I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive.
Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports.
So you'd come back to the states - and you'd have to catchup on everyone who had said terrible things.
Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider).
Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale, true, but living without internet doesn’t create perfect world.
My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.
- When living and interacting locally I think folks moderate their views a bit - call it "politeness"?
- Views locally are somewhat more homogenized?
- For better and worse, I'm not sure you'd last that long in Caribbean if you were just a twitter bomb thrower, even if justified - my impression was even things like whistleblowing would not be very well received (ie, if I'd complained about various govt officials not being at their desks when they should have been - it wouldn't have come over well). This may be wrong and certainly has changed as folks become more aware of what should and shouldn't happen.
Most definitely. I live as an expat in a foreign country and while I use the internet a lot and even speak the local language, I still feel very disconnected from the celebrity and political drama.
I find it very beneficial, and it definitely helps broaden you general outlook on these things. I used to follow the news pretty closely, now I just get the headlines once a day and move on with my life.
But as always it's a rather privileged position. I'm a high-wage childless white dude with a French passport, I don't have a lot to fear from politics. If things go bad here for some reason I can just move somewhere else, a luxury the vast majority of human beings don't have.
Having the possibility not to care is a luxury, in a way.
And politicians/powerful people doing and saying outrageous things predates the Internet by far. The fact that now we can be informed about it if we so choose is nothing but a blessing from my perspective.
This is very true. You get the same thing with people who live in Japan for a bit and declare that the political climate there is so much better. Eh, no, you just can't read the newspapers.
I would have agreed before getting rid of Facebook in 2016.
Two key things - a power force for stealing my attention is gone, and I’ve dumped faux friends who are really just old acquaintances that felt more intimate because I got to see them on Facebook.
People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course the vast majority get lost in the rat race and forget what it is that made them choose to work their ass of to begin with, but it’s not because their ultimate goal (at least in the beginning) was to chill at the beach.
You miss the OP's point. They're talking about a specific aspect of culture in the Carribean, where they worked for a while, not about idyllic lifelong vacations. While there, they found that separation from the internet reduced the amount of outrage they felt.
Unless you're suggesting that social media outrage is productive and helps people to accomplish something meaningful in their own way, you're not actually addressing the OP's comment, you're addressing an unrelated idea that you've heard in the past.
I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local?
Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice.
You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons), you ate larger group meals, you spent a lot more time outside. I'm just spitballing some impressions. Some of this was efficiency, (group meals are more cost effective?) etc.
There is also an attitude difference. There is a story (probably made up - please fill in correct details) that a group "conquered" one of the islands (maybe Saba?). They took over whatever building, raised whatever flag. And everyone just ignored them. They eventually left.
One thing that's an adjustment is ignoring the rules if they are silly - no one thinks anything of it. And yes, in part because of corruption and rent seeking there are some silly rules so maybe you have to.
Absolute downsides as well no question. But I wonder if the folks not on internet just don't care as much about what someone said to someone as the rest of us.
I think you’re letting your own pre-conceived notions color your interpretation of this comment. The person said nothing about not working as hard, not accomplishing as much, and only chilling on the beach. People in the Caribbean (and other beach/vacation destinations) work hard and accomplish plenty. Just because some people go to their country to relax doesn’t mean the entire country does nothing but relax.
>However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course the vast majority get lost in the rat race and forget what it is that made them choose to work their ass of to begin with, but it’s not because their ultimate goal (at least in the beginning) was to chill at the beach.
IMHO, if that person who was working their ass off was a genius and an outlier, then their contributions are a huge net benefit to society and we/society should reward and applaud them.
