I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era. Here's a taste: in 1970, the national guard murdered four unarmed students at Kent State. A poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students, who were widely smeared.
Maybe the real rot of social media is how it erases in peoples' minds the idea that anything could have happened without social media. Here's a quote from the end of No Country for Old Men, because why not it's a great book & film:
What you got ain’t nothing new. This country is hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.
> I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era.
You are missing an important point though: with machine learning, you can make sure all social media will be optimized naturally to put the maximum amount of people's hair on fire, all the time.
Outrage create clicks, replies, and with recommendations engines it's served to your eyeballs as often as possible.
Whatever manual interventions we had to make use of outrage before are like kids' play compared to the systems which automate this nowadays.
> Whatever manual interventions we had to make use of outrage before are like kids' play compared to the systems which automate this nowadays.
I think you need to cite evidence for that view. There's a long history of terrible violence based on manipulation of religious animosity that predates the Internet. The Reformation movement in Germany triggered religious conflicts--incited by various secular powers--that lasted around 130 years and did not burn out until the end of the 30 Years War. Something like half the population of Germany died in that conflict. [1] That's just one example.
I'd guess it's more that in that time, the amount of incrimination and accusation you could have in a society before you had a civil war on your hands was lower. So you had more civil wars, but it also pushed people to stay quiet more. I think the reason we have so much criticism nowadays is how relatively limited the consequences are.
Well also there's the notion of freedom of speech, which is a relatively new development in the West. We tolerate speech today that would have resulted in gruesome execution in the reign of, say, the Tudor Kings of England. [1] These were not democracies. (Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point.)
Outrage spreads just fine without machine learning. All you need is a platform that makes mass signaling cheap. Maybe machine learning intensifies the effect a small amount, but I am not aware of evidence that it is decisive.
Even without Social Media, people will continue to view and subscribe to Youtube channels that fits their views. It is really the "Internet" as a whole, or the always connected tech. Not simply Social Media.
For example there are far greater amount of information flowing through Instant Messenger that is not accounted for.
I have now come to the conclusion it wasn't Social Media or Internet that divided the world. They act as an amplifier or solidify the viewer views. Simply because they spent more time on these media than ever before. So in reality, Social Media isn't really to blame, but it is currently a good use for politicians and other Press to target.
My new question for myself is, Before the amplifier or solidifier comes in, How did one get their view in the first place? What shapes it?
Fair enough it is possible that we have "industrialized" outrage and gotten good at mass producing it, but being real, Donald Trump would have fit in great with 18th century politics.
This is my annual reminder to anyone who thinks politics has become uncivilized that Aaron Burr (a founding father) killed Alexander Hamilton (another founding father). Makes twitter jabs seem quaint.
I would also encourage reading about the press before the 20th century. Every random pamphleteer or newspaper churned up all kinds of despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric as bad or worse than Twitter. The idea of “objective press”
is pretty new...
The difference many less people had those newspapers or pamphleteers in their face all day long. The odds of people running into those stories in their personal lives were pretty small.
The analogy is like people complaining about A-Bombs and someone replying "300yrs ago people killed each other with swords. The world hasn't changed. People always killed other people".
In both cases the scale has changed by many orders of magnitude
Another multiplier is that Facebook and others have data scientists and psychology PHDs that are working to maximize the addictiveness of these apps to suck more of our eyeballs attention
I wonder how the perception of who the writer is influences the people who read the 'message'.
When "the press" publishes something, you know it's "the media", since you're reading it in the paper.
On Twitter, the message presents itself as coming from "regular people, like you and me".
What I mean is that maybe people may have some kind of skepticism when reading a paper, such as I they know that this paper has rather this kind of views whereas that other paper will have that other kind. And also, this was written by some journalist and approved by the paper's editor, so it could very well be a fringe opinion since only few people were implicated. We don't know that this opinion is shared by many people. Contrast this with Twitter, where it appears that "a lot of different people" seem to be holding this or that opinion. People who aren't overtly belonging to the same group or organization. Which means the opinion isn't just some random group making things up, there must actually be something to it.
