[jacquesm]

You essentially want people to stop being people. We are for want of a better term meme machines and we pass on information that we find interesting, gives us hope or makes us feel better and we avoid the opposite because it eventually makes us feel worse.

[j_maffe]

Yes but we can try to be selective about what we treat as a meme. People have that ability, although it is diminishing with the speed of communication these day.

[jacquesm]

That is a very interesting observation. I've always likened it to the diminishing cost of communication but your insight may well be the better one.

[s1artibartfast]

j_maffe took the words out of my mouth.

I would also say that in addition to diminishing cost and discretion, there are changing incentives/rewards structures with online communication.

[jacquesm]

Maybe. I think the point is valid but in the traditional media there is plenty of ways in which the incentives and rewards lead to pathological behavior, especially with TV but also with some forms of print.

[s1artibartfast]

I totally agree that there are always incentives at play! I'm not even trying to make the claim that they're worse, although I do believe that.

One of the new incentives more at play with modern media is using a sense of social visibility, community, and belonging as a reward. Well sometimes true, I think that for the most part it is false or at least very shallow.

Someone shouting at or praising a book, newspaper, or TV rarely felt like they were part of something bigger and making a difference.

New Media enables these feelings in a way that I think is exaggerated, and leads to a different type of pathological Behavior.

To take an example, I think that some people, on some level, feel that posting some mundane comment about superconductivity makes them feel more part of the science, history, and Society. It is a subtle satisfaction of a need to validate ones on existence. I know this all sounds very Freudian, and it probably is. But my central objection is that this gratification is just a new form of junk food for the mind, leaving people malnourished and ultimately dissatisfied.

It's basically a psychological trap, like someone satisfying their need to learn with a tweet instead of reading a book. Not everything needs to be a book, but some people trick themselves into thinking they're a scholar after reading a tweet.

[jacquesm]

That's true. It is something I'm observing with kids around me: they don't learn from books, they hate to read, but they consume video like there is no tomorrow, wherever and whenever they can. Inane stuff, but also really bad stuff as well as good stuff. Getting them to be selective is hard, but it is far less hard than to try to get them to read.

I really struggle with this, I would love to get my kids to read more (they are the ones I can influence the easiest) but it's very much an uphill battle. Their peer group is just like them, and 'reading is for old people' is pretty much how that whole generation sees it. They may well be right and I'm probably tilting at windmills but I'll keep trying. I wouldn't know how to get through life or run a business without my literacy and ability to write, it's what allows me to absorb knowledge far faster than I could do from any other means of communication. Video, in comparison, sucks. It is so low in information density that unless the subject is something where video actually enhances the information it is a distraction and bloat.

[justanotherjoe]

I think there is justifiable view here that people these days are getting more and more addicted to making prediction. We predict everything but we forget most of it will be just a coin toss cause for every 1 factor we consider, 100 more are unconsidered.

[wolverine876]

It's sad that the current assumption is that we have no power to change ourselves or our world. We're not machines, we are human beings, agents; we control what we do.

[jacquesm]

Collectively we have a lot of power, individually much less.

[wolverine876]

I agree, but that's always been true and yet we are communicating on HN and not wandering the savannah trying not to starve.