[xtiansimon]

I recently watched a film about Umberto Eco, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022). (It has an eerie sense of “last words” from the “maestro” of letters as the film was produced after his death).

I’m therefore unsure who to credit with the assemblage or arching themes. Nevertheless, one is about the internet. I perceived in his words a duality—-the internet is “limitless memory” as well as “lost memory”. And not just the immediate connotation of repository of lost ideas, but in the sense we as human beings, with the Internet at our fingertips, are losing our memory to it.

Turning this idea around in my mind I imagined such a thing as _Instagram Brain_, where your memory contains only the last “bird on a branch”. (Reflecting, I watch a lot of woodworking and furniture making videos, and I can only remember the last one.)

Now some of my intellectual interests intrude on this infinite semiotic chain. Adding M.Eco’s imaginary conditions, where more information than we’ve ever had access to somehow becomes less useful, the image of the internet as a “complete graph” of knowledge comes to my mind’s eye. What a tangle. Everything connected to everything else—-numinous and beyond comprehension. (I wonder what M. Eco would have made of Chat technology? More’s the pity.)

And finally I get to the political point. By comparison the film gave my imagination a sidelong image of politics. What if, in this stage of the digital revolution, we are all striving to find some mental refuge from the mass-complete-graph (and Instagram Brain): a little corner of HN where colleagues warn each other about this or that dangerous virus or zero-day. A daytime dose of enervating 24h news for the 65+ crowd.

Like this. And more. I wonder at the American two party system and today’s political divide. (The president is literally calling the Democratic Party “traitors”. What a cockup.)

A hypothesis forms: partisanship (as a “function”) makes a tearing bifurcation of the “complete graph” of social knowledge and culture. This is our nations’s social immunity in action. We’ve reached some limit of the social-mind’s capacity to be so highly interconnected, and a function is tearing through everything faster than we can comprehend the individual parts.

Sure, It’s just a fanciful idea. The furthest extent of a Chain of Semiotic reasoning before I’m bored. Maybe the result is a false idea (short of “belief” since I know it’s hypothetical). Still, some people walk away from the computer (read internet, or whatever mass media which produces “Instagram Brain” effects) in full faith, belief and without a doubt, because they “did their research”.

Scientists and other learned individuals might balk at my subjects and turns of reason. Don’t take it literally, but poetically. If I have been at all successful your mind’s eye might glimpse a vision where we Americans, as a people, are not so far apart as it might seem. We are suffering through a black turn of the Digital Revolution, and rather than, as a group, dividing into a million opinions we have split only in two. LOL.

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[OkayPhysicist]

IMO, the interconnection of the internet is heavily to blame for how divisive politics have gotten, but I offer a different method of action: Prior to the internet, most people only regularly interacted with people in a relatively limited cultural band. When venturing out of that cultural band, you largely came across people interacting on heightened levels of good behavior, because of in-person hospitality norms. We might have had assumptions based on stereotypes of other groups, where a Bay Area city slicker might think of the average Kentuckian as a bit backward perhaps a bit bigoted, and the Kentuckian might have imagined the Bay Area type as a bit pretentious, but any individual of the other group you happened to meet probably seemed fine.

The internet blew that illusion up. Rather than dispelling stereotypes, transparency confirmed them, to an even greater extent than everyone thought. Urban people got to see first hand that rural areas were full of deranged bigots who are perfectly primed to believe wild lies about foreigners eating people's pets, and the rural people saw that the urbanites really dismissed them out of hand as speed bumps on the path of progress. Paradoxically, both sides had been imagining that the political divide was smaller than it really was.

[xtiansimon]

I need to contemplate this notion the internet removed the veil of presumed good character.

Is this something you’ve read about? Is there a general consensus in some circles the more we learn, the less we like each other?

I think of social media in some ways like costume; I’m putting on the social costume of the group i want to belong to. Opposed to how you might address someone at the grocery store or fellow neighbor in a chance encounter. Then it’s the relationship of sharing mundane life together with the politeness or grace (dignity?) you afford to people when you meet them in person.

The classic advertising gambit has the Goth helping the Soccer Mom with her groceries to the car. Under the hairspray and makeup is the child who has a notion of helping mom, and is therefore only wearing a costume (which, in my networked idea, becomes another node we all already expect and a condition that seems to paralyze teenagers).