I definitely think we will look back on my generation (Generation Y) as the guinea pigs for this whole "connected social world" thing. So far it's been too much, too fast, and we have done an abysmal job handling it.
But they have to keep their party accountable. I see it so many times that people complain about something when the other party is in party and as soon as their party has the power it's perfectly fine. Sometimes this reminds me of "Doublethink" in 1984.
That's basically what I said in the sentence before the one you quoted to respond to.
Most Russians don't care what happens with American politics. We don't blame 'the Arabs' for 9/11, right?
If 9/11 had been planned by a government we would also say the "Iraqis" and not the "Iraqi government".
I was taking, based on what seemed to me to be exquisitely clear contextual clues, “the Russians” in the post I was responding to as “the Russians to whom blame has widely been attached”, who, yes, are the Russian government and certain regime-linked business figures.
“Stop blaming the Russians”, it seems to me, makes clear that the focus is those Russians who are currently being blamed, which is not the Russian population in general.
Yes, if you were to stop and think about it, this is the intended meaning. However, when people constantly hear 'The Russians' repeated over and over..
Sure, but you're blaming the drop in the bucket.
Actively and without consequence? No. Simply maintain self control and realize that the more dialog is open, instant, and global, the more it is subject to the loudest and most manipulative. Not necessarily ideal, but better than alternatives.
It's a can of worms, especially in a country that is as suspicious of it's government as America, but in my view, one of the biggest changes in people's views of the media (and "truth" in general) is the steady erosion of Journalistic standards - putting infotainment shows and opinion pieces on the same level of journalistic rigour as actually well written, high standard news stories.
News corps will continue to chase money, and money is tied to viewership - which gains from people being engaged through polarising, emotion driven content.
If there are no standards for this kind of thing, people will gravitate towards the stuff that gives you that hit of emotion, and they'll forgo and bend facts to present a story in a way that keeps their viewers at the expense of fair representation of facts, and bias.
In the context of social media, it's tricky, because robo websites and opinion pieces run rife through them, with pieces debunking them and/or apologising for incorrect facts not propogating as hard - so in my view there needs to be some level of targeted/intelligent regulation of social media as a news source. (Content aggregators perhaps taking some level of responsibility of curating what is being shared? Admittedly difficult to do this without getting Orwellian...)
But that's just my opinion, interested to hear if people think it's a load of BS or not.
Is there something Congress should be doing? Perhaps it's not the thing for them to be involved in.
Paul Frazee's 2018 JSConf EU talk on "Formalizing User Rights on the Web" makes an important observation: technology doesn't just interact with civics, it actually drives civics; it defines what the civic structure of a community is going to be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ffpAkviM0&t=920).
That there's a serious problem has been obvious for quite some time now, and Silicon Valley has hardly even tried to do anything about it. More likely, they've tended to tune their algorithms to best profit from it.
I'm a small government guy, but if they continue with this disingenuous "we had no idea!" song and dance for much longer, I'd fully support bringing a very big hammer down on the bigger players.
The public airwaves are regulated by the FCC. There is no reason to pay broadcasters to prevent some candidate from becoming elected.
It's gotten quite bad in the U.S. Common political discourse has devolved into a back and forth of insults, hyperbolic accusations, and sometimes just plain insanity. I agree with you that this will probably be something that will last a while.
If only we could get people to realize that believing something to be true merely because it reinforces a pre-conceived idea or because it's plausibly true is not a path toward finding the truth. How do you have a discussion with someone who believes the political equivalent of a flat Earth?
Having lived in both deeply red and deeply blue states in the US, I think most people aren't as crazy or as far apart as they think they are. But many of the people who have lived their whole life in one camp have been trained to think that the other side is literally crazy, and that's a convenient excuse to be afraid of them and not bother seeking to understand them.
A good article along those lines:
https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-t...
" Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. “We often think we understand these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however.” "
" Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others,” according to training literature from Resetting the Table, an organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the U.S. "
If you're looking for it, you'll see this behavior everywhere online, including HN, and it's getting worse.
How can you decide if someone is the political equivalent of a flat Earther unless you actually attempt to have a discussion with them? All I really see online is people trying to collect the most virtual points (retweets and likes) within their own echo chamber rather than actually discuss things with people.
if i may: this example, and my own experience, is consistent with the newspapers from the american civil war, which i read lots of many years ago while my parents dragged me through the american South Eastern states and the myriad covil war national parks an monuments.
further:
> flat earth
just dont. let them vote. and relax. and remember you arent in charge. if you want Texans (for instance) to vote differently, well then... move to Tecas, y'all!
We also have to remember that discourse waxes and wanes in tone. Throughout the 1800s for example it wasn't uncommon for massive brawls to take place between what were essentially political gangs. Think of the brawls we see today between antifa and right wing groups. Also the 70s saw literally thousands of bombings in NYC by far left groups. Its probable that due to political realignment and inevitable shifts in technology we're going to see this going forward. The most important thing we can all do is keep faith in our fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech.
With demographic and economic changes and the power/scale of social media the U.S. is facing, I think the intermediate future does not look good for political discourse.