alt Hacker NewsSocial media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing today: extreme ideas, populism, the destruction of institutions. All of this because people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up.
Replies
>and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism
The concept is called "yellow journalism" and extends basically to the days of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Modern culture has poured gasoline on this but it's existed forever.
I think the issue is that we have scaled groupthink--people now engage in circular conversations that reinforce nonsensical beliefs. Where as they might have historically encountered 1 or 2 people that agreed with crazy or inaccurate notions and most of their environment would likely push back on outrageous ideas.
Now, you can find 1000s of people that not only agree, but reinforce biases with other facts, perceptions.
Its interesting that TV is regulated. You can't put certain content on there and I'm sure the governments can ultimately control things. Now todays eyeballs are controlled by Meta and TikTok and I dont really trust them at all - they have too much unchecked power.
We have exited the age of information, and entered the age of irritation.
> people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up
Sounds like news broadcasts. Throw in some politics, murders, rapes and economic downturns and you've got your audience hooked watching through the ads.
Throw into the mix inherent mimetic desire and where we are in society makes sense. There's a need for a more that frankly can't be satisfied and hard to see how we turn back from that without a structural rejig
> the destruction of institutions
More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings?
The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change.
Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.
>and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism
This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits. Just give us a chronological feed of the people/topics we proactively choose to follow and much of this harm would go away. Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything.