this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Feel you with being unable to keep up. The thing is, most of the outrage is artificial; have to remember the incentive structures of media etc.
If its any consolation, I reckon the average person being unable to keep up with stuff during periods of rapid change has always been the case historically. Most conversations, discourse, etc that have shaped society have been either among small groups of powerful people motivated by various interests, or stuff like pamphlets, polemics nailed to church doors, talking points, buzz words. This riles people up and is effective at getting stuff done but not effective at all at having an actual conversation. So the average person just gets swept up in the tide.
I am not an expert in political history by any means but I can't think of a single example in which people just talked to eachother to decide the direction of society. Seems like it has always been 'waves' or 'trends' or 'forces' and then 'backlashes' driving things. Historical developments and transformative change seems to just 'happen' and suddenly you live in a fundamentally different world.
Like, did we ever have a conversation, as 'a society' (if it can even be considered a singular entity) which resulted in the decision to put big tech corps in charge of running the main platforms we use to communicate with eachother?
Of course not; it's like we woke up one day and suddenly heads of state are issuing diplomatic communications via goddamn Twitter so we all just use that now. Again, not a historian, but I think it was a similar thing with major historical shifts like industrialisation etc.
And then we get hit by the consequences, and are totally unprepared, as if they were unexpected. A small group of random people having a conversation over drinks could have anticipated pretty much every single issue we now have with big tech running our social platforms, and probably could have anticipated many of the pitfalls of industrialisation or globalisation (not saying these don't have positives; but we're dealing with the pitfalls now so it is what it is).
I think this kind of approach to discourse and societal decisionmaking is very vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in the modern world.
I recently read 'The Word for World is Forest' by Ursula Le Guin, and am reminded of this part in the introduction: "They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics." (Context: the Senoi people of Malaysia).
We haven't developed our 'social technology'; we're operating on the same kinds of social tech in the past, which is simply not equipped to deal with a connected globalised world. I think this extends to stuff like academia and journalism. We desperately need an approach to making sense of the world in a calm and thoughtful manner; but since our social tech can't really facilitate that, we're doing... whatever it is we're doing rn.
And coming back to capitalist incentive structures: inflammatory stuff generates more engagement, ad revenue etc.
I am holding out hope that smaller, FOSS alternatives which do not have such incentives will lead to better conversations
This is entirely my observation but the conversations I've seen on this platform seem more like actual conversations vs the almost-artificial 'talking past eachother instead of talking to eachother' I used to see on Reddit and Twitter.
Sorry for the ramble. My first post on any public-facing online thing since I quit posting on random forums like 15 years ago. I always lurked on Twitter and Reddit but feared that actually posting and/or getting into arguments would drive me insane so avoided it. Hello everyone; let's be humane to eachother and enjoy eachother's company. There's enough alienation in the world as it is. Thanks for reading to whoever is still reading.
Former(-ish) active Reddit user here. Your comment hit home, because it pointed to "social technology", capitalism, conversations and value of interactions.
Capitalism's approach sees value in Reddit, Twitter, etc. as being advertising platforms and means of data collection. So anything from which they can't make money is just there.
The real value is the interactions and conversations these platforms are fostering. The IMDb Message Boards were a really fun place to discuss movies, but the suits in the IMDb boardroom came to the conclusion that having the boards hurt the engagement with the site, providing "negative experience" to the users. Which was just good old corporate bull for "it is too expensive to keep them up". So they axed the boards (did not even keep them as a read-only archive!), deleting all posts, deleting all that tremendous cultural value that accumulated over the decades the Message Boards were operating.
Sad. But these stories (and now Reddit's story, sadly) are the wake up calls we need to advance in our "social technology". All we need is to realize thatour conversations and interactions with other people is the value in itself. Right now, the capitalist approach to everything is deeply rooted in the minds. We need to change that, and clearly separate societal values from capitalist values on the internet. I don't know if this "Fediverse" is the way to do that. But I'm happy to join. I'm happy to try.
And Void_Reader - I'm really glad you posted this. This is my first comment on Lemmy, and I'm happy to be reacting to your thoughts here.
Very thoughtful post. Thank you. I like your point about history just happening. Noone seems to plan it and the change makers more often than not seem to have no real idea of the likely consequences.
Very thoughtful post. Thank you. I like your point about history just happening. Noone seems to plan it and the change makers more often than not seem to have no real idea of the likely consequences.