commenting before reading cuz i gotta run but: I AM ALL ABOUT THIS
posted by glonous keming at 9:45 AM on June 26, 2021 [12 favorites]

Metafilter: the great filter.
posted by k3ninho at 10:01 AM on June 26, 2021 [23 favorites]

This is a really good point:

...What do you say to the people who think this is not really a crisis and argue that people had similar concerns when the printing press came out that now seem alarmist?
Carl Bergstrom: Well, with the printing press, I would push back. The printing press came out and upended history. We¡¯re still recovering from the capacity that the printing press gave to Martin Luther. The printing press radically changed the political landscape in Europe. And, you know, depending on whose histories you go by, you had decades if not centuries of war [after it was introduced]. So, did we somehow recover? Sure we did. Would it have been better to do it in a stewarded way? I don¡¯t know. Maybe. These major transitions in information technology often cause collateral damage.

The idea that agriculture was a mistake has already been introduced into the popular discourse, but I don't know that I've ever heard someone suggest that the printing press might have been. (Except for maybe Ignatius J. O'Reilly or some other trad-Cath.) It is at least an idea worth considering. For one thing, without Martin Luther's books, a lot of Jewish people might have led their lives in peace.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:07 AM on June 26, 2021 [26 favorites]

While I like my digital watch, perhaps it was a mistake to climb down from the trees or get out of the ocean, Countess Elena.

Aside from flippancy, should we ask digital natives about their ability to manage complex epistemology (how we believe to be true what we believe to be true)? And what's making them act so responsibly with lower drinking and/or drug use and higher knowledge of contraception/lower rate young pregnancies -- are they anticipating a world upset by climate change with longer-lived generations clinging on to power? What would it take to get that responsibility picking our political representatives?
posted by k3ninho at 10:15 AM on June 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

Who will steward the stewards?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:26 AM on June 26, 2021 [13 favorites]

From tfa:

Democratizing information has had profound effects, especially for marginalized, underrepresented communities. It gives them the ability to rally online, have a platform, and have a voice. And that is fantastic. At the same time, we have things like genocide of Rohingya Muslims and an insurrection at the Capitol happening as well. And I hope that it¡¯s a false statement to say we have to have those growing pains to have the benefits.
posted by maggiemaggie at 10:29 AM on June 26, 2021 [12 favorites]

As someone who has basically cut social media out of my life, I am keenly aware of how much less stressed I am, and also horrified at the things that my mother (who is the case study of a misinformed Qultist) seems to find true because clearly everything on Facebook is true. It does not surprise me in the least though that even after we've seen Facebook used by other world governments to propagate disinformation and incite violence, that nothing is done until we see that problem arrive back here at home.

I'm glad they wrote the paper outlining this as a crisis discipline, and I think the characterization is accurate, but beyond that, I want to see some proposed solutions. These companies have zero financial incentive to fix these problems, which leaves it on governing authorities. As much as I think simply nationalizing the companies, making the ad revenue go straight into the tax stream, and prosecuting Zuckerburg and the entire Facebook board for crimes against humanity (see the Rohingya Genocide mentioned in the article), that extreme solution would create its own set of problems - namely, putting the US government as the gatekeeper of information for 1/3 of the world. Not a solution I find ideal.

Currently in congress is a slate of antitrust bills aimed at technology companies (scroll down for a list of all 5), but of those 5, only 2 would affect Facebook - the Ending Platform Monopolies Act would give legal ground to review Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and theAugmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act would potentially end the walled garden effect Facebook has, effectively allowing you to migrate your entire timeline and all the data off the platform.

These are a good start, but not a true solution to the problems described in the original article.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 10:31 AM on June 26, 2021 [24 favorites]

So far I'm getting the impression that this thing is so true & will be so poignant to read that it'll be hurting me the whole time
posted by bleep at 10:47 AM on June 26, 2021 [11 favorites]

it's become something a recurring theme for me of late. We (and here I mean pretty much every so-called responsible adult regardless of our leanings, cultural, political, philosophical) need to get way better at being confused.
posted by philip-random at 10:55 AM on June 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Anonymous social media with no fear of repercussions might.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 10:59 AM on June 26, 2021

I agree with so many of the particular laments here and in the original article, but at the same time there is no a priori way to know which technological and cultural advances will bring good or ill. All we can know is that things are changing. For those of us who believe in human reason and the principles of the Enlightenment and universal democracy, the printing press and the Protestant Reformation are - on balance - good things.

For anyone tempted to say "the authorities should regulate X, Y, Z!" please remember that history is overflowing with examples where the authorities that did eventually exercise such control weren't doing it for the democratic benefit of all.

To lighten my own mood just a tiny bit about these acknowledged horrors of new media and technology, I have found it helpful to bookmark the Pessimist's Archive.
posted by PhineasGage at 11:01 AM on June 26, 2021 [13 favorites]

It's a case of chickens come home to roost with some of this stuff, the same misinformation campaigns and divide and conquer strategies the US govt has run against the citizens of other govts for years now reaching the heart of the homeland through social media.

TV news is still the largest driver of misinformation in the US, especially FOX News where the largest monetary donations come from the Saudi royal family (and Saudi Arabia, like Russia, is a petro state so there's your link to climate change denialism right there - but also you don't need to look only at foreign influence campaigns for this either when the Koch brothers are right there).

Still I think there's something to the need to look at this in an interdisciplinary way, because there's also something there about parents, and click-driven advertising, and mental health, and anxiety, and public health, and attention spans. All stuff that seems less political but is still, nevertheless, political. None of those details are in the article summarizing the paper though, maybe they're in the paper itself. There's not much to this article besides a sense of alarm. And the alarm is for the loss of the old ways, that not everyone will mourn.

But sometimes it feels like it's all the old guard holding down the fort on democracy as we currently understand it in US, and what happens when the people who go to the PTA meetings and attend the town halls are too old, what happens when all of this is digitalized and private companies control the platforms where public debate is happening? Are we replacing these systems with centralized systems run by for-profit companies? Or with "local" systems that are secretly puppeteered through astroturfing campaigns?

I don't know, I feel the anxiety too, but I don't know how right it is to feel that anxiety. I guess supporting the author's conclusion that more study is needed.

I do know NATO has a big focus, now, on cyberwarfare and information warfare in particular. Just like in physical warfare in the past, it feels like it's the big powers that pursue war and everyone on the battlefield who becomes the collateral damage.
posted by subdee at 11:16 AM on June 26, 2021 [11 favorites]

The idea that agriculture was a mistake has already been introduced into the popular discourse, but I don't know that I've ever heard someone suggest that the printing press might have been.

I don't think he ever considered a medium of communication a mistake, but if I recall correctly, I thought Marshall McLuhan was very focused on the idea that we embrace communications systems before we understand their impacts socially. Sort of like we barely understood the impact of printed text, let alone radio and television, which were dominating the landscape during the period he was writing media theory.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:17 AM on June 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

What they¡¯re describing is one of the key components that make up stupidy, which, like entropy, increases.

Stupidy is an attempt to define and measure the amount of, basically, ¡°wtf¡± in a social and physical environment. As connections between actors increase, the effective distance of the impact of their actions decreases. So individual actions are influenced by those further and further away (physically, socially, culturally, financially).

People self-select into communities, and in-group/out-group social pressures continually hive off new communities. This is not new, of course. But over time the number of splinter communities/belief systems will always increase. And the beliefs in those systems will always grow in intensity. (If they don¡¯t, you go elsewhere.) Over time, criteria used to select will always get more stringent, which sharpens the division between one group and the next, and guarantees that there can never be global consensus reality.

So a lot of the terms of the stupidy equations deal with social connections, and estimating the overall flux in belief grouping. There are also terms for things like information propagation latency and bandwidth, encoding, error/mutation rates. Stupidy theory also tries to account for toxicity¡ªthe likelihood that beliefs increase danger to outgroups, the likelihood that an advance in materials science will result in a better way to kill, or damage the environment.

Stupidy theory isn¡¯t just about belief systems, though sometimes it sounds that way. It¡¯s also about individual numbskullery, and the ability of one person¡¯s tragic flaws to be inflicted on billions of others. (There¡¯s a branch which is basically the theory of mad scientists.) And it¡¯s about the creation, adoption and propagation of all technologies, not just those for information transfer.

Anyway, stupidy increases until it goes asymptotic. Then things get really interesting.
posted by bigbigdog at 11:40 AM on June 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

without Martin Luther's books, a lot of Jewish people might have led their lives in peace.

Pretty sure Luther was a symptom not a cause .
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:42 AM on June 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Who will steward the stewards?

The wait staff.
posted by y2karl at 11:43 AM on June 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

there is no a priori way to know which technological and cultural advances will bring good or ill.

Exactly. It was radio that was instrumental in the Rwandan genocide. TV was supposed to bring us 24-hour opera and other culture. Fission advocates were predicting nuclear-powered cars.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:52 AM on June 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

Last I checked, the Internet now offers 24-hour opera and other culture. Along with plenty of lies and political hatred. That's the point. Humans gonna human.

Bergstrom's comment that we had decades of war after the introduction of the printing press is fatuous - we had centuries of war before the invention of the printing press, too.
posted by PhineasGage at 12:10 PM on June 26, 2021 [15 favorites]

Yeah, I don't think the point is that the printing press was a /mistake/, so much as an observation that there's no such thing as a technological revolution without trade-offs. The printing press gave us religious wars, along with greatly expanded educational access, just as the internal combustion engine was practically genocide for horses.

