Social Media's Effects On Our Minds & Lives

[auxien]

21 minutes ago, zazen said:

I remember life before the internet really got going (I was at uni in the 90s) and something just crystallised in my brain about the difference between then and now:

Back at uni we would sit around in someone's room and chat and my way of socialising was to try and say things that were either funny or interesting. Or both. So you'd talk about things you'd read or heard and try and make them interesting. So I might talk about chaos theory and how it related to global warming, or someone (say) had read Carlos Castañeda and would go on about the mystical beings he wrote about in his books. And unless you happened to stumble upon someone who was actually an expert in any particular area (say an expert in enviromental modelling or an expert in the Yaqui cultures of Mexico), you could just explore ideas in a fairly uninformed way and it was kindof fun. Like you'd take a concept from one subject and a concept from another subject and try and squash them together and see what you came up with.

But now that the worlds knowledge is at everyone's fingertips, you can't really chat in the same way. You end up kindof shrugging and saying 'well I guess I'll go and look that up later'. Because you know that any inkling of an idea you have, someone's probably written about it already in better depth than you could manage. So you can kindof go and read about that, and be better informed, but thats now a research activity, not a form of socialising. And everyone is aware of this in a way so conversations tend more towards the safe/mainstream because saying anything wild or innovative is probably going to make you look dumb unless you do loads of research up front. So unless you've got a subject that everyone has a lot of depth in, there's really not much point talking about it. I suppose 'current events' are still worth talking about because eveyone's roughly equally informed and its safer to speculate.

Now: in terms of actually understanding the world, the new post-internet way is much better. For example back at uni we all spent weeks sitting around going on about Carlos Castañeda and the Teachings of Don Juan. But five minutes googling now lets me know there's now a broad consensus that Carlos Castañeda just made all that shit up.

So we're better informed now. But actual conversations and socialising are harder, because its much harder to have a fun/interesting conversation and much easier to have a safe/boring one.

And so the way I get my social needs met has sortof split into two - my intellectual curiosity and my need to see and read hilarious things is met by the online world. And my need to have face to face conversations with people is met by having conversations with people and thats kindof nice but a lot of the conversations are boring because we can't have interesting (but naive) talking-bollocks sessions like we used to.

yeah this tracks well.

it makes me think the rise of more 'mainstreamed conspiracies' is because of the socialization reinforcement that 'secret/un-confirmed' information creates. for example, the Qanon nuts grow closer to each other with these ideas as the core not specifically because they're implying information outside of the 'facts' but because the 'secret information' was purely social, and largely counter to accepted facts that one could look up outside of the group. i knew that to some extent, but your comments are making me think of it even deeper. the conspiracy groupthink forces heightened regular socialization and sharing of 'knowledge' from the source and other members in on it all.

[prdctvsm]

‘News on Facebook is dead’: memes replace Australian media posts as Meta turns off the tap (ozguardian)

[Wunderbar]

 I cant believe what i just witnessed...

I stumbled upon a stream ( with a lot of viewers 40k ????) where some guy was doing a To catch a predator type show. When i started watching they - a group of 10 guys or so - were confronting a 71 year old guy with which they had organized a meet up via text pretending to be a 15 yo.

They were getting up in his face intimidating him, pushing cameras in his face, telling him they had proof of him sending dick pics ? and other stuff allegedly he had ate his own shit ?

So once they have him surround with cameras shoved in his face they start making some sadistic show out of it instead of just delivering him over with the alleged proof they have.

This "show" consist of telling him they will let him walk free if he puts on some clown costume if not they will call the cops and he will end up getting raped in and die in prison, meanwhile some other alleged pfile they had caught earlier - i guess -  was doing the worm in the background, which i assume was another one of their ultimatums.

This last about 10 to 15 minutes during which crowds start forming around this commotion. These crowds get told that this man is a pfile and just instantly believe this without proof and start shouting at him telling him he is a horrible person etc.

After a while some random guy comes out of the crowd and hits the alleged pdfile in his face, he falls to the ground, and starts bleeding from his head. the camera goes black and the chat burst out in laughing emojis.