However, most people are average or below average, so their contributions are extremely unlikely to move the needle. So from the point of view of the person chilling on the beach, yeah sure, do whatever makes you happy, but as far as real accomplishments go, its a wash between them and the non-genius hard-worker. Just my opinion! :)
Otoh 99% (exaggeration for emphasis but not that far off if you think about it) of what happens in the “news” is totally irrelevant to you and your life beyond the initial outrage it provokes. You have virtually no impact on preventing or influencing the event and it has no impact on you whatsoever. War in Africa again? It’s sad to think about and outrageous how some scummy warlords terrorize the local population, but what’s the impact on your life? Tsunami in Asia? Terrible for all the death but no impact on your daily life. Corruption in Europe again? Revolting but... all these things just add to your overall unhappiness and stress but really have no bearing on your actual day to day life. So why even bother? Not too mention that nedia and news outlets can have a hidden agenda they’re pushing either because the entity that owns them wants to promote a particular view of the world or because they want people to look away from something else.
In my opinion, it isn't about ignoring anything. It's about moderating our reaction to things such that "outrage" dissipates in the face of more reflective, sustained modes of thought. The 24/7 news cycle, which is often based on infotainment, doesn't allow time for contemplation of ideas, just emotions.
I am not from US , so please don't try to interpret my comment as some US politic stuff.
I do not watch or read news daily, so when I went in a vacation at the hotel I had nothing else better to do then open the TV. There was some big outrage that the president mumbled something racist(he was inside a car and people were lips reading) - again not in US. I realized what I was missing by not watching TV, I am ignoring all the useless drama. The other part of the news that is not politics is also mostly irrelevant crap.
The thing is that there is almost nothing we can do as individuals, elections are 4 years apart and sometimes people organize and manage to change the prime minister with big protests but that is when something so big happened that even I knew about it.
What could work much better is a weekly summary that ignores things that happened this week, so it will be like a filter for minor stuff and all the events reported would have been better digested and all involved parties would have had the time to respond.
There are some rare events that should not be ignored, and this are large enough that will surface, a local example is this incident that eventualy caused protests, some resignations but probably nothing actually major changed to improve safety(unfortunately we have a few horrible incidents related with fire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectiv_nightclub_fire
The opposite of that I do would be me having to read or watch 3 different reports on same maybe relevant stuff and decide what is my favorite interpretation.
Add on top of that the propaganda by US to start their wars by fabricating stuff, now when I read some report about 1 million people in camps in China I will always have a doubt the numbers and facts are real, or the interview with persons could be fabricated, so with news from far away is double pointless to be on top daily, is nothing you can do about it today so it can wait a week and you can never be sure it is not manipulation.
I was walking around my neighborhood and saw that someone posted a printed sign making a snarky remark about the Matt Gaetz news. I could not believe someone would care enough about a random politician's demise. Please get off Twitter.
Not to get political, but Matt is anything but random. He’s one of the rising stars of his party. Without much actual track record of actually getting stuff done and direct power, but very popular among certain group of voters.
> Local social life was fantastic- I missed nothing about the internet.
In general after decades of working with Internet and technology, I realize that I enjoy life (not work) better when there is no Internet. Of course, it is nice to have Internet to have occasional communication with friends and family not in the surrounding area.
Johannesburg, relatively speaking, is similar to this. People will use the Internet in business parks to do their jobs, but you don’t see people walking around staring at their phones. People use WhatsApp to curb high talk and text rates, but that is a lions share of what phones are used for. It feels very similar to 90s America technologically and it’s strangely relieving.
Echoing this. I visited Cuba when I was in college. While I was there the only way to access the internet is to buy an "internet time" card (costs like $2 and gives you 30min to 1hr online) and connect at a public hotspot.
It was actually quite nice being forced to disconnect. It's almost funny how quickly you go from wanting to know what is going on in the world to not really caring anymore, when it's out of mind you don't really think about it.
I read the headline, and my first thought was "I wonder if they are happier for it?" thinking that they probably would be.
I have spend a fair bit of my life in countries where I don't speak the language particularly well. I like the fact that the subtleties of advertising and the spin put on the news often go over my head, but I realise especially during the last year that I consume way to much junk information on the internet.
My first thought was that 7% of the population are disenfranchised from News and services. But second thought makes me wonder how much of the 93% are just reading celebrity gossip and poor quality news on Twitter and Facebook or TikTok/Instagram reels of cute pets.