I do tend to think that previous big shifts in information dissemination are insufficiently studied/cited when people are Worried About the Internet. The printing press allowed cheap books, and there was a whole other revolution of low-quality newspaper journalism in the late 19th century: Ignoring these (very well documented!) eras seems a bit like ignoring the Spanish Flu when thinking about Covid response. We have some different tools available now, but there's a whole lot of interesting data on global response to a planet-spanning plague. 'Sensationalism sells better than truth' is exactly the problem of yellow journalism.

---

Meanwhile, it's very easy to look back at the printing press and cheer for its success. Without it, I'd probably be a serf who never understood the weekly latin sermons explaining why I'm such a bad person. And there's good odds I would have died before my fifth birthday. I have a really high discount rate for the suffering of people who died centuries ago, as it turns out. This is probably healthy: there's nothing I can do now to rescue the victims of past religious wars, and throwing the printing press (and all descendant technologies) away at this point in history would have its own pile of bad consequences.

Applying that same discount rate to consideration of the present basically makes you a monster, though. I'm currently re-reading Ada Palmer's 'Terra Ignota' series, where this is the central question: Would you sacrifice a better world to save this one?

I tend to agree with Hans Rosling that tech changes and resulting economic changes have the largest impact on the quality of day-to-day life for most people, mainly by a) making new things possible that weren't before, and b) lowering the barriers to entry so that anyone can get access to helpful things. (Especially: health care and education.)

Democratizing access to $CoolStuff eventually has the effect of upending existing power structures, which are often based on violently-enforced preferential access to scarce resources: Once the resources aren't scarce, it's easier to ditch the preferential access scheme. And the realignment occasionally gets really ugly, as in the case of the Reformation (scarce resource: education+books; preferential access scheme: the church hierarchy). One can view Reconstruction in the US as a rejection of the realignment of power in the face of industrialization, which had negative repercussions on the economics of the South which persist through today. All of the right-wing madness this decade can be viewed through a similar lens: A (racist!) minority with access to power trying desperately to hold on to it.

So, I suppose my ultimate argument here is an argument for monstrosity. Democratizing access to information is ultimately helpful, but tends to upend power structures, leading to all kinds of conflict and pain in the short term. But you gotta be willing to kick the beehive in order to reap the ultimate rewards. Burn today to save tomorrow...
posted by kaibutsu at 12:13 PM on June 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

Bergstrom's comment that we had decades of war after the introduction of the printing press is fatuous - we had centuries of war before the invention of the printing press, too.

The other part that's missing is that the church and crown bluechecks of the time did indeed endeavor to "steward" the printing press. Now I have a little $100 printer sitting next to me, and many of the authors subject to "stewardship" are renowned today as leading intellectual lights of their time...
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 12:30 PM on June 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

It seems the researchers are looking primarily at social media, but not really the wider Internet. So Facebook and Instagram, but not necessarily surveillance/privacy issues or Uber and Amazon. I'm wondering how do they separate that, when they kind of go hand-in-hand. I'm also wondering how social media's impact would be if mobile devices were never widespread and people still primarily interfaced with technology on a computer/laptop.

I mean, I'm kind of thinking about this because technologies rarely work in isolation. They work alongside other technologies and social developments too. For example, European colonization was possible because of large ships capable of transatlantic voyages and guns. If you took away ships, then Europeans would mostly be stuck shooting themselves. If you took away guns, would Europeans still be as successful in conquering other peoples and setting up colonies? And yes I am oversimplifying here, but it's mostly for the sake of example.
posted by FJT at 12:43 PM on June 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Democratizing information has had profound effects, especially for marginalized, underrepresented communities. It gives them the ability to rally online, have a platform, and have a voice. And that is fantastic.

Social media didn't do that. The internet did that. Social media then came along later, and spoiled it.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:46 PM on June 26, 2021 [13 favorites]

Great Thunberg, to pick just one easy example, would not have rocketed to global fame and influence were it not for social media.
posted by PhineasGage at 1:07 PM on June 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

>I'm glad they wrote the paper outlining this as a crisis discipline, and I think the characterization is accurate, but beyond that, I want to see some proposed solutions.
If some things cause outcomes or are outcomes that are better than others, then a track record and reputation also are things that matter. There are people for whom bad faith, caring not for reputation or zero consequences mean they destroy our common sense of better and worse -- or right and wrong -- and these people need to be. face consequences and carry the weight of poor reputations. It is from better and worse outcomes that reputations matter.
posted by k3ninho at 1:13 PM on June 26, 2021

Great Thunberg, to pick just one easy example, would not have rocketed to global fame and influence were it not for social media.