Through all the chaos you get some glimpses of the guy laying there with paramedics around him whilst some mom with 'here baby buggy strolls by, what a crazy world to raise your kid in.

 

I am struggling to describe what i just saw and feel nauseous,This internet culture feels alien.

I'm watching some alleged pdfile who eats his own shit ?? getting intimidated by some guy to be a monkey and dance for him on his internet show in front of 40.000 people who seem to love this by their reaction in the chat and are i assume on the younger side since the fans that came up to him where young.

Why does violence like this attract?

[Alcofribas]

3 hours ago, zazen said:

in terms of actually understanding the world, the new post-internet way is much better. For example back at uni we all spent weeks sitting around going on about Carlos Castañeda and the Teachings of Don Juan. But five minutes googling now lets me know there's now a broad consensus that Carlos Castañeda just made all that shit up.

So we're better informed now. But actual conversations and socialising are harder, because its much harder to have a fun/interesting conversation and much easier to have a safe/boring one.

This is dubious to me. It’s not obvious to me that just because we can look stuff up online we are actually informed. In fact, I’d say a significant amount of people do exactly that - just look something up briefly (oh it says on wiki castenada is debunked got it) - which is to me far less interesting than someone who took the time to read a book and is stimulating discussions with what they found within it. 
 

I don’t think the sort of superficial factoid skimming that the internet provided has lead to a better understanding of the world by any means. Lots of “information” at our finger tips is certainly not the same as having real knowledge and being engaged in trying to discover and understand the world. I absolutely am not meeting people in 2024 who are like big brain geniuses just because of the internet. I’d say from experience, it’s more common for me to meet people who just skim stuff on wiki, listen to a 1hr podcast or a YouTube video, then actually go to a library and read about a subject. 

Edited May 6 by Alcofribas

[Walter Ostanek]

[zazen]

19 hours ago, Alcofribas said:

This is dubious to me. It’s not obvious to me that just because we can look stuff up online we are actually informed. In fact, I’d say a significant amount of people do exactly that - just look something up briefly (oh it says on wiki castenada is debunked got it) - which is to me far less interesting than someone who took the time to read a book and is stimulating discussions with what they found within it.

Fair point. I could quote that modern saying 'the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber' but then it would seem like I'm saying I'm smart, and thats not a smart thing to do.

I don't know how old you are but when I was a teenager/young adult in the 90s, my knowledge and understanding of the world was very patchy. Some very small examples that I remember vaguely wondering about at the time:

• on the news every day they would talk about the FTSE index (UK equivalent of dow jones) going up or down but no-one would really explain what it was, or how it was calculated
• in the news they talked about right-wing and left-wing but rarely tried to define the terms. Like I had a vague idea, but it was only vague
• when I went to get a haircut I had no idea how to explain to the hairdresser what I wanted, or what the possibilities were, or what words to use. Consequently the hairdresser was terrifiying (this was more an early teens thing)
• I could list a million little things like this but you get the general idea

Now these days the answer to all of those is trivial - you google it. But in the 90s for the political/news ones you could potentially go to a libary and spend an hour or two flicking through books but that was a LOT of effort. Or ask around with your friends and risk looking dumb. And I never wondered enough to actually do either of those things, so I just bumbled through my life with lots of things I only had a very vague inkling of, and no easy way to inform myself. We just weren't awash with information in the same way and it led to a very different way of being in the world. I'm sortof trying to understand what is different between then and now but perhaps its very personal to the way my own life has gone.

[Alcofribas]

1 hour ago, zazen said:

Fair point. I could quote that modern saying 'the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber' but then it would seem like I'm saying I'm smart, and thats not a smart thing to do.