If over 65 year olds count for half of the 7% (25% of 50Million), does poor rural internet and poverty count for a lot of the rest.
I had a hunch that this was a reality.. so much of our modern life is wasted on utter nonsense .. we oughta cut the internet router figuratively and spend our time on fun or useful local things.
I live in the States and don't participate in anti"social" media or dopamine-addiction with a phone glued in my hand, neck hunched over, and nearly get run-over absorbing distractions in the form of outrage, manufactured infotainment, or virtual, meaningless lives. Selfies still look to me like narcissistic loser mementos that someone can't find another person to take their picture because they're all so glued to their phones and socially-clueless to interact with anyone else.
I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why.
I'm not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward others.
If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it, I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another (no specific implication intended/assumed). The "subreddit simulator" powered by GPT-2 bots has more than enough realistic-seeming conversations to make me not immediately reject the idea, since we've all seen how much better GPT-3 is and I assume private entities have even better language models than that: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
My additional total-speculation is that all the NSA/FVEY surveillance of our everyday online conversations and interactions would be an excellent training set for such a hypothetical language model.
The internet is the most frictionless propaganda machine on the planet. AI is almost certainly being used in conjunction with human troll farms. There are firms which pay bounties on comments sections. I also think this is a reason social media should be de-emphasized: it's just too easy to game our squishy minds with a narrative.
There is a shocking amount of "non-human" activity. I think there are definitely bots, but also people that are paid to promote one narrative or another (paid with money or social validation).
I've trolled through many a twitter/reddit account when I sniff something off about a post. They are often hyper focused on a single topic, pushing a specific point of view. Rarely is this mentioned. Its "hail corporate" vibes but in a guerilla fashion.
It's the medium. Written text is not a suitable replacement for face-to-face communication, and Zoom or Skype aren't either because you can always be recorded / are semipublic in this respect.
On social networks mostly communicate to bystanders and there is almost no communication with each other. Moreover, important feedback mechanisms aren't present. If you meet someone in person, both interlocutors temporarily adapt to each other in their language, world views, opinions, etc. The effect may not be lasting but leads to better mutual understanding. In face-to-face communication people go at great lengths to avoid direct confrontation, conflict, and "loosing face."
This does not happen to the same degree on a social network. Discussions are way more adversarial than they could ever be in personal communication because people don't have to fear physical violence, and nearly everything people say is directed towards an anonymous audience. I have colleagues working in "Argumentation Theory" (in my opinion, a pseudo-science) who analyse these kind of interactions. However, not all of them realize that the people are barely arguing online - they're really mostly voicing opinions to show allegiance to their "in-group." This doesn't mean that there cannot be helpful and meaningful information exchange, explanatory dialogue works very well online. But personal conversations are rare, can only occur on forums where people have a common goal and there is no potential for conflict.
> I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another
I think this is unlikely because it would be far simpler, cheaper, and more effective to employ a small number of people and use tooling (automation, templates, etc.) to amplify their reach drastically. Why invent an unreliable AI to push narratives on the Internet when you can have one real person carry on thousands of arguments a day with a little help?
> If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it
Of course. Being able to entertain ideas without necessarily believing it is what online interaction is all about. I suspect this is why your friend seems like a completely different person online. He should be. Being able to take a completely different perspective to see if you can understand it well enough to talk about it is an excellent learning tool and a great way to validate that your face-to-face persona, the one we value most, is positioned correctly.
That subreddit is rather impressive. Some of the comments don’t seem to make too much sense (as in they’re grammatically correct but devoid of overall meaning) but it’s pretty convincing none the less. And if you’re not aware that it’s generated, your brain tries a bit harder to read meaning into the comments which make it quite convincing. Very impressive.
Being on social media is only a subset of being online. Plenty of people are not on social media but still watch tv, bank, and get gps directions online.