Truly, I shudder to think where we would be today without Great Thunberg watching out for us.
posted by some loser at 1:22 PM on June 26, 2021 [17 favorites]

[I thought about asking the mod to fix that typo, but now I'm kinda liking it...]
posted by PhineasGage at 1:24 PM on June 26, 2021 [8 favorites]

The mods are in the pocket of Great Thunberg anyhow.
posted by axiom at 1:28 PM on June 26, 2021 [11 favorites]

That's what a tamping rod will do for your spelling, I guess ;)
posted by jamjam at 1:38 PM on June 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

How legit is this? Or is it like the chart discussion we just had, where CNN was trying to wag the dog on a "crime wave".

Because I can't help but think that this is just entrenched power throwing a hissy fit about the democratization of information. Watching Fox News seems to be way more radicalizing than social media, from what I've witnessed. If you want historical parallels, maybe William Randolph Hearst? Let's declare a crisis about that.

"Ask a cable news viewer what's wrong with social media and they describe cable news."
posted by Horkus at 2:23 PM on June 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

The idea of a crisis discipline is fascinating, a kind of urgent applied field.

Nice example the paper gives: "the relationship between medicine and comparative physiology."
posted by doctornemo at 2:51 PM on June 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Great Thunberg in the morning! And all day too! Spell checkers be damned, they're just part of the electronic brainwash.
posted by Atom Collection at 3:06 PM on June 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

That Great could actually be an artifact of autocorrect, you know.
posted by y2karl at 3:33 PM on June 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Biology, which construes human beings as organisms, is inadequate for the challenge at hand. Only a philosophy in which human beings are understood as persons, i.e., as agents with intentions, can help resolve the problem.
posted by No Robots at 4:27 PM on June 26, 2021

Also: once again we have a serious discussion about digital media problems and utterly fail to mention media/information/digital literacy efforts. This drives me nuts.
posted by doctornemo at 4:37 PM on June 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

which is kind of what I was getting at with ...

We (and here I mean pretty much every so-called responsible adult regardless of our leanings, cultural, political, philosophical) need to get way better at being confused.

because I don't think it matters how media-info-digital literate you are in the current zeitgeist, confusion is always next one way or another. So in other words, yeah, this new literacy (which is hardly new - Marshall McLuhan was riffing on it more than half a century ago) has to include various tactics and strategies toward ... rolling with it.

On a personal level, I've found that just saying "I Don't Know" a lot has saved me a pile of grief.
posted by philip-random at 5:08 PM on June 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

> Would it have been better to do it in a stewarded way? I don¡¯t know. Maybe. These major transitions in information technology often cause collateral damage.

This is... a profoundly (classical) conservative ethos/mindset. That guy is literally rueing the advent of the printing press! He's explicitly, in so many words, saying the world might be better place if only our noble overlords - colonialist white male elites - would control and carefully dispense access to every new mode of communication selectively only to the worthy, in accordance with their grand plan of What's Best For The World. The unwashed masses cannot be trusted with the power of speech.

Whew! It's been a while since I came across someone with not merely a stick but an entire marble statue up their ass.
posted by MiraK at 5:19 PM on June 26, 2021 [11 favorites]

Quite some while ago I was making a joke about signing up for the GIB (google implant beta) and was mighty amused when Serge (or Larry) denied in some speech that it was a thing. It's going to take longer but it's happening, small projects that are initially for medical recovery reasons but a nerve/chip interface will put us online 24/7 pervasively. Won't the hackers have a hayday.

I do think folks will learn to manage, the n'th next big thing will lessen in vital immediacy for most people. But it may take a generation. Or two.
posted by sammyo at 5:20 PM on June 26, 2021

"I don't think he ever considered a medium of communication a mistake, but if I recall correctly, I thought Marshall McLuhan was very focused on the idea that we embrace communications systems before we understand their impacts socially. Sort of like we barely understood the impact of printed text, let alone radio and television, which were dominating the landscape during the period he was writing media theory."

I mean if you want to go back even further, early literates bemoaned the loss of oral culture. The benefits of writing were immediately obvious -- the ability to exactly record laws, religious chants, and speeches; the ability to send exact messages long distances; the ability to similarly bridge time differences. Suddenly temporal and physical proximity don't matter so much for the preservation and transmission of knowledge! It's literally revolutionary!

But. But! Early literates began to notice losses as well: Students could no longer as easily memorize lengthy oral corpuses (epic poems, etc.). Written texts lose enormous amounts of meaning that are normally transmitted by the human voice and by human physical expression. (Something we lament online on the regular, but was obviously much more startling to people who had just invented writing.) Less clearly obvious in the moment (but more clear to us today reading laments of wise men and knowing what we know about oral vs. written cultures) is that writing fixes a culture, renders it more conservative, forces it to remember things that might better be forgotten. Oral cultures remember what is important and meaningful, and slough off what has becoming unimportant or dangerous, because there is no other option; written cultures keep all of it, reciting (rewriting) in their laws and liturgies old rules that probably should no longer apply.