I don't know how old you are but when I was a teenager/young adult in the 90s, my knowledge and understanding of the world was very patchy. Some very small examples that I remember vaguely wondering about at the time:

• on the news every day they would talk about the FTSE index (UK equivalent of dow jones) going up or down but no-one would really explain what it was, or how it was calculated
• in the news they talked about right-wing and left-wing but rarely tried to define the terms. Like I had a vague idea, but it was only vague
• when I went to get a haircut I had no idea how to explain to the hairdresser what I wanted, or what the possibilities were, or what words to use. Consequently the hairdresser was terrifiying (this was more an early teens thing)
• I could list a million little things like this but you get the general idea

Now these days the answer to all of those is trivial - you google it. But in the 90s for the political/news ones you could potentially go to a libary and spend an hour or two flicking through books but that was a LOT of effort. Or ask around with your friends and risk looking dumb. And I never wondered enough to actually do either of those things, so I just bumbled through my life with lots of things I only had a very vague inkling of, and no easy way to inform myself. We just weren't awash with information in the same way and it led to a very different way of being in the world. I'm sortof trying to understand what is different between then and now but perhaps its very personal to the way my own life has gone.

one of your examples here made me laugh bc one time i brought in a magazine to the hairdresser and asked to her to make my hair look like this one image of johnny greenwood. she botched it and i had to give myself a buzz cut lol

i am 42 so i grew up before the internet became the ubiquitous entity that it is now. allow me a bit of a personal story: i got into nine inch nails basically bc of pop culture video and radio - it was hard not to hear nin in 1994. through my obsession with nin i came to learn of other artists like aphex and meat beat manifesto. once my cd player busted and my dad gave me his old record player and took me shopping for a few lps of my own. naturally, i looked up stuff i already knew about and in the mbm section there was a 12" promo for the upcoming "prime audio soup" single. this had no art, just a plain sleeve and a white label with basic information about the release. so i got it. taking it home and putting it on my turntable was an unforgettable event bc it was here that i discovered BOC through their remix on this single. i listened to this obsessively and when i finally got a new cd player i went shopping for some cds. i went to a tiny little shop in chicago called Evil Clown. i asked the owner if he had ever heard of Boards of Canada. he stared into space for a moment and then said he'd be right back. he eventually emerged from the back with a promo copy of MHTRTC that had been sent to the store. this wasn't even for sale but he knew me (my uncle/music guru worked there) and said i could have it for $10 or whatever. of course, this is one of the best albums i have ever known and i came upon it by chance, almost as though through accidents guided by fate. after becoming completely fucked by how good MHTRTC is i later went to find more of their stuff. found peel sessions (i believe i first saw this at Best Buy and then bought it from Borders). i noticed there was also a peel session by "autechre" that looked almost identical. kind of a "what's going on here" situation for me. so, i bought the autechre one, too. and now i am the third member of autechre obviously and the rest is history.  

what is the point of this personal rambling? idk. if there's a point i guess it's something like this: if i was 16 today i could make all these "discoveries" in like 5 minutes online. i could go to wiki and just click away, enter some words into youtube and listen to nin > mbm > boc > autechre. this would be free and i could just do it on my phone. i could do this while simultaneously replying to texts and then literally forget i even did this by the end of the week after i've seen like a million other things on my stupid phone. is this "better?" i mean, obviously the convenience is undeniable and the possibilities of discovery are so much more vast. but tbh i prefer my older, more limited experiences. in them, i travelled across chicago and visited the numerous record stores (mostly now gone) and in my fumbling obsessive ignorance i made discoveries that resonated throughout my life until now. sometimes it could literally be as simple as two records in a series having the same design elements (peel sessions) that could open up an entire new realm. you cracked open the cd and you sat there obsessively studying every single thing there was to see. any text therein was shit you memorized if for no other reason than it was the only thing you had to look at while listening to the new tunes. then you'd take that knowledge with you into the shops and hopefully make a connection. i have many memories from this time that i still think about. like one time i went to "medussa's head" (i think it was called that??) which was a goth cd store on Belmont in Boys Town (tons of record stores used to be in the area and years later i would work in one). i found mbm's "satyricon" there and when i took it up to the register the young goth girl said "that's a nice shirt, it's a ben sherman!" to me. having never heard "satyricon" i had no idea what she was saying and was frozen with fear. is she making fun of me? am i a loser? what should i say to this? i stood silently until she just smirked and told me my total. i practically ran out the door only to have my humiliation freshly explained later that evening when i sat in my room listening to the cd in my room lit by these huge candles my neighbor gave me from a restaurant she worked at. i think there's something about the way these experiences are defined by your own life in such a unique way that makes them really special. bookstores also became like this to me and as i type this i do so before a wall of books many of which were pulled from shelves across the numerous chicago bookstores entirely by chance and now remain among my favorites, still resonating with me in such a deep way. i'm not suggesting you can't have meaningful discoveries online or whatever but imo EVERYTHING is done via the flatscreen and that in fact flattens our experience, there is less of a landscape of discovery and memory. the terrain is just brightly lit glass and we are never really immersed in it. we skim across its surface monotonously. 

