When I started to write this post, I had no intention of creating this rambling essay that might well come straight from a comspiracy nutjob. It is certainly not well supported by any facts that I have readily available. But I really need to vent, so here it is anyway:
I too get the perception (through media!) that the world is becoming more dystopian. But I think that there may be more to that than meets the eye.
I am seriously starting to wonder if social media and internet based media in general have a big part in that.
This is not a single issue IMO. There are several aspects to it: people get offer a much wider spectrum of sources of information and generally tend to prefer thise that have slants more in line with their own views. Also, bad news is more sensational and spreads wider and faster than good news. This lead to a bias in what is reported. Thirdly, and most damning, social media is not only supporting these bubbles that people build around themselves. They are being exploited by actors who post material that is designed to undermine our perception and our opinions. This is apparantly done in subtle ways. Some internet shitstorms are apparently engineered using bots to shape public views on certain topics. This seems to be done to subtly, slowly and purposefully undermine public opinion and steer it towards extreme views.
There was a recent study undertaken of s sample of Twitter messages to Rian Johnson about Star Wars VIII. A substantial fraction of the negative comments were apparently manufactured using bots. This activity appears to be linked to a political motivation, but I do not know how the study reaches that conclusion. But if it is true, it is quite disturbing.
When creating the world wide web, the idealists among us wanted to bring the world closer together and make it more connected and peaceful. I get the suspicion that these good intentions instead bring us closer to an age of renewed nationalism, intolerance and totalitarianism, which is created by maliciously exploring the very freedoms we wanted for everyone.
Hypocrisy but mostly the attempt to unify totally divergent realities, usually by omitting / "forgetting" something.
E.g. you can't be the good guys when you abuse children at your border, so obviously that's fake news (=propaganda by the bad guys) and/or(!) those are criminals anyway (=the propaganda by the bad guys omits those parts showing how what you're doing is the right and overall good thing to do).
Another example where this is readily apparent is Americans and their freedom knee-jerk reflex; all the while the US is a country with some of the most restrictive justice/penal systems in the world, the most powerful surveillance state in the world and also comes with it's own secret court and set of secret laws.
Random quote:
> All men have served their sentence and yet, due to a controversial legal mandate, they remain confined indefinitely.
I too get the perception (through media!) that the world is becoming more dystopian. But I think that there may be more to that than meets the eye.
I am seriously starting to wonder if social media and internet based media in general have a big part in that.
This is not a single issue IMO. There are several aspects to it: people get offer a much wider spectrum of sources of information and generally tend to prefer thise that have slants more in line with their own views. Also, bad news is more sensational and spreads wider and faster than good news. This lead to a bias in what is reported. Thirdly, and most damning, social media is not only supporting these bubbles that people build around themselves. They are being exploited by actors who post material that is designed to undermine our perception and our opinions. This is apparantly done in subtle ways. Some internet shitstorms are apparently engineered using bots to shape public views on certain topics. This seems to be done to subtly, slowly and purposefully undermine public opinion and steer it towards extreme views.
There was a recent study undertaken of s sample of Twitter messages to Rian Johnson about Star Wars VIII. A substantial fraction of the negative comments were apparently manufactured using bots. This activity appears to be linked to a political motivation, but I do not know how the study reaches that conclusion. But if it is true, it is quite disturbing.
When creating the world wide web, the idealists among us wanted to bring the world closer together and make it more connected and peaceful. I get the suspicion that these good intentions instead bring us closer to an age of renewed nationalism, intolerance and totalitarianism, which is created by maliciously exploring the very freedoms we wanted for everyone.