Re: Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Youtube &Dailymotion all sign Christchurch call ac
To answer your confusion. I'm not against the sharing of information. Extremist use social media and flood it with fake news and propaganda videos. That's the issue. Removing that content is what I was referring to. It may reduce their influence but won't completely wipe it out.
Hard to arbitrate fairly, if you are talking about social media policing 'fake news'. I'd say darn near impossible for social media companies to do this objectively. Some of what constitutes such material is subjective, some of which is contested, and doesn't have certain answers. I look at things like wikipedia's entries on politically hot topics, and the trend I see isn't objectivity, but rather 'accepted social wisdom'.
I am highly cynical that social media tasked with the job of combating fake news and propaganda would manage to do so in an impartial and objective manner. They can't even apply their existing TOS consistently or convey accurately to the public what those rules are.
I actually saw an example of FB policing fake news. They had a post, that had some over the top claims about the medical uses of cannabis. They refuted those with a counter post which was a sort of 'official well actually', and the information they provided was also scientifically inaccurate, but from the opposite side.
It felt very big brother ish, and not at all helpful. In fact, it felt like those old DARE videos from high school. Be careful who you give power to.
"Who watches the watchmen".
Breakdown of community has little to do with immigration flows. There might be an impact of some sort but the breakdown has been going since the 80s.
There is a fairly consistent effect found in studies. For eg.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/juaf.12015
This is likely because of differing social values, possibly other effects (bigotry? customs). Humans operate well, in their evolutionary context: a single tribe, with a single set of social norms and values, and a single behavioural and verbal language.
Although I agree that this is not all there is to this story. Larger populations for one. The internet. The collapse of the church as a focal point. Centralisation. Many things.
One major factor is our other topic, marriage and family. One families kids, get to know another families kids. Lowered marriage, LTR, birthrates means less of that. It acted as a sort of glue.
But also gathering places. Everything is gathered now around a big city hub. No church, no social clubs. And much of those 'gatherings' moved online.
In studies of human wellbeing, people found that a building, with a single entry orientated around interaction, like a small park with chairs increased community within that group of people significantly and subsequently made them happier. Just coming in one way, where people might be hanging out.
We don't design for these things any more. We don't think about them. Well apart from things like communal living projects.
We moved away from what people considered social norms (secure employment, wage increases, being able to buy a home, etc) to an aggressive form of capitalism where everything is a commodity and an accountancy based value. Marriage breakdown is symptom of this not a source. But then I think our thoughts on marriage and family are a bit antiquated.
I'm not sure this is the first social shift that comes to mind, when thinking of the last 100 years. What comes to my mind is the 60s counterculture. The shift from then conservative values, to what became our now modern values. The sexual revolution, the inception of intersectionality, post modernist art and philosophy and so on. I think these things merely paved the way for a corporatist consumerist culture, in an odd way (sex sells, postmodernist philosophy supplants religion, and classical philosophy leaving only capitalism as a remnant for an accepted set of values, aside from those modern progressive values like equity)
For marriage, no fault divorce and changes in social sex/relationship values. Todays younger generations have the lowest recorded rates not merely of marriage but of long term relationships. They also have low levels of sex compared to later generations and the highest average age for male virginity recorded (23? 24?).
That situation is more complex than merely changes in social values IMO. There ar many records, and some of them have quite negative probable social impacts. I think it almost might be a dying of intimacy. Exactly why, is difficult. But I do think generations of broken families might be a factor; no examples lead. Another is kids staying with parents until nearly 30 (hard to have a LTR living with mum, or sex for that matter) due to the explosion of housing costs. Tinder? Hard to say.
Tribalism has been around and is in fact part of who we are as humans. It's a natural state of what makes us human. Part of the problem is that humans evolved in small tribes, the world now is the tribe, in a way, thanks to the internet. I don't think our evolved monkey brains do well with this.
Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented globalism, both physically and virtually. That results in conflict of values, way of life. People who would disagree on what society should be about, or how to act, are closer than ever. Before the internet, or global travel, two people who are less alike, would rarely meet. Now they 'meet' every day. But people still attempt to silo themselves into groups, physically and online, while they experience conflict with their own way of thinking at the same time.
Still you are right, it's very old, very human.
The problem is that negativity seems easily accepted over positivity (think of the 'news' you hear every day). Hate is easy when you don't know different people and cultures.
