Re:Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife
by paganel on Saturday May 25, 2019 @06:20PM
(#20011833)
> How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
Because size matters, and in this case social media is a lot more pervasive (I'd say at least an order of magnitude more) compared to TV news of the 1980s or to newspapers. I knew of lots and lots of people who to didn't read newspapers 30 years ago, also the majority of the people around me didn't give that much thought on what was presented as "news" on TV because we knew they were mostly lies anyway (I grew in an Eastern-European country located on the wrong side of the Wall), but nowadays even the remotest shepherd has a cheap Android phone with an Internet connection which he mostly uses for Facebook and Whatsapp.
In other words social media is a quantitative change (billions of people are using it) which has transformed into a qualitative one (because billions of people are using social media things are different this time).
Because size matters, and in this case social media is a lot more pervasive (I'd say at least an order of magnitude more) compared to TV news of the 1980s or to newspapers. I knew of lots and lots of people who to didn't read newspapers 30 years ago, also the majority of the people around me didn't give that much thought on what was presented as "news" on TV because we knew they were mostly lies anyway (I grew in an Eastern-European country located on the wrong side of the Wall), but nowadays even the remotest shepherd has a cheap Android phone with an Internet connection which he mostly uses for Facebook and Whatsapp.
In other words social media is a quantitative change (billions of people are using it) which has transformed into a qualitative one (because billions of people are using social media things are different this time).