This is very true. However it is certainly the subset I find myself on the most, ha. I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. How often do we see on this very site people bemoaning only visiting the same N websites when there's more websites than ever?
I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go and update my /etc/hosts now...
Watching TV via the internet is not really "using" the internet IMO. I mean it is, but it's just the protocol on the wire. Otherwise it's not really different from when your TV was connected to an antenna or cable.
Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation.
I can only guess at what you're referring to, but do keep in mind that American culture had wrong things happening from the start through today. From when they colonized the land, to slavery, through the KKK, Japanese internment camps during WWII, violent union busting, manufacturing consent for pointless wars and so on. You're just more aware of it now because of the Internet. Yes, it is hard to come to terms with knowing that people you know, or even love and respect, support things you consider inhumane, but sticking your head in the sand isn't going to make it go away or change this, though.
I’ve been trying to put The Internet back into the role of Tool, but even that is a challenge because for so many topics the search engines are overrun by SEO hack sites. If the page rank of StackOverflow weren’t so overwhelming I’d probably struggle with work related searches too. Even there, a few times a week I end up in someone’s link farm.
I recommend getting off social media and figuring out how to just chat with people whether that be telegram, signal, discord or something like that. Leaving twitter, fb and those has left me feeling much better. It sucks there's no way to chat with people on FB without using FB software anymore (even Frost seems broken now) though.
It's surprising how many people here equate "the Internet" with "social media". It's like having access to 1,000,000 x the Library of Alexandria every day and only being interested in keeping up with what people are talking about in the lobby
Exactly, that's how it is. The library has never been a happening spot. The happening kids, if forced to the library by an authority figure, would just spend the time whispering, gossiping, and playing around with their friends.
I bet you were one of those nerds who actually USED the library. :D I was too.
Yep, shifting the terms reframes the issues. Even library of alexandria sounds a bit biased toward the web and similar things. The fundamental thing is the decentralized packet switched network that lets any node talk to any other node where anyone can build new applications on it.
(But sadly a lot of people aren't directly on the internet anymore, and have only indirect access via a IPv4 NAPT gateway).
Well... I assume that most Alexandrians weren't to be found in the library, at any given moment in time.
In any case, a smartphone with social media (fb even) was the entry point to personal computing for most people on earth. They entered through the lobby, I guess.
My dad doesn't use the Internet. Not on principle or anything, but he grew up without it, has friends but meets them in person or talks on the phone, same as he has for the past 40 years. He's retired now, but never needed it working as a skilled tradesman with a county job. In retirement, he still builds stuff, but physical stuff. No need for Internet.
My ex-wife's mom also didn't use the Internet, but she was a schizophrenic who believed the FBI was following her around her entire life and has spent much of the past 40 years institutionalized.
So those are at least two very different types of people, and that's just people living in big cities. I'm sure there are still a fair number of rural people who couldn't make much use of the Internet even if they wanted to.
Another ex of mine grew up on a farm in Amish country. Not Amish, but all the neighbors were. They didn't use Internet.
Same with mine. And I'll be damned, he seems to get by just fine with letters and phone calls, probably with even less hassle than I have using only the internet and avoiding phone calls.
My grandfather doesn't ”use the internet", my grandmother uses email (not sure what else).
They do watch Netflix now via roku (they used to have a blockbuster subscription so they could go and pickup DVDs). Is that the internet?
My mom grew up in Nazi Germany and never went to college. Yet for the last decade of her life she used email and web every day (iMac and then Mac mini) to explore the world (and sometimes actually go there). She didn't need the internet at all, but embraced it anyway. Age is not an obstacle to new things, but attitude is. My uncle and aunt had multiple devices for their entire 80-90 decade of life, until he passed away and she developed too many health issues.
Yet my cousin(s) in a small town in Germany rarely use email or internet at all (which I think is not unusual there) as everything they need is available locally.
I've spent my whole adult life using computers and writing software - I still routinely help people in younger generations explaining things that baffle them. People still have a limited understanding of how the internet works.