Plato's Phaedrus:

SOCRATES: Theuth [...] first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing. [...] when they came to writing, Theuth said: ¡°O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.¡± Thamus, however, replied: ¡°O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.¡±

PHAEDRUS: Socrates, you¡¯re very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want! [...] And I agree that the Theban king was correct about writing.

Anyway, every revolution in communication brings obvious and less-obvious gains -- but also obvious and less-obvious losses. And those all change society and human relationships in really unpredictable ways.

"I'd probably be a serf who never understood the weekly latin sermons explaining why I'm such a bad person"

Good news, the sermons were (almost always) delivered in the vernacular (even when written down in Latin) precisely because otherwise the serfs wouldn't have understood their own sinfulness, but also because, especially in the early medieval period, many many MANY local priests just memorized the Latin Mass and had no idea what they were saying and could not read it because they were not literate. They were oral people living in oral cultures who, weirdly, were responsible for transmitting a written culture!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:01 PM on June 26, 2021 [18 favorites]

From the article:

There¡¯s a misperception that we¡¯re saying, ¡°Exposure to ads is bad ¡ª that¡¯s causing the harm.¡± That¡¯s not what we¡¯re saying. Exposure to ads may or may not be bad. What we¡¯re concerned about is the fact that this information ecosystem has developed to optimize something orthogonal to things that we think are extremely important, like being concerned about the veracity of information or the effect of information on human well-being, on democracy, on health, on the ecosystem.

In other words, it's yet another case of privatising profits while socialising costs.
posted by swr at 6:23 PM on June 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

What we¡¯re concerned about is the fact that this information ecosystem economic system has developed to optimize something orthogonal to things that we think are extremely important, like being concerned about the veracity of information or the effect of information on human well-being, on democracy, on health, on the ecosystem.

Fixed that for them.
posted by deadaluspark at 8:06 PM on June 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Like I'm just sorry FOX News literally can lie on air all day long and Tucker Carlson drop straight up race baiting Nazi bullshit, but we're worried about social networks?

Why aren't we asking why an economic system incentivizes this in all aspects of its media? Television nailed this down years ago, this isn't new, it's just more sophisticated.

"If it bleeds it leads."
posted by deadaluspark at 8:12 PM on June 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

All tools can be used for good or evil. I daresay a hammer was used to kill someone before it was used to build a house. The problem and the solution lie within the tool wielder, not the tool.
posted by fairmettle at 8:13 PM on June 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

I am part of a patient advocacy group that could not possibly have achieved the major wins we have against some truly ferocious resistance from the establishment without the critical access granted by the internet to documents and info and discussions.

At the very least it would have taken vastly longer to achieve. Like an order of magnitude, and it has already taken decades to get this far.

I fear we are living in short historical window where that is possible, before the powers that be learn how to prevent it happening. Sci-Hub, for example, has been a huge advantage to us, but its future looks increasingly bleak.
posted by Pouteria at 8:21 PM on June 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

Coincidentally, I was reading up on the Waldenian heresy today, which happened mainly in the 12th century. They were notable for taking fairly serious vows of poverty, disclaiming the primacy of the pope, and (notably!) producing the first 'vulgar' translations of the bible for circulation amongst the unwashed masses.

Which is to say, the social and economic problems that spurred the reformation existed long before the printing press. The dissidents were just easier to stamp out (a la the Waldensians) or subvert (accepting the loyal Franciscans to appease the critics) before the printing press made it reaaaally easy to get the word out.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:01 PM on June 26, 2021

Yeah, I've always had a little trouble getting on board the hysteria over social media. Humans certainly had little trouble inventing excuses for killing each other prior even to the invention of writing. The whole line of thought hews a bit too close to some vulgar Rousseau style ignorance-is-bliss state of nature argument in which we're degenerating as a species from some mythic golden age due to some serpentine intervention.

Certainly new technologies bring new dangers we need to be aware of along with opportunities. For instance, psychologists and mental health professionals have been worrying about cyberbullying, links between social media and depression, and the impact of screen-time on attention spans since at least the early 00's if not before. I'm not really sure what's being added to the discussion here.

If the worry is about people cocooning themselves in their own self-constructed realities, well, FOX News predates social media. I still remember how the comparative media monoculture of the late 90's and early 00's pushed first the Iraq War then risky financial instruments.

