- Joined
- Mar 4, 2019
Coming back to this now I'm actually at my desk - when I should be working. Oh well.
You're into a similar track with the headlines and buzzwords, but I was thinking more toward the effects social media in particular has on people. Take twitter as the most extreme example of it: the entire point of twitter is to produce and consume thought-terminating cliches and sound-bites. There is no way to have a nuanced discussion on the platform, or lay out a full argument without either breaking it into pieces, or reducing it to fit into the character limit of an individual tweet. The former decontextualises each element of the argument, isolating it from the whole thought and reducing its meaning to nearly nothing in the process. The latter destroys the content of the argument, turning it into a slogan to be repeated, rather than an exploration of an idea.
On the consumption side of the same tweets, you are given a constantly churning feed of the same slogans and decontextualised fragments of an argument. Each is presented atomically, separated from the others, and consumed in that bite-sized chunk. Often out of order, often "curated" to further reduce links between related ideas. This form of consumption destroys the mind's ability to connected related ideas and form a thread of argument through them. It reduces the mind to thinking in slogans and decontextualised fragments of thought. In a lot of ways it's like an artificially-induced dementia, where no true, whole thoughts exist any more, only fragments of thought, with simulacra of whole thoughts assembled from unrelated fragments.
Any feed-driven social media will create the same problem. Facebook, though it has much less restrictive character limits, still results in atomised content because of the way content is presented on the feed. There is an unconscious impetus to try and craft the initial argument into the headline and the first few lines of a post, which then tends to result in the same sound-bites and repetitive slogans. That ties right into your point about news headlines and buzzwords, which are really the same problem in an from an older medium. Headlines have become more eye-catching on the assumption that people don't read past them, so they're used to try and tell the whole story in as few words as possible. They've become a place to insert editorialised slogans that are absorbed and repeated without question. If you look at older newspapers, from the late 19th century for instance, headlines were far less prominent than they are today and much longer as well, because they were only the lead into the story itself.
Twitter's UX in particular is the perfect method to mould minds and destroy critical thinking. If any of the despots of the early 20th century had invented it, we would rightly call it a malevolent and efficient propaganda tool, and condemn it utterly.
On the consumption side of the same tweets, you are given a constantly churning feed of the same slogans and decontextualised fragments of an argument. Each is presented atomically, separated from the others, and consumed in that bite-sized chunk. Often out of order, often "curated" to further reduce links between related ideas. This form of consumption destroys the mind's ability to connected related ideas and form a thread of argument through them. It reduces the mind to thinking in slogans and decontextualised fragments of thought. In a lot of ways it's like an artificially-induced dementia, where no true, whole thoughts exist any more, only fragments of thought, with simulacra of whole thoughts assembled from unrelated fragments.
Any feed-driven social media will create the same problem. Facebook, though it has much less restrictive character limits, still results in atomised content because of the way content is presented on the feed. There is an unconscious impetus to try and craft the initial argument into the headline and the first few lines of a post, which then tends to result in the same sound-bites and repetitive slogans. That ties right into your point about news headlines and buzzwords, which are really the same problem in an from an older medium. Headlines have become more eye-catching on the assumption that people don't read past them, so they're used to try and tell the whole story in as few words as possible. They've become a place to insert editorialised slogans that are absorbed and repeated without question. If you look at older newspapers, from the late 19th century for instance, headlines were far less prominent than they are today and much longer as well, because they were only the lead into the story itself.
Twitter's UX in particular is the perfect method to mould minds and destroy critical thinking. If any of the despots of the early 20th century had invented it, we would rightly call it a malevolent and efficient propaganda tool, and condemn it utterly.
Gardening, now the sun is back out. Physical labour improves my mood immensely, so I can see why people treat it as a virtue in itself, but mostly it's getting me in the habit of doing things that aren't computer-related, given how much time I spend working on the damn thing. As for reading, the last two were "The True Believers" by Hoffer, and "not a penny more, not a penny less", Jeffrey Archer's only original creation. Everything he wrore afterwards is formulaic shite, but this one is actually not that bad.