A significant portion of the US is illiterate [1]. One might assume that being illiterate affects internet usage. Not quite as romantic as neo-Luddism, or even making a conscious choice not to expose oneself to potentially problematic patterns of communication.
I think a lot of people are surprised by statistics like “x% of people don’t [thing every modestly privileged person does]” because it’s easy to forget that society has a lot of fringes if you’re not regularly exposed to them.
My first reaction was “7% sounds low”, but again, that’s probably biased by my own experiences.
> My first reaction was “7% sounds low”, but again, that’s probably biased by my own experiences.
That was my reaction as well, particularly based on how the question was asked - it was very specifically about the Internet, not mentioning specific services that someone with low technological literacy might not associate with Internet usage (e.g. Google Maps, or Facebook Messenger) [1].
I sometimes wonder how much illiteracy or lack of vocabulary and comprehension skills has to do with popularity of Instagram and tiktok and the videos that people make of themselves talking to the camera.
Also for people only fluent in languages that aren’t popular online. My parents aren’t able to parse most online English discussion, and I’m sure it’s tiring to try to understand just like it would be if I tried a deep conversation in their language, so they like WhatsApp video forwards and YouTube. Unfortunately, that content is mostly garbage.
From the https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp link - "U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States."
It's most likely a factor. It's also not too obvious whether those numbers are high compared to any other country, because it's one of those things that every country has its' own unique standards and methodology for measuring. For instance you might think that North Korea is the gold standard of literacy, at 100%, or you might think that they likely have some serious issues with the methodology they use for measuring that.
Well we certainly added to that number with many districts refusing to return to class even when the science proved it was safe and the concerns being bandied about were not supported by any research.
The real danger not mentioned in the article is how many of that seven percent have students in school districts that were not offering classroom education?
We have areas of the country, mostly serving minority students, who have irreparably harmed their chances because politics trumped science.
I don't think you can generalize the internet to be bad. That's like saying processed food is bad: Yes, we would not have the obesity problems we have now without them, but neither would we have been able to build our civilization as is or be able to be as well nourished as we are.
The direction the net is currently going looks a bit worrying, I definitely agree. But I would not want to miss all the awesome advantages it brings.
This decade is the time to engage in a public discourse about what we want from our devices. Really sit back and think about what makes us happy. Hardware and software design can begin to nudge us toward some healthier, happier ideals. One small example: the incorporation of blue-blocking modes (f.lux, night shift, etc.) for night time usage. Some people love the addition of time limits that ensure they don't use apps too much.
I am optimistic that the best social media sites have yet to be designed--rather than optimizing to squeeze the most engagement, ad dollars, or whatever, I like to imagine algorithms that seek to encourage pro-social behavior, friendliness, happiness, fun, healthy habits. We may discover that Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally incapable of doing these things as well as their future replacement, whatever that may be.
Luckily I don't need to generalize the Internet to be good or bad, I only need to determine whether the good it brings to my life personally outweighs the bad.
I don't have an exact answer to that, but what I do know for sure is that the good has been on a downward trajectory, and the bad on an even steeper upward one, for years. Even if they haven't actually crossed yet, it seems only a matter of time before they will.
I often think of what life would be without using the internet. Observing a electronics sabbath usually on sat, seems like a good idea. Not Jewish but feel that the Rabbis of old were on to something.
I try to do this for the last week of every month. I don't turn off the router because I'm not going to exclude myself from things like Discord with friends, facetime with my Mom, or paying bills with my laptop instead of my phone. But anything non-essential is off limits.
It was certainly hard to keep this up in 2020 though, I pretty much dropped the habit from April to December
I would be such an idiot (in some but not all contexts), highly doubt would learn how to write, let alone basic mathematics, or programming, scientific method would have no meaning in my life, if it not where for the internet.
I'm expecting the only thing that'll keep me on it in old age is VR chats with the grandkids or whatever. The rest of it's not worth the money, except that it's de facto required for work and (for the kids) school these days.