IDK, I think some people know other cultures quite well, and still hate them. According to the social sciences, empathy is learnt. And so I imagine is hate. Whether by negative personal experiences, abusive parenting, or social narratives or both or all. It's hard to combat really, when it runs in every direction. It feeds itself. Someone hates you, you are more likely to hate them.
An eye for an eye.
All I feel like I can do personally, is try to humanize myself and others with my own conduct.
Pointing fingers at the 'other' has been part of our makeup for a very long time. As much as things change, thing stay the same. I wish it were otherwise.
Scapegoating is a rather natural instinct. I guess it's sort of mentally the easiest path from a to b, if you don't want to ask any deeper questions, or come up with more complex solutions.
If you put the blame on a symptom, or something surface level, you never have to ask any real or challenging question about why the problem comes about. And because it's easier just to live your own life, than struggle to fix something.
We all get born with a desire to change the world. Young eyes. Easy wins, and that might be practical, but it's probably not always good. Particularly because by the time we have surrendered, often we understand the problems a lot better.
I'll put a suggestion to you and I'm not picking on any one particular group, however, there has never been a time in history where there was a large population of humans over the age of 40 (I'm in this category). I think this is part of the problem we face currently. The clash of generations is bigger than we let on and it's well known that older generations are typically more conservative and more stuck in their way of thinking. That's not to suggest that younger people don't play a role in this or that some older people can't change their ways but I think this is part of the clash, part of the problems.
Certainly true of older populations, like the baby boomers in terms of higher numbers. I guess bithrates still dropped a little over time. But I am not sure that conservative thing is true entirely. Gen x was really ground zero for mainstream progressivism (left wing values). The 90s was when these things kicked in, in the mainstream. Even though, the millenials are the most progressive generation yet, early indicators suggest gen z is quite conservative according to studies; eschewing drugs, tatoos and having less typical progressive values, even lower support for gay marriage or social justice issues, particularly the boys.
And although perhaps in some ways baby boomers are conservative, in other ways they feel more in line with millenials (they often sit on the centre left, the old hippy vibe). Less identitarian, but generally on that tip.
Conversely there is a massive political opinion difference between men and women on the whole. And our gender war has like other forms of ideology clash, reached a sort of fever pitch.
We grow more conservative as we get older, but maybe some trend to being open minded too? It's complicated.
Certainly there are conflicts between the generations because of these value differences. In that the millenials, now growing older, are the most left leaning of all, certainly does produce some understanding differences, but even they are starting to drift on the economic side, as they move into more adult life.
As for the internet. It's been in need of some sort of real policing for various reasons. It's not about censorship or whatever objections people may have, it's about realising that this thing, the internet, has a real impact on people's lives. For good and bad. To me that's just reality. You can't stop everything but we need real laws to face the real problems that the internet brings.
To me, the problem stems from this being wildly unlike actual people, actually talking.
It's anonymous, there's no sense of the person being a person, having feelings, no facial expressions, tone. If I was to ask anything of big tech it would be to combat this. VR/AR/video/audio. Even better emoji that convey REAL emotion rather than are used as gold stars for your tweet.
Places with less anonymity. More locality. Anything to reintroduce the sense of talking to a person, having a community set of values, and social consequences.
It's easy to hate a line of text if it disagrees with you. Or act like a nasty person. Create deeper more lifelike mediums. Our evolved social responses work incredibly well in person. Take an angry online troll, and put him in a group of six: radical change in behaviour.
And we have similar problems in large anonymous cities, with raised crime levels. The whole issue of scale, and what is natural to us, takes second seat, because it's one of those hard problems, with difficult solutions.
Nobody wants to ask 'should we scrape it all, redesign, and start again'? Too hard.
We rarely ask: does this suit us, as humans? Instead we ask people to adapt. The more we adapt, the more we forget who we are in the first place.
Lastly, everything seems very dark at the moment but society goes through these points all along history. We just don't seem to learn from them. All you or I or anyone else can do is live the best life we can regardless of these outside influences. I've learned over the years an in more recent times that I can simply move on and let things go. There's no point dwelling in negativity.
I believe everything happens for a reason, and people do learn, albiet slowly. If we experience darkness, we will grow. Thousands of years ago we were sacrificing people, animals, holding slaves, ruled by kings. Now we have due process, democracy. It's not perfect, but nothing ever is, it's perfecting. Sometimes it's just difficult.
Whatever growing pains we have now, the crises that it will create will be our touchstone for whatever comes after. This is why I don't worry. I live my life in the knowledge, that everything is cumulative, and every little thing, changes the whole.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram