to agree it's not limited to government, but what's incredible about fringe theories is that the very same people who espouse "trust no-one" also lend enormous amounts of credibility to terrible sources.
Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind them. Trusting no one isn't feasible, so all we're doing is transferring trust, on the basis on anecdote at best and usually just memes, from organisations with flawed but improvable accountability to organisations with none whatsoever.
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 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.
It's also important to note that many of the people responsible for the Internet as we know it had known left- or right-libertarian leanings. The Internet destroys people's faith in government because the people who created the Internet fought long and hard to ensure it would do so.
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).
I would flip it the other way and say he predicted the mainstream media's need to discredit his use of social media since social media is threatening their position as the dominate communication channel with the masses.
Trump lies, but I have seen very little evidence that he lies more than any previous president.
The things he lies about are precisely the "Great Leader" style attempts to improve his image.
To me, that is much preferable to lying in order to push us into another Middle East war.
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 countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities."
They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government."
— 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 people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ”
The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening.
What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later:
— “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.
Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA.
The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world.
Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.)
Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run.
The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.
Travel to Europe is still eye opening experience. People not stressed out, quite happy and relaxed. It feels safe, something that's not possible to buy.
In west Ukraine a lot of people been there. I think that's what divided country. In no way I am going to support pro Russia policy once I've been to Europe.
Citizens visiting prosperous neighbor country is worst enemy of authoritarian regime.
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?
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 retribution for the German atrocities in the East).
there was a similar sort of story (maybe was it in wired?) that american television was treated as a fantasy until the opening credits of some popular tv show maybe in the credits panned out to see thousands of unfaked homes, each with a swimming pool.
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: 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.
We in Italy knew about American malls and supermarkets, we had them but we usually didn't use them as much as we do today to buy groceries because our culture was based on local smaller shops selling fresh food.
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 that having Muslims in the community is a negative thing.
Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".
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?
“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 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.
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 think the agrument is against slanting the conclusion as creating distrust without significant evidence. Voting out incumbents does not necessarily equate to lack of faith. Less people voting would indicate lack of faith, yes?
Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
Valid point. I think there are two totally different reasons it could erode trust in whatever ideas were in wide circulation before the introduction of the new medium:
(1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have.
(2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
It is my experience that the people who are most susceptible to misinformation are the same ones who where uninterested in valid info about Gov wrongdoing.
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 magnitude more are being caught. I'm often speechless by how badly all politicians are misrepresented when I compare reporting to actual transcripts of what was said.
I don't especially trust social media news. But people who are paid to generate news aren't about to admit nothing is going on today. And too many important media stories were just wrong.
Or "People with access to more information but with less education how to discriminate and make something of it become less likely to trust anyone."
The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less.
Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago:
"Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)"
https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288
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. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives.
With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.
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 more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
In rural areas people often have more and closer contact with government than big city folks.
People in US rural areas are likely to personally interact with the mayor, sheriff, police chief, council members, US park service directors, US forest service directors, local or federal agriculture agency reps, public utility commissioners, water commissioners, tribal government, and so on.
And, many of these people do have direct influence on their day to day life.
>"With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it."
Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
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.
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.
> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"
I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads:
we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?).
Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.
"People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"
Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.
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 we should (IMO) be thinking about this stuff is as complex systems, where the mechanisms can't really be understood to the point of predictiveness. Just like printing presses, mass literacy, radio and television broke political equilibriums... the internet breaks political equilibriums, for better or worse.
The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Despite all the centralisation, the facebook, twitter, google and such use extremism like an exploitation film uses sex and violence. If something is dangerous, sexy and naked... people are going to look.
>>The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos.
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.
I meant chaos in a more casual sense of "disruption of status quo." Old media was a lot less inclined to get behind any old revolution that comes along.
> 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.
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.
> 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, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier.
It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".
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.
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.
I don't buy it. Even in North Korea, I'm pretty sure people know quite a lot.
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.
The allegory of the cave is about having choice and ignoring it. This is about obtaining choice and everyone seeing the folly of their masters. The people that don’t would be closer to that allegory.
Readit News
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. Focus on solutions over reactions.
2. It becomes easy to take advantage of weaknesses in people and squander their strengths, so try as much to do the opposite.
3. Have a plan to handle highly ambitious people before they show up. Don't start wondering what to do after someone with more energy/drive/talent/resource shows up and wants to take over everything, which will keep happening as networks expand. For this we treat things like sports teams, which have to deal with a whole spectrum of highly driven people and get them to work in sync. Works out some days and blows up in our face on others.
There is no free lunch with transparency and growing networks. Just lot of tradeoffs.
Government has a lot of corruption, people who don't care about their jobs and the stakes are much more personal - greater personal wealth and power at stake.
Dead Comment
Pieter Hintjens, Clay Shirky, Bryan Cantrill, Nadia Eghbal caliber.
I'd read anything you write about FOSS, organizational psychology, governance.
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.
I bet it isn't just government people trust less since mobile internet, but everything.
Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind them. Trusting no one isn't feasible, so all we're doing is transferring trust, on the basis on anecdote at best and usually just memes, from organisations with flawed but improvable accountability to organisations with none whatsoever.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
[...]
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
Trump lies, but I have seen very little evidence that he lies more than any previous president.
The things he lies about are precisely the "Great Leader" style attempts to improve his image.
To me, that is much preferable to lying in order to push us into another Middle East war.
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 countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities."
They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government."
— 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 people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ”
The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening.
What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later:
— “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.
Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA.
The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world.
Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.)
Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run.
The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.
In west Ukraine a lot of people been there. I think that's what divided country. In no way I am going to support pro Russia policy once I've been to Europe.
Citizens visiting prosperous neighbor country is worst enemy of authoritarian regime.
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 retribution for the German atrocities in the East).
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: 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.
We in Italy knew about American malls and supermarkets, we had them but we usually didn't use them as much as we do today to buy groceries because our culture was based on local smaller shops selling fresh food.
Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".
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?
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.
Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
(1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have.
(2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
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 magnitude more are being caught. I'm often speechless by how badly all politicians are misrepresented when I compare reporting to actual transcripts of what was said.
I don't especially trust social media news. But people who are paid to generate news aren't about to admit nothing is going on today. And too many important media stories were just wrong.
The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less.
Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago: "Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)" https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288
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. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives.
With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.
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).
People in US rural areas are likely to personally interact with the mayor, sheriff, police chief, council members, US park service directors, US forest service directors, local or federal agriculture agency reps, public utility commissioners, water commissioners, tribal government, and so on.
And, many of these people do have direct influence on their day to day life.
Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
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.
I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads:
we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?).
Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.
Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.
Alternate headline: “Higher meme transmission rates strengthen cultural immune systems”
This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.
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 we should (IMO) be thinking about this stuff is as complex systems, where the mechanisms can't really be understood to the point of predictiveness. Just like printing presses, mass literacy, radio and television broke political equilibriums... the internet breaks political equilibriums, for better or worse.
The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Despite all the centralisation, the facebook, twitter, google and such use extremism like an exploitation film uses sex and violence. If something is dangerous, sexy and naked... people are going to look.
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.
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.
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.
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, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier.
It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".
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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.
The allegory of the cave is about having choice and ignoring it. This is about obtaining choice and everyone seeing the folly of their masters. The people that don’t would be closer to that allegory.
With the use of force.