I'm not saying this works every time and "despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric" in the press never worked. I'm sure they did. But I think it worked on fewer people, and in order for those rumors to take hold in society they would have to spread through the people, not through newspapers, which must have been slower at the time.
Or the newspapers would have to be very convincing in order to influence many people directly, just writing a 140 character blurb wouldn't have done it.
> I wonder how the perception of who the writer is influences the people who read the 'message'.
Given e.g. the propensity for politicians to emphasise their "salt of the land, common folk" attributes whilst hiding their gold-plated toilets, etc., I suspect it's not inconsequential.
If you want a real open society, you need to address as many people as possible and the best way to do that is by including the most perspectives as possible. Journalism evolved here until financial incentives drove us back to strong opinions.
Propaganda undermines trust and it is actually far easier now to identify untruthful and biased news compared to the past. So a regression would be costly.
You're right, I was listening to a long podcast that covered parts of the 60s and 70s, and the same things were going on back then, they just didn't have "social media" so people don't remember. Rioting in cities over civil rights issues, "woke" college students creating oppression hierarchies that decided who was right when someone was offended, and the DNC rigging the presidential primaries which resulted in Nixon getting elected. It was really eye opening to see how history repeats itself, it's just more visible now because of technology.
The Vietnam-era "culture war" did not, however. It continued for quite some time. Just like the Civil Rights era and McCarthyism beore it, both of which came with their share of lynch mobs, and sometimes literal rather than metaphorical ones.
>That in my view is what’s new and worse about it and it’s only likely to get more integrated with us.
Absolutely we should work to reduce this kind of behavior, but it is in no way something "new". Dragging people on Twitter is a significant improvement from dragging them in front of Congress on national TV, which is an improvement from dragging them... behind cars.
> > [bamboozled] the war ended and people moved on
> [dralley] The Vietnam-era "culture war" did not, however. It continued for quite some time.
Evidence (anecdotal) in support: Jane Fonda is STILL referred to as “Hanoi Jane”; I think I've seen it used even more recently than, e.g, [1]. This is from 1972, i.e. almost fifty years ago. OK, half that time the Internet has been available, and half of that in turn, “social media”. But for the first ~twenty-five years of that, they weren't.
The underlying witch-hunt mentality has obviously existed since before the term witch-hunt.
The new part is that social media arguably accelerates it. One wacko trying to burn the witches in a village full of level heads couldn't accomplish anything. Now they can band together nationally.
The Red Guards accomplished the national banding together thing, with the approval of the establishment, going from village to village, city to city, they burned and hanged witches, and destroyed problematic symbols too.
They were actually incredibly fractured and fought each other a lot, actual fights with weapons and casualties. But still, you're right, they only got off the ground initially due to a national infrastructure encouraging them.
Social Media is more of an accidental paper-clip-optimizer national encouragement.
Social media has been doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to being a scapegoat for anything to do with people being shitty for a good few years now.
Media abuse is not a new thing. Understand that the current iteration is worse than the last one and that has resulted in worse polarization is probably a better way to put it.
People that blame it on social media maybe forgot that we once had a civil war that killed 2.5% of the population of the entire country.
The things that divide people are slow and many. The creep along slowly until at some point the differences are so great people believe those differences are worthy of death.
To be fair, the draft over a war was what really drove people apart in the 60's/70's. The youth of the country didn't want to die face down in the mud in a god forsaken jungle in vietnam to support the anti-communist narrative spouted by our political leaders.
In 2020, we no longer use the draft. What's our excuse for being so polarized?
Hmm, why I am still saying tweets about BLM being violent and is aiming to disrupt social stability? I am stilling seeing a lot of people dont believe Covid19, and they also call it China Virus, and some are even attacking Asian people.
Maybe the real rot of social media is how it erases in peoples' minds the idea that anything could have happened without social media. Here's a quote from the end of No Country for Old Men, because why not it's a great book & film:
What you got ain’t nothing new. This country is hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.