Digital Lithium
I'd like to preface this with saying I'm not a super big fan of the internet. While it's a great tool and places like Tildes exist, I'd posit that a vast majority of the internet is less utility and more waste of mental space for most people. How much information does the typical web page for different types of content offer? How much do we intend to absorb? How much do we actually absorb? Most people say it is a decreasing trend, the web page offers (in ELI5 fashion) three informations, we try to absorb two, we generally only get one.
I believe it's different now-a-days. The web page offers two, we intend to absorb one, but we end up with three informations. Modern internet journalism preys on our emotions, social media preys on our emotions. The authors of major internet outlets sensationalize everything. So we end up with:
- The information we are interested in.
- The superfluous information, often irrelevant, through content like advertisements, "related topics/articles/pages" and other people's comments (not always made in good faith or constructive).
- Our emotional reaction. This is something that while engineered by the content creators, only exists in our minds.
Like any good book, we pick up the content and when we put it down we walk away with more to think about than what was originally written. Except, what do we do when this concept is detrimental to societal development and our own health?
Then we think about the speed of information. What prompted this entire post for me was an article I was reading on CNN today, about the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee. This is not a man I have any sympathy for, I do not like him or any ideas he represented. A man convicted of killing three people and a self-proclaimed white supremacist was executed this morning.
This morning.
I got into town this morning and read the article, it had been posted 10 minutes prior.
10 minutes.
Mr. Lee was pronounced dead at 8:07AM ET. I read this article at about 6:30AM MT. Within 30 or so minutes of a man being killed for what the state claims is his crime, I was informed by an internet article. I am about 2000 miles away from where this man was killed.
30 minutes.
I have been off the internet for quite some time, so I'm getting back into the groove a little bit. This hit me like a truck, had this occurred 3 months ago I don't think I would have flinched. What kind of world do we live in, where a ubiquitous monstrosity called the internet can so easily desensitize us to the fact that a human being was just killed by the state for their crimes?
I offer no sympathies for the man or his actions, I do not wish this to be a post about the death penalty but that is still a human being that was just killed. I argue not whether or not he should have been executed, I instead posit that our reactions as a society are a testament to how much empathy and humanity has been lost in the modern age. In the grand scheme of things, for everybody but the most intimately familiar and impacted people, this is just a headline. It will be forgotten in a few days, life will go on. I believe this is a direct consequence of the aforementioned information overload in association with emotionally driven content.
Is this the world we created? Is this how we want to live? In this society where the loss of one is equal to the loss of none? Even the loss of a distant many is inconsequential in the modern, desensitized age. I believe we as a people are numbed by our own creations, and I honestly don't know what we can do about it.
What did we do in the past that demonstrated empathy and humanity that we don't do now? I'm not sure your example is any different than newspaper articles about executions from a century ago.
I guess your right, we didn't lose anything, I can't think of an example. That said though, we have so much to gain. I guess I'd pivot my position to one where I'd argue we need to drastically improve in these areas as a society.
I'd suggest the premise of my reaction to the linked article and observations I've personally made is still sound. There is a lack of empathy and humanity in my view, that we never had it is, while nihilistic, accurate. So how do we change society? This human experience is honestly not one I'm preferential to.
There are a few sides in this thing.
On one side, I am with you regarding the excess of useless information and lack of concentration nowadays. The level of "noise" we have to coupe is insane and the only way of dealing with that is discarding a lot of things that goes through our heads. Sadly, we lose also real information and ideas, I feel like my mind is always with the buffers saturated and losing things to being able to keep track of the new ones.
On the other side, I am not saying that we are not insensitive but this world has been always rough, think that the last public execution happened in 1937, so people gathered to see a man being executed for no other reason than sadism and curiosity, in the time probably your grandfather was alive. Anyway, I am not saying that this is not horrible I meant that we are not as far as the medieval ages as we like to think.
I am sad not because the world is like this but because we could change all the rules whenever we want but we won't.
We are not as far from the stone age as we would like to think. Society is such a fragile thing, and if it were to truly break we would be no better than cavemen. Mankind is a basic creature at heart, and it is only through society that we gain 'humanity'. This is the core reason why utopia can never be achieved.
I don't think we could ever revert back to the stone age. While society is fragile, if it were to "break" I think it would lead to a totalitarian, fascist state rather than a pre-industrial civilization. While mankind is truly basic, and at our nature we are truly self centered, I'd suggest there is a small contingent of mankind that prospers on empathy and our humanity, even despite society.
I am sad in both regards. This world has gotten me so cynical in more ways than one.
The issues you have with the internet today has to do with how we have changed how we access content on the internet. In other words, it's because of search engines. I'm sure you've probably heard about how google creates "filter bubbles" that favor information from specific sources. It's actually much worse than that. Search engine algorithms are designed specifically to get you 'what you want'. But the problem with that is how they figure out what the best source is. They count things like how many people link to the page, how large the website is, how much text is on the page, and other similar statistics. Because of this, Google tends to send you to pages owned by large content organizations who have written things in a simple "in a nutshell" way. Imagine how when you look up an unfamiliar topic you'll generally get a Wikipedia page; a great introduction to a topic but it's designed to be non-exhaustive on purpose.
Compare this to the past when we would use things like personally shared links to information sources or subject directories; it was a great way to find conflicting or dissenting information.
In regards to news in particular, I have one simple statement: 24 hour news sources are absolute garbage. The worst thing you could do is to actively try to follow them.
If there is one thing that I think that modern people are woefully undereducated about, that would be media literacy. By default, you should assume that every news source is full of liars. It's only after you find some corroborating sources - from people who independently confirmed the facts, not from those quoting other sources - that you can start to believe that it's true. And that's just the most basic principle of media literacy. If you want a good source to learn about it, why not take a quick course like this one?
WRT the particular article, it makes sense it would be disseminated quickly... that's kind of a huge deal.
That said, everything you discussed I think is a byproduct of the internet going worldwide, instead of just the smaller groups you would encounter on BBS systems.
Human beings weren't equipped to be able to communicate with millions of people at once. It's going to take some time to adjust.
I guess that gets into the question of whether the internet is needed. In my approximation, it shouldn't be, but the content creators of the internet can't survive if that were the majority public opinion. I wish it weren't so, though.
Even as a cynical person myself, despite the various piles of garbage, there's also a ton of good coming out of it.
That said, I totally get where you're coming from, and I'm generally in the camp that we need to step back from technological advancement until we get the basics resolved again.