That was amusing, but the linked "25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers" [1] was even more interesting. From 2003, no less!
My brother is one of them -- hard core blue collar worker, eschews a lot of modern technology, still carries a flip phone, and doesn't even use SMS. If I want to talk to him, I need to make a voice call, like a caveman. He doesn't have his cell phone turned on most of the time so his landline is the best way to reach him -- he even has a home answering machine. Not voicemail from his carrier, but an actual answering machine (though it's digital, not cassette tape).
His wife's view of the internet is pretty much only Facebook.
His kids are typical young adults, they have iPhones and are regulars on Instagram, Tiktok and other places that oldtimers like me don't usually visit -- they've moved on from Facebook... once their mom started using Facebook, they stopped using it.
He probably drives around listening to rage-inducing talk radio hosts all day. Then gets to jobs sites where he vents his rage with all the other guys.
Does this include the roughly 1% of the US who are in prison/jail? They generally do not have ready access to the internet. Then there is a unknown percentage of convicted felons who, while "free", are barred from internet use.
Readit News
Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports.
So you'd come back to the states - and you'd have to catchup on everyone who had said terrible things.
Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale, true, but living without internet doesn’t create perfect world.
- When living and interacting locally I think folks moderate their views a bit - call it "politeness"?
- Views locally are somewhat more homogenized?
- For better and worse, I'm not sure you'd last that long in Caribbean if you were just a twitter bomb thrower, even if justified - my impression was even things like whistleblowing would not be very well received (ie, if I'd complained about various govt officials not being at their desks when they should have been - it wouldn't have come over well). This may be wrong and certainly has changed as folks become more aware of what should and shouldn't happen.
I find it very beneficial, and it definitely helps broaden you general outlook on these things. I used to follow the news pretty closely, now I just get the headlines once a day and move on with my life.
But as always it's a rather privileged position. I'm a high-wage childless white dude with a French passport, I don't have a lot to fear from politics. If things go bad here for some reason I can just move somewhere else, a luxury the vast majority of human beings don't have.
Having the possibility not to care is a luxury, in a way.
Two key things - a power force for stealing my attention is gone, and I’ve dumped faux friends who are really just old acquaintances that felt more intimate because I got to see them on Facebook.
Instead, I actually talk to people who are here.
I recall the film 'Network' with its "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" thread.
Among other messages.
Unless you're suggesting that social media outrage is productive and helps people to accomplish something meaningful in their own way, you're not actually addressing the OP's comment, you're addressing an unrelated idea that you've heard in the past.
Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice.
You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons), you ate larger group meals, you spent a lot more time outside. I'm just spitballing some impressions. Some of this was efficiency, (group meals are more cost effective?) etc.
There is also an attitude difference. There is a story (probably made up - please fill in correct details) that a group "conquered" one of the islands (maybe Saba?). They took over whatever building, raised whatever flag. And everyone just ignored them. They eventually left.
One thing that's an adjustment is ignoring the rules if they are silly - no one thinks anything of it. And yes, in part because of corruption and rent seeking there are some silly rules so maybe you have to.
Absolute downsides as well no question. But I wonder if the folks not on internet just don't care as much about what someone said to someone as the rest of us.
I heard that Travis Kalanick coded the initial code base of Uber in Varkala beach in Kerala[1],[2].
[1] https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/guess-what-uber-ceo-tra...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varkala
IMHO, if that person who was working their ass off was a genius and an outlier, then their contributions are a huge net benefit to society and we/society should reward and applaud them.
However, most people are average or below average, so their contributions are extremely unlikely to move the needle. So from the point of view of the person chilling on the beach, yeah sure, do whatever makes you happy, but as far as real accomplishments go, its a wash between them and the non-genius hard-worker. Just my opinion! :)
(Writing this as a non-genius average person)
if i just knew where that corner is ...
I do not watch or read news daily, so when I went in a vacation at the hotel I had nothing else better to do then open the TV. There was some big outrage that the president mumbled something racist(he was inside a car and people were lips reading) - again not in US. I realized what I was missing by not watching TV, I am ignoring all the useless drama. The other part of the news that is not politics is also mostly irrelevant crap.