when i was a kid getting into stuff it was like you were part of some secret society. when you found someone who even knew wtf you were talking about it was amazing. and generally, people did not know what you were talking about. lol. but when they did, it felt like they knew their shit. maybe they didn't "know" it in the way you are pointing to, like having all this factual information about the world or something. but maybe they'd put a new cd on in the car when you were driving and you were both pointing to the cd player right when THAT PAD faded in just at that special moment. maybe they didn't know who Nancy Pelosi was but who fucking cares! we weren't embarrassed to talk shit because it was all part of the game of discovery. no one gave a shit if you said "aw-tek-er" and they said "awticker." and i gotta say, even though i'm a pretty solitary guy, i meet young people a lot at work and my impression is not that they are on some whole new level of awareness or knowledge. just the other day some guy at work was trying to tell me of this amazing band he's really into and he could not even remember their name and had "discovered" them when spotify simply played their music randomly. it was just part of the constant flow of musical data the app churns out for him in the background of his life. 

i could go on about this but i'm sure i've lost a number of people here already who can perceive a veritable old grey beard hanging from this post. i'm grateful for having had the chance to experience my youth before the internet became the dominant medium for every last experience. 

Edited May 6 by Alcofribas

[Crazing]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/

[o00o]

44 minutes ago, Crazing said:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/

When elections start or international conflicts raise with US involved you could see Facebook or other social media platforms switching into propaganda mode bombarding everyone with these topics. TikTok is a bit smarter. You can completely ignore political topics if you wish but you can also go down several rabbit holes. I think the us has limited influence to where these rabbit holes actually lead

Edited May 7 by o00o

[o00o]

8 hours ago, Alcofribas said:

what is the point of this personal rambling? idk. if there's a point i guess it's something like this: if i was 16 today i could make all these "discoveries" in like 5 minutes online. i could go to wiki and just click away, enter some words into youtube and listen to nin > mbm > boc > autechre. this would be free and i could just do it on my phone. i could do this while simultaneously replying to texts and then literally forget i even did this by the end of the week after i've seen like a million other things on my stupid phone

But there is also an illusion to this. You have the illusion of knowing it all. Once you manually travel to different countries it becomes very obvious that „all information at your fingertips“ does withhold so much you have never seen until you really physically travel to other places.

you can still go to some obscure festival in some foreign country and get lost at some great local underground party and still find music you will never find online as you didn’t even known what to look for. I do this on a regular basis and it’s nothing like listening to Apple Music on random 

 

Edited May 7 by o00o

[Rubin Farr]

very interesting 

 

[ignatius]

8 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

very interesting 

 

christ. cat in a blender. i can't even. wtf. humans are awful. 

[xox]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C57a8oOrm8Q/?igsh=NGFiejFscG90M2tt

[Rubin Farr]

7 minutes ago, ignatius said:

christ. cat in a blender. i can't even. wtf. humans are awful. 

It almost sounds like he's delineating that point in 2013 as a change in human devolution. I can imagine Ai could take up the slack in human culture, if we end up in an Idiocracy type society, but mobile phone-based self identities could also lead to human population drops, as mobile phones have infiltrated the entire world now.

[prdctvsm]

1 hour ago, Rubin Farr said:

human devolution

 

[geosmina]

1 hour ago, xox said:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C57a8oOrm8Q/?igsh=NGFiejFscG90M2tt

Zhuangzian.

