“Politics is not supposed to be a team sport.” —Unknown
“Politics is not supposed to be a team sport.” —Unknown
What if we made all advertising illegal?
[…]
The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
Clickbait, listicles, and affiliate marketing schemes would become worthless overnight. Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.
[…]
Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.
—Kōdō Simone in What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
#SocialMedia #Technology #Communication #Politics #Philosophy
I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.
—Unknown, dubiously attributed to Abraham Lincoln
What's wrong with hyperpartisan media? (Pick your favorite example of a one-sided TV channel, YouTube channel, website, radio show, podcast, or magazine.) If the problem is that these outlets promote overly simplistic, slanted perspectives, never reporting the other side of the story, then why are we not equally worried about social media filter bubbles, given that they are designed to do the same thing?
Facebook and other social media platforms show us what we want to see. They reinforce our existing worldviews. One doesn’t need to think hard to understand why; anything else would be bad for business. Nobody logs on to be told they’re wrong. Nobody enjoys having their reality challenged.
I’m concerned about old-style hyperpartisan media, but this new, “social” version is much worse. Many of us walk around with personalized, digital propagandists close by. They push our buttons and beg for our limited attention—buzz, buzz! Sometimes, we spend more time with them than with real human beings, with their nuanced and thoughtful perspectives.
Should we be surprised the world is so divided?
Do social media platforms and news websites really need comments sections? I don’t think so.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking.”
—Albert Einstein
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”
—E. O. Wilson
#AI #Belief #Business #Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
I'm struck by this point made by Josh Faga in his article Starving for Wisdom:
It used to be the case that we had to make up our mind about something. But, the advent of modern mediums has been so successful at packaging intellectual positions into digestible vitamins that they have essentially “made up our minds” for us.
We don't make up our minds at all. Instead, we are presented a pre-packaged intellectual position that the medium we consume it over conveniently places into our minds for us; a process not too dissimilar from placing a CD into a CD player. Then, also not too dissimilar from a CD player, when in the appropriate situations, we are conditioned to push a button and “play back” the opinion that was burned on the CD.
To complete the feedback loop, whenever we 'play the songs' on our CD players, we are rewarded by those that have the same CD. We regurgitate the opinions and information we consume to the group of people that have also consumed it and receive our reward for having successfully consumed and spit back what we have 'learned'. This process is at the bottom of our ideologically possessed and polarized political landscape. We are educating, organizing, and rewarding ourselves for simply putting a CD in a CD player and pressing play.
#Belief #Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
Social media is a confirmation bias machine. Facebook, for instance, is a great place to hear what we already believe. It's a terrible place to learn from the other and confront the weaknesses of our own arguments.
Is it any surprise, then, that political extremism, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience are flourishing?
I find it strange that we rarely hear the term “publicity stunt” anymore when they seem more common than ever.