The thing is that there is almost nothing we can do as individuals, elections are 4 years apart and sometimes people organize and manage to change the prime minister with big protests but that is when something so big happened that even I knew about it.
What could work much better is a weekly summary that ignores things that happened this week, so it will be like a filter for minor stuff and all the events reported would have been better digested and all involved parties would have had the time to respond.
There are some rare events that should not be ignored, and this are large enough that will surface, a local example is this incident that eventualy caused protests, some resignations but probably nothing actually major changed to improve safety(unfortunately we have a few horrible incidents related with fire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectiv_nightclub_fire
The opposite of that I do would be me having to read or watch 3 different reports on same maybe relevant stuff and decide what is my favorite interpretation.
Add on top of that the propaganda by US to start their wars by fabricating stuff, now when I read some report about 1 million people in camps in China I will always have a doubt the numbers and facts are real, or the interview with persons could be fabricated, so with news from far away is double pointless to be on top daily, is nothing you can do about it today so it can wait a week and you can never be sure it is not manipulation.
In general after decades of working with Internet and technology, I realize that I enjoy life (not work) better when there is no Internet. Of course, it is nice to have Internet to have occasional communication with friends and family not in the surrounding area.
On the other hand, life becomes utterly miserable with a little internet. It's an all-or-nothing kind of deal.
It was actually quite nice being forced to disconnect. It's almost funny how quickly you go from wanting to know what is going on in the world to not really caring anymore, when it's out of mind you don't really think about it.
I have spend a fair bit of my life in countries where I don't speak the language particularly well. I like the fact that the subtleties of advertising and the spin put on the news often go over my head, but I realise especially during the last year that I consume way to much junk information on the internet.
If over 65 year olds count for half of the 7% (25% of 50Million), does poor rural internet and poverty count for a lot of the rest.
I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why.
I'm not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it, I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another (no specific implication intended/assumed). The "subreddit simulator" powered by GPT-2 bots has more than enough realistic-seeming conversations to make me not immediately reject the idea, since we've all seen how much better GPT-3 is and I assume private entities have even better language models than that: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
My additional total-speculation is that all the NSA/FVEY surveillance of our everyday online conversations and interactions would be an excellent training set for such a hypothetical language model.
I've trolled through many a twitter/reddit account when I sniff something off about a post. They are often hyper focused on a single topic, pushing a specific point of view. Rarely is this mentioned. Its "hail corporate" vibes but in a guerilla fashion.
On social networks mostly communicate to bystanders and there is almost no communication with each other. Moreover, important feedback mechanisms aren't present. If you meet someone in person, both interlocutors temporarily adapt to each other in their language, world views, opinions, etc. The effect may not be lasting but leads to better mutual understanding. In face-to-face communication people go at great lengths to avoid direct confrontation, conflict, and "loosing face."
This does not happen to the same degree on a social network. Discussions are way more adversarial than they could ever be in personal communication because people don't have to fear physical violence, and nearly everything people say is directed towards an anonymous audience. I have colleagues working in "Argumentation Theory" (in my opinion, a pseudo-science) who analyse these kind of interactions. However, not all of them realize that the people are barely arguing online - they're really mostly voicing opinions to show allegiance to their "in-group." This doesn't mean that there cannot be helpful and meaningful information exchange, explanatory dialogue works very well online. But personal conversations are rare, can only occur on forums where people have a common goal and there is no potential for conflict.
I think this is unlikely because it would be far simpler, cheaper, and more effective to employ a small number of people and use tooling (automation, templates, etc.) to amplify their reach drastically. Why invent an unreliable AI to push narratives on the Internet when you can have one real person carry on thousands of arguments a day with a little help?
