[dang]

Before considering deliberate manipulation you need to account for contagion and memeiness among the population by default. That's certainly a nontrivial phenomenon, and possibly so dominant that manipulation is no more than a sideshow.

Running HN has shifted my priors on this point because, at least in our little pond, claims of deliberate manipulation almost always turn out to be unsupported by data.

[jhawleypeters]

Thank you, that’s parsimonious and makes sense.

[ChainOfFools]

If that's the case then detectable (if a magnitude or two weaker) pulses of the same phenomenon should have followed the widespread availability and access to the printing press and perhaps the telephone.

[mike_hearn]

Moral panics over communications technologies are nothing new. Certain types of people just like to performatively worry about anything that empowers other people.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/texting-isnt-first...

“Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?” wondered the Knights of Columbus in a 1926 meeting. “Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”

Others worried that the inverse would occur—that it would be so easy to talk that we’d never leave each other alone. “Thanks to the telephone, motor-car and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions,” complained an American professor in 1929. And surely it couldn’t be healthy to talk to each other so much. Wouldn’t it create Too Much Information?

“We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other,” a London writer moaned in 1897. Others fretted that the telephone sped up life, demanding instant reactions. “The use of the telephone gives little room for reflection,” wrote a British newspaper in 1899. “It does not improve the temper, and it engenders a feverishness in the ordinary concerns of life which does not make for domestic happiness and comfort.”

Young ladies, some fretted, were at romantic risk. “The serenading troubadour can now thrum his throbbing guitar before the transmitter undisturbed by apprehensions of shot guns and bull dogs,” a magazine article in Electrical World noted. Scamsters loved the phone.

“It changed people’s ideas of social trust,” notes Carolyn Marvin, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and author of When Old Technologies Were New. We could no longer read someone based on face-to-face social cues.

[hypertele-Xii]

The moral panic is real, and warranted.

> Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?

Proven, the telephone (especially with integration of computer) has made men less active and more lazy. Obesity and media addiction skyrocketing. Cops called on kids playing outside.

> Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?

Confirmed. When I was a kid, we just went to a friend's house to knock to see if they wanted to play. Nobody does that anymore, and so much spirit of adventure has been lost. Everyone is glued to their pocket phones.

> it would be so easy to talk that we’d never leave each other alone. [...] Thanks to the telephone, motor-car and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions

Also confirmed. Constant addiction-engineered notifications from social media apps. Everyone always chatting. People are losing the ability to walk up to strangers and strike up conversation.

> Wouldn’t it create Too Much Information?

Sure did. First we had phone books to find peoples' contact. Then we got search engines and shift through websites. Now there's so much garbage most services just let it rot, and we're looking to AI to organize it all (good luck).

> the telephone sped up life, demanding instant reactions

Happened. There's no time for things to play out and integrate it anymore. It happens, it spreads instantly to all corners of the earth, and people suffer without having any time to ponder the ramification. Mental contagion is a real phenomena.

> The use of the telephone gives little room for reflection

Confirmed. Everyone is glued to their screens, avoiding deep and difficult conversations. The screen instructs them how to think, what to say, and especially what to buy.

> It does not improve the temper, and it engenders a feverishness in the ordinary concerns of life which does not make for domestic happiness and comfort.

Yup. People get so angry and worked up about social media. In particular, old single women of tiktok are convincing younger women to divorce their husbands over nothing, leading to lifetime of loneliness and misery. Half of all western women are projected to be childless and alone forever. Most of them will regret it.

> Young ladies, some fretted, were at romantic risk.

Dating apps have decimated romance. Ladies stuck on promiscuous hypergamy, "dating" a tiny percentage of men. Romance is the prime motivator for men to work hard, so this has far-reaching repercussions.

> It changed people’s ideas of social trust [...] We could no longer read someone based on face-to-face social cues.

People don't even interact face-to-face anymore, and when they do, they are clueless to cues as texting has none.