On balance, I actually tend to think that the interactive nature of social media and the internet in general is an improvement on television. It's still possible to isolate yourself in your own bubble, but you have to work at it more, and it's kind of hard to completely isolate yourself from all pushback. Even more importantly, the democratizing nature of social media gives voices to people that traditionally were shut out of the public sphere because they lacked the wealth and privilege to obtain a voice in traditional media.

Of course there are drawbacks and potential dangers (e.g. parasocial relationships are no substitute for real relationships), and its good to be aware of them, but as I noted above, they haven't gone unremarked upon or unstudied.
posted by eagles123 at 10:21 PM on June 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

CheeseDigestsAll - It was radio that was instrumental in the Rwandan genocide, radio was only the stage though, there were some very bad actors behind the scenes.

"Collective Behavior as a Crisis Discipline" ... "we expect that stewardship of social systems will require increased focus on digital technologies" sounds like a call to repressive states, don't like the tone at all.

But haven't read all of it, plus I've been reading mathematical ecology all afternoon, and this is too similar to that.
posted by unearthed at 12:26 AM on June 27, 2021

Nothing new here; Phil Alden Robinson already laid it out way back in 1992.

There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:10 AM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

And by that I mean- in any war (and this is a form of war), there is always profit to be made. Fear is one of the most powerful weapons in existence, and every day, more people are figuring out how to point it at stupid people and sit back and reap the benefits. Same as it ever was.

If it makes money for someone to provide a battlefield where smart vs. stupid battle it to the death, nothing is going to change. It's only going to keep raging on. For every person willing to die on that ignorance-soaked, buffalo-horned hill, 100 more are right there eager to take their place.

In a recent podcast, Conan O'Brien and Barack Obama discuss this very topic. Obama is quick to point out that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward progress. And if progress feels slow in coming, it's worthwhile to remember how far we've come despite if feeling like we've accomplished nothing. Crisis mode can be its own form of blinders, and that blinding can stun us into entropic rage, which is just as damaging.

Obama quotes US Grant: "If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other" and remarks that those words could have been spoken yesterday.

He elaborates, "You don¡¯t have to go back to Ulysses S. Grant and the Civil War. Look at 1968. You know, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King shot in the same year, you got a Democratic convention that is a complete...street fight. You¡¯ve got a Vietnam War that is ripping the country apart. So what I always tell young people is, if you examine history, then you come to the conclusion that as terrible as things are, the world is healthier, better educated, kinder, on average, than just about any time in human history. The problem is we just don¡¯t make progress in a straight line. We have to be vigilant. We have to work hard. We have to push and be resilient."
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:36 AM on June 27, 2021 [8 favorites]

Thanks for dropping one of my favorite movies, I_Love_Bananas, but you gotta link to the actual scene because it's definitely one of my favorite "villain" speeches.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:36 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't get how the existence of FOX News negates the need to study social media. It strikes me as kind of a US/Anglocentric view too, because there are places that don't get FOX news or even speak English, but they certainly do get social media.

And there is the modern anti-vaccination movement. It doesn't conveniently fit in the typical red/blue American politics model. And it used to be a fringe idea in the US that only a few celebrities talked about, but it's now spread in the US and outside of it too. I would not be surprised that that pandemic has popularized the movement even more, as they can take advantage of vaccine hesitancy and twist it to their own ends.

At the very very least, I don't think studying social media takes away anyone's efforts in studying FOX News or anything else. We can study two (or more) things at once after all.
posted by FJT at 2:14 PM on June 27, 2021 [6 favorites]

Like I'm just sorry FOX News literally can lie on air all day long and Tucker Carlson drop straight up race baiting Nazi bullshit, but we're worried about social networks?

the interactive nature of social media and the internet in general is an improvement on television

Fox News didn't enable genocide in Myanmar, or enable Cambridge Analytica hijinx, or enable Nazis to organize in Charlottesville, or enable Elon Musk to spew "Covid is a hoax" bullshit, or enable Trumpist U.S. representatives to broadcast the location of Nancy Pelosi during the insurrection attempt at the Capitol, or supercharge the QAnon cult, etc. Social media did.

We can study two (or more) things at once after all

One would think.
posted by Lyme Drop at 3:59 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think we can all agree that we don't want to live in a world where people plan and execute genocide on social media.

The question is who is going to make the rules. Up until now it's been mostly a few giant companies that have decided what they will and won't censor and here's their answer, "Yeah we're totally cool with lies about vaccines that get people killed but don't you dare post that clip of Frozen. Also happy to take down videos if Xi asks."