[ignatius]

3 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

It almost sounds like he's delineating that point in 2013 as a change in human devolution. I can imagine Ai could take up the slack in human culture, if we end up in an Idiocracy type society, but mobile phone-based self identities could also lead to human population drops, as mobile phones have infiltrated the entire world now.

kinda not relevant w/human population i think. birth rates in decline all over except a few places. the poison we're putting in the earth is in our bodies and killing all the baby making parts. 

edit: unless thinking it'll just make things worse for sperm counts because the hot new trend of the boil the balls challenge?

Edited May 7 by ignatius

[chenGOD]

14 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

very interesting 

 

Haidt brings up a lot of interesting points, one of which resonates with Alco's description of experiencing the world through the screen/phone as flat.

The lack of play for kids is huge - it's crazy here in Japan, especially Tokyo, you go to parks and kids are out together but they're all on the phone or Switch. And the idea of risk in play is massive - I remember reading a thread on reddit about some skater teaching his kid to ride, and everyone was "where's her helmet, where's her pads blah blah blah".

But the other thing I would point out is that with the rise of usage (as Haidt notes - it's up to nine hours a day!!) of phones and social media, is that the material that captures the interest and gets promoted the most is very negative. As the old media adage goes, "blood sells". Combine that with the fleeting nature of the "engagement" with the material that young people are seeing, is that the overwhelming view of the world is negative. Now certainly there are big problems for the younger generations (millennials and Gen Z I guess? maybe young Gen Xers?) to deal with, but there are many many positive things occurring in the world that just don't get the same attention. All that attention to negative media with little or no critical thinking must certainly have an impact on the psyche, especially in kids who lack any context and whose minds are still very plastic.

 

[o00o]

Reddit starts to become overrun with bots

 

[chenGOD]

2 hours ago, o00o said:

Reddit starts to become overrun with bots

 

Reddit has had a bot problem for at least two years. There are so many bot accounts that whore karma. Recycled content is terrible on reddit.

[Psychotronic]

4 hours ago, o00o said:

Reddit starts to become overrun with bots

 

The internet is being overrun by AI Training crawlers and bots. One thing you can do, is blocking all hosters, cloud providers and co to access your site, just let Users surf it, maybe keep google and Bing search. The splinternet is becoming real.

[usagi]

2 hours ago, chenGOD said:

Recycled content is terrible on reddit.

that bullshit website and everyone on it is terrible. I would love it if it imploded like Twitter under Musk.

[auxien]

1 hour ago, usagi said:

that bullshit website and everyone on it is terrible. I would love it if it imploded like Twitter under Musk.

not happening...even with their user-hostile redesign and policies over the last ~year, Reddit is booming rn: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151548/reddits-ceo-confirms-that-a-lot-of-user-growth-is-coming-from-google-search

Quote

Reddit’s daily users grew 37 percent to 82.7 million during its first quarter as a public company. CEO Steve Huffman said on the earnings call that 60 percent of those users are logged out and coming mostly from Google.

“Googlebot likes speed” and Reddit has focused on improving load times, he said. More on the numbers below:

 

[o00o]

Yeah google is redirecting 50% of my requests directly to Reddit

[usagi]

I've noticed that as well. it's like the opposite of having helpful wikipedia links come up as top search results on a lot of subjects. and with the company going public they're awash with more money than ever.

of course it's not as obviously bad as the twitter cesspool but reddit - in particular, getting your opinions from reddit - is actively making the world a dumber place. it's a massive echo chamber for the noncommittal centrist/"liberal" hivemind that understands nothing except optics. the upvote/downvote system practically guarantees this outcome. I give some credit to people who were redditors in their teens or early 20s but have moved on and become wiser, but there's always the next generation of idiots that think they're making a difference in the world while updooting celebrity-fellating content or GME go brrr or whatever other dumb inconsequential bandwagon shit is the order of the day. people argued with me when I said the antiwork 'movement' on there was built on a foundation of nothing and would go nowhere.