Of course. Being able to entertain ideas without necessarily believing it is what online interaction is all about. I suspect this is why your friend seems like a completely different person online. He should be. Being able to take a completely different perspective to see if you can understand it well enough to talk about it is an excellent learning tool and a great way to validate that your face-to-face persona, the one we value most, is positioned correctly.
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I suspect that even without anonymity, arguing when there's an audience has that effect on people.
I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go and update my /etc/hosts now...
I can only guess at what you're referring to, but do keep in mind that American culture had wrong things happening from the start through today. From when they colonized the land, to slavery, through the KKK, Japanese internment camps during WWII, violent union busting, manufacturing consent for pointless wars and so on. You're just more aware of it now because of the Internet. Yes, it is hard to come to terms with knowing that people you know, or even love and respect, support things you consider inhumane, but sticking your head in the sand isn't going to make it go away or change this, though.
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https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidot...
I bet you were one of those nerds who actually USED the library. :D I was too.
(But sadly a lot of people aren't directly on the internet anymore, and have only indirect access via a IPv4 NAPT gateway).
In any case, a smartphone with social media (fb even) was the entry point to personal computing for most people on earth. They entered through the lobby, I guess.
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My ex-wife's mom also didn't use the Internet, but she was a schizophrenic who believed the FBI was following her around her entire life and has spent much of the past 40 years institutionalized.
So those are at least two very different types of people, and that's just people living in big cities. I'm sure there are still a fair number of rural people who couldn't make much use of the Internet even if they wanted to.
Another ex of mine grew up on a farm in Amish country. Not Amish, but all the neighbors were. They didn't use Internet.
Yet my cousin(s) in a small town in Germany rarely use email or internet at all (which I think is not unusual there) as everything they need is available locally.
I've spent my whole adult life using computers and writing software - I still routinely help people in younger generations explaining things that baffle them. People still have a limited understanding of how the internet works.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
My first reaction was “7% sounds low”, but again, that’s probably biased by my own experiences.
That was my reaction as well, particularly based on how the question was asked - it was very specifically about the Internet, not mentioning specific services that someone with low technological literacy might not associate with Internet usage (e.g. Google Maps, or Facebook Messenger) [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Non-i...
Also for people only fluent in languages that aren’t popular online. My parents aren’t able to parse most online English discussion, and I’m sure it’s tiring to try to understand just like it would be if I tried a deep conversation in their language, so they like WhatsApp video forwards and YouTube. Unfortunately, that content is mostly garbage.
I bet it's near 0%. That looks more like a lack of enjoyment of reading if anything.
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The real danger not mentioned in the article is how many of that seven percent have students in school districts that were not offering classroom education?
We have areas of the country, mostly serving minority students, who have irreparably harmed their chances because politics trumped science.
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n521
https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
The direction the net is currently going looks a bit worrying, I definitely agree. But I would not want to miss all the awesome advantages it brings.
Two hundred years ago, we processed food to survive the winter, now we do it to make a few extra bucks from each ton of corn and wheat.
I am optimistic that the best social media sites have yet to be designed--rather than optimizing to squeeze the most engagement, ad dollars, or whatever, I like to imagine algorithms that seek to encourage pro-social behavior, friendliness, happiness, fun, healthy habits. We may discover that Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally incapable of doing these things as well as their future replacement, whatever that may be.
I don't have an exact answer to that, but what I do know for sure is that the good has been on a downward trajectory, and the bad on an even steeper upward one, for years. Even if they haven't actually crossed yet, it seems only a matter of time before they will.
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Leaving the internet behind doesn't mean living without technology.
It was certainly hard to keep this up in 2020 though, I pretty much dropped the habit from April to December
https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/
[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
His wife's view of the internet is pretty much only Facebook.
His kids are typical young adults, they have iPhones and are regulars on Instagram, Tiktok and other places that oldtimers like me don't usually visit -- they've moved on from Facebook... once their mom started using Facebook, they stopped using it.
He probably drives around listening to rage-inducing talk radio hosts all day. Then gets to jobs sites where he vents his rage with all the other guys.
This stuff existed long before facebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...