It's like our economy. It only exists and is successful because of rules and constraints that all obliged to follow. It's a measure of how poisoned our discourse is that many won't even admit there is a problem and others are happy to hand wave away any problems and risks as reasonable price to pay so that grandparents can see pictures of their grandkids.
posted by euphorb at 5:27 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

I was with you until your last paragraph, euphorb. The point I and others here are making isn't hand-waving away any problems, it's looking to history and seeing the problems with giving legal control of individual expression to any particular authority.
posted by PhineasGage at 5:53 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Do I want unelected judges and corrupt politicians deciding what I can say and do online? Heck no! I would much rather leave it up to my man Mark Zuckerburg, who over the past 2 decades has demonstrated the wisdom of Solomon and has a sterling track record of accountability. If anyone should have the authority to decide which dissidents should be silenced and which ethnic groups should be annihilated it's him.
posted by euphorb at 7:18 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Preventing disinformation on Facebook is a far cry from "giving legal control of individual expression to any particular authority."
posted by Lyme Drop at 7:50 PM on June 27, 2021

Eager to hear your plans for government control of Facebook content, which don't threaten at least as much the free speech being used by advocates for the progressive ideas and causes we share.
posted by PhineasGage at 7:54 PM on June 27, 2021

Since we're talking about the Phaedrus, and the Gutenberg press, I'd like to point out that the flip side of what scholarly life was like before the press was invented. I'll start with the rabbinical saying about what one had to do to make ones virtuous actions outlast his life: "write a book, plant a tree, and raise a child." They were not talking about Nanowrimo, here. They meant "sit down with a quill and copy a manuscript, or pay someone else to do it." For most of Jewish history, middle and upper class families could establish their standing in the community by commissioning scribal work for everyone's benefit. And there are cities in that era where economic conditions reached that sweet spot where they really needed scribal work done, but were also wealthy enough that the middle classes could afford to take part in the effort, and all those places are mentioned with a degree of awe today: Timbuktu, Samarkand, Barcelona, Baghdad, Tblisi and others.

Censorship in that era was a lot more lax. The religious authorities did not burn books with anywhere near the zeal we see in Europe's Wars of Religion from the 1500s onwards, because they. Did. Not. Have. To. The authorities published a Canon of works that needed to be copied onwards and onwards, and so those were. Other works fell by the wayside because the effort to copy them was not done. Once copying books became easy, the effort to suppress books stepped up.

Case in point, the Malleus Maleficarum, by Heinrich Kramer in 1487. Imagine such a book in the era before the press. The Inquisition would have intercepted the one or two copies, kept the entire affair a local one, and instead of debating the book, just emphasized that Kramer was a toddler torturing sadist and burned just him at the stake. Instead, the book spread to audiences that knew nothing of Kramer and forced the Inquisition to actually discuss the content of the book.

So yes, there was a dark side to the printing press. And now we have a double edged sword called social media. Give Instagram to teenagers, and you get Great Thunberg. Give Facebook to Putin, and you get Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, and the rest of that motley crew.
posted by ocschwar at 7:56 PM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

Eager to hear your plans for government control of Facebook content, which don't threaten at least as much the free speech being used by advocates for the progressive ideas and causes we share.

Similarly, I'm eager to hear your solution to social media's enabling of mis- and disinformation, hate speech, extremist violence, and genocide.
posted by Lyme Drop at 8:01 PM on June 27, 2021

Sadly I don't have a "solution." But I am ok with that because social media also enables The Great Thunberg; and the propagation of all kinds of progressive ideas; and the organizing of Women's Marches; and supercharged fundraising for AOC and Bernie Sanders and many more progressive advocates; and so much more good effort. And I believe the best remedy for speech we don't agree with is yet more free speech. And I have faith (probably misguided, but still) in the progressive arc of history. Yes, we need to fight fight fight. But censorship censorship censorship is guaranteed to work against the ideas and causes we here hold dear.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:24 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Perhaps on reflection, as it's been a few years now, "the sharks" need to be further encouraged to up their game.
posted by Wordshore at 10:15 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Just saying first I was calling for more study of social media and didn't say anything about government involvement. Though I will point out it's kind of odd that people hear "studying social media" and then think immediately of censorship. As if there's no other ways (like increasing media literacy as pointed out by doctornemo) that these studies can be used for.

And I believe the best remedy for speech we don't agree with is yet more free speech.

But again, that's a US/American viewpoint, that even other fellow democracies interpret differently. Like Germany outlawing Nazi imagery.

And I'm pushing on that, because right now the Internet is dominated mostly by a handful of US tech companies. Thus, US/American views on free speech are currently the internet "standard", and so it's up to other countries (governments ranging from democratic to totalitarian) to try to adjust themselves to fit this or just to try to keep it out (like North Korea). But I don't see it as a given that American companies will dominate the internet forever. What's going to happen when the biggest and most influential social networks are not US/American?
posted by FJT at 11:51 AM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

Facebook is Other People
posted by mstokes650 at 12:49 PM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Look, I'm all for doing research on social media and traditional media. I guess my point is that traditional media has a lot of these same problems, it's just a difference of scale and reach. That extended scale and reach is absolutely why social media is currently doing far more damage than traditional media.

