Re:Media Companies Are Getting Sick of Facebook
by wutbrodo on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @07:29PM
(#14599422)
This is a great, high-quality comment, and I agree with much of what you're saying.
Does anyone else _like_ the current state of information access? It's beyond naive to think that you can get high-quality, honest, bias-free information from any source without having to have an ounce of skepticism. This pre-dates the Internet and the decentralization of content by [# of years since the beginning of civilization] years. I feel far more capable to form an opinion on something now than I did in the days before the Internet: I'm able to rapidly check a dozen different sources of information, weight them by how much I trust them and how credible I find their arguments, and assess my level of confidence about how I feel about it. This can include the issue being controversial enough that I end up with "hmm...I lean this way but don't have a strong opinion on which side is more correct". It's even easy to validate this approach: as I'm sure many others here can, I can think of half a dozen issues where traditional gatekeepers arrived at the conclusion I reached _years_ after I did.
By contrast, in the past, you had access to far fewer analyses of any degree of quality and if they were wrong or lazy or dishonest, you were just shit out of luck. Importantly, it's not like the highest-quality info sources back then were _better_ than the best sources you have access to now, so even if you think you're completely incapable of critical thought, you're no worse off.
I think the fundamental problem is how incredibly uncomfortable people have with uncertainty. It seems like purely a psychological problem to me, present only if one isn't mature enough to face down the fact that the knowledge you have access to in a large, complex society is inherently socially-constructed[1].
The "downside" of too much information only appears if one has already deluded oneself into thinking that skepticism is never warranted with gatekeeper-delivered information.
Does anyone else _like_ the current state of information access? It's beyond naive to think that you can get high-quality, honest, bias-free information from any source without having to have an ounce of skepticism. This pre-dates the Internet and the decentralization of content by [# of years since the beginning of civilization] years. I feel far more capable to form an opinion on something now than I did in the days before the Internet: I'm able to rapidly check a dozen different sources of information, weight them by how much I trust them and how credible I find their arguments, and assess my level of confidence about how I feel about it. This can include the issue being controversial enough that I end up with "hmm...I lean this way but don't have a strong opinion on which side is more correct". It's even easy to validate this approach: as I'm sure many others here can, I can think of half a dozen issues where traditional gatekeepers arrived at the conclusion I reached _years_ after I did.
By contrast, in the past, you had access to far fewer analyses of any degree of quality and if they were wrong or lazy or dishonest, you were just shit out of luck. Importantly, it's not like the highest-quality info sources back then were _better_ than the best sources you have access to now, so even if you think you're completely incapable of critical thought, you're no worse off.
I think the fundamental problem is how incredibly uncomfortable people have with uncertainty. It seems like purely a psychological problem to me, present only if one isn't mature enough to face down the fact that the knowledge you have access to in a large, complex society is inherently socially-constructed[1].
The "downside" of too much information only appears if one has already deluded oneself into thinking that skepticism is never warranted with gatekeeper-delivered information.