My point is that the real problem is an economic system which incentivizes lies and propaganda over truth and objectivity in media, no matter the type of media. I don't think you'll find a solution to the 'social media problem' without admitting it's actually a 'for-profit-media' problem.

Because, by contrast, the television media in the 80's and 90's helped a lot of horrific events worldwide. American media in particular is used to massage public opinion. I worked in local television news in the run-up to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I was off work on 9/11. I barely had any hours at work for the next month after 9/11 because it was all pre-empted for national news. National news was corporations demanding we march to war and Katie Couric talking about how hunky marines were. The war in Iraq had the largest worldwide protests ever, but the media and government were still too gung-ho on it to question the "weapons of mass destruction" narrative that we went to war anyway.

Oh, also, remember when television media decided when Trump was Presidential when he bombed the shit out of Syria? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

The evil is at every level of media, let's not split hairs here. Television was the big bad guy when they television was the king of scale. I recall Bill Cinton and George Bush "visiting" all over the country via satellite TV feeds in the 92 election. If you want to get to the bottom of the "problems with media in the US" barrel, you have to start with asking why the for-profit media structure always, always, always results in promoting lies and anger over truth and love. After that, you can nail down the worst offenders, but if you don't take out the profit-motive, you've missed the point entirely and aren't going to actually solve any problems. Tucker Carlson is proof enough of that. You think the kind of laws that "reign in" Tucker Carlson will "reign in" social media? They will find every scummy way around it, like they always do, give me a break. Like FOX, Facebook will do dumb shit like argue in court that nobody in their right mind would trust Tucker Carlson, except Facebook will be all "nobody in their right mind would trust our platform" as a legal shield.

Just, give me a break, unless you deal with capitalism you're not solving the fucking social media problem (let alone the media problem), no matter how much research you do.
posted by deadaluspark at 1:54 PM on June 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Why do you equate this with capitalism? State-run media all over the world as well as state-funded media like the BBC have engaged in behavior just like the examples you cite. The "problem" is viewers, citizens, humans.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:10 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

1) I don't see where anyone is advocating that we don't study social media. Indeed, as I pointed out, we already do, and we've been studying and worrying about it almost since it was invented. My only point would be that it seems like these scholars (and I recognize Bergstrom's name) seem to think they've noticed something new about the world because recent events occasioned their interactions with large numbers of the "unwashed masses" over social media due to the sudden salience of their disciplines to current events.
2) I rarely find myself arguing this position on here, but I think some attention needs to be paid the fact that we've been a relatively violent species over the course of our history. Reams of archeological evidence points to periodic spasms of violence, warfare, oppression, and genocide. Those violent events occurred whether humans scratched cuneiform into clay or shouted Nazi propaganda into microphones while light inscribed their images in celluloid. As such, I disagree with the notion that social media and the internet are inherently dangerous technologies compared to past media advances.
3) Given our shared human history of violent oppression, I tend to distrust any single authority - private corporate monopoly or government sensor - controlling the flow of information. Now, I 'm not calling for anarchy; I don't think people should be free to dox, harass, or defame each other, but I do fear that concentrated media power does tend to promote violence and oppression because historically groups tend to gain power by oppressing others. For example, lets say the Republicans manage to gain power in 2022 and 2024 by somehow undermining US elections: Would you trust the Republicans to honestly run a government bureau tasked with regulating media? I can already tell you what would happen. Just look at Florida. Suddenly progressive attempts to organize labor, fight racial injustice, or even protest the elections are all Antifa and subject to a visit from Blackwater. No thank you.
posted by eagles123 at 7:09 PM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Pulling a quote from the PNAS paper:

Adding friction to this process has become one of the more promising approaches to reducing misinformation online (105).

A major tactic of the Chinese censorship regime is not to prevent the dissemination of some information, just to slow it down so that the communist party can put a response together before it reaches a critical mass in the general population. Kind. of a flatten-the-curve thing.
posted by ocschwar at 7:10 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Given our shared human history of violent oppression

From where I sit this is an argument for better regulating social media content, which is well-established as an accelerant of extremism. It's highly unclear to me how "people can be really evil" leads to a conclusion like "let's ensure the evil they foment is able to spread as rapidly as possible."
posted by Lyme Drop at 2:18 PM on July 3, 2021

And really, once the GOP takes control thanks in large part to social media, do you really think they're going to be cool with "progressive attempts to organize labor, fight racial injustice, or even protest the elections" on social media?
posted by Lyme Drop at 2:21 PM on July 3, 2021