I think social media amplified trends that were there before. I remember when I came to the US in 2000 it was pretty fashionable to say “I am angry” all the time. And the hatred at politicians was pretty pronounced too. And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups. The internet just made it much worse.
I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations are only from the US but the thinking that there are “others” who can’t be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.
It's like a societal autoimmune disease - when there's not a real, immediate event to react to, something has to be found to fill the airtime that is compelling enough to keep people watching and reacting, and social media has the added "benefit" of finding that filler algorithmically.
> social media has the added "benefit" of finding that filler algorithmically
Algorithmically, tailored per-user and without any oversight.
Traditional media can't peddle too extreme viewpoints because that would alienate a large chunk of their target market. Social media on the other hand can tailor the content for each individual user as to achieve maximum engagement without the risk of alienating anyone.
Traditional media is also subject to oversight (some people - or government watchdogs - can just record the TV programme as evidence) and regulations targeting broadcast media, where as social media isn't since nobody can monitor every individual user's feed, nor do they have the same regulations governing them (Fox got in trouble for peddling election misinformation, Facebook can promote exactly the same content and get away with it thanks to Section 230).
I think that when people are angry, they are more open to suggestion if you do it right. So this is a way to make people more receptive to buying a particular product or subscription, or to supporting a political cause, etc., if you don't make them angry about something first and do nothing else different, you get less conversions. And of all the different ways to improve in this kind of metric, the make-people-angry method one is relatively easy and requires relatively less competence.
And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in parents becoming overprotective towards their children, stunting their development. When these children grew up into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's not stopped somehow.
It is definitely happening. I used to like people like Taibbi and Greenwald but I feel that they have cranked up the outrage over the last years to the point that I can't listen to them anymore.
Another factor in parents over protecting kids came from John Walsh. Now, let me preface by saying no parent should endure what his family had to. But he nearly single-handedly caused what we see today where parents get in trouble for letting their kids walk to school or to the park. People today think everyone is a pedo or a child killer because that's what they were fed in the 80s and 90s.
It's a powerful combination of safetyism and concentration in urban and suburban areas that has pushed the American political compass strongly towards collectivistic priorities this generation. Basically a strong "europeisation" in metropolitan America.
Perhaps extortionate real estate prices and telework will put some counterbalance to it, but I don't expect this trend to buckle during my lifetime.
What has this got to do with collectivism? People can collectively decide to do whatever they want. Germany collectively decide to have risky playgrounds for kids. Sweden collectively decided not to lock down hard for covid. It sounds to me like America could do with collectively standing up against these channels and rejecting the rubbish they are peddling.
That is not why I meant by collectivism. Deciding things collectively just means you have organs of government.
By collectivistic priorities I simply meant that given trade offs between individual and collective orders of priority, the collective takes priority, often at the expense of individual rights.
America has traditionally had classical liberal ideals of individualism, as laid out by Locke, Rousseau and Franklin chiefly, and later others. What we've seen in the last few decades is a stronger alignment with continental European mainstream thought and politics. Perhaps because cities and demographics have pushed things in that direction. But I think safetyism is also a strong component.
I don't know that I'd call Germany collectivist. Under your examples by the US having national laws and regulation, we are somehow collectivist, which is not true. It's a trait of society and government.
Collectivist societies are unique in that they punish individuality. The government decides something and everyone must comply or face extra-judicial and potentially judicial consequences.
Individualistic societies often celebrate individuality. It's not marked by the absence of collective decisions, but that there's tolerance to dissent, or even that dissent is given weight and merit philosophically.
I'd summarize this as, collectivist societies are a proxy for government cohesion; it looks like people have power, but they don't. Individualistic societies retain power in both large numbers of people, but also individuals. The government is at competition with it's power to groups of people, which theoretically plays a role in keeping it in check.
I have seen those "risky" playgrounds in Germany - they aren't that risky at all?
Sure, you could get a splinter from the wood if its not maintained, or have a fall and get scraped up, but the risks are low, the benefits (learning to not be a fucking muppet, learning to cope with falls) are high.
When I was growing up, every weekday there was 30 minutes of local news and 30 minutes of national news. Most of the time they were able to fill all of that time with actual newsworthy stories, sometimes, there was filler.
Once the 24 hour news stations came out, there is still 30 minutes of national news, but much, much more filler. This is mostly fear peddling. 40 years of that and it's no wonder the entire population is a little off.
Yes once upon a time 24-hour news meant 25 or 30 different news stories covered in a an our. Now it seems like 5 or less stories in a day, and most of it is panels and "experts" spouting vitriol.
> And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups.
I'd posit it goes even further back to shortwave radio. Cable TV, internet forums, and later social media made discoverability easier - but the mass-media bile wa already present for a very long time.
This phenomenon social media is tapping into is far older than cable news. Tent revival preachers tapping into xenophobia and hate on supposed moral grounds date back well over 100 years. I'd expect you have similar feverish preaching by some charismatic leaders who don't believe a lick of their own creed their sheep flock to since we first had enough language to actually think in these terms. Good luck finding a counter for something that seems to be wired into our nature.
Yeah the 24/7 news cycle was definitely a precursor for this. There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that time so they resort to sensationalism and drudging up anger wherever they can.
Now, that 24/7 news cycle gets carried around in your pocket daily and you get to see other people commenting on it.
> There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that time
There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy things to cover. The problem is that there are limited resources for coverage. It's expensive to staff a desk full of people who can find interesting topics and tell good stories about them for every subject area under the sun. It takes a lot of people with very variegated kinds of subject matter expertise.
It's much cheaper to have 4 or 5 people whose main skills are theater criticism level analysis of political events (i.e. how does this play with various demographics) and a skill of manipulating emotions to spend all their time speculating over nonsense instead. Just put them in a suit and have somber music on and we can pretend this is a serious matter instead of idle gossip.
"There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy things to cover."
Not when it also needs to be "entertaining". When you watch Fox, CNN and others they convey almost zero information about actual issues but only emotion and opinion.
What makes something entertaining or not isn't necessarily a property of the topic. I think you just need an expert who is a good communicator and really enthusiastic about the thing to help you understand why it's cool or important or interesting. The trouble is there are only so many Carl Sagan level people to go around.
It's also important to remember that there are specific threat actors in other countries who spend many many millions on polarizing western countries by amplifying the most extreme voices in their online forums.
I mean, there was anger at politicians, but it was mostly "all politicians are corrupt". I certainly don't remember people saying "I am angry" all the time. I wonder if this was a coastal thing (e.g., the 'Occupy' movement seemed angry in a way that I couldn't relate to having lived my whole life in the midwest) and social media amplified it and spread it across the country?
I do recall online discourse being a lot angrier and less civil (not merely "more critical", but a lot more personal attacks, hateful generalizations, caricatures, etc). It was no longer "politicians are bad", nor even "the other side's politicians are bad", but increasingly "Americans on the other side are the enemy". And of course, conservatives were slow to adopt social media, so (as I recall) this was mostly liberals and progressives punching at conservatives who were still trying to be more buttoned up and play by the old rules, but as they increasingly came online and encountered the new incivility directed towards them (and the incivilizing force of social media itself acting upon them), I think it caused a lot of latent anger to accumulate until they finally embraced incivility in the form of Donald Trump (to be clear, this is a very abridged version of a very complex topic).
> I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations are only from the US but the thinking that there are “others” who can’t be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.
My hope is that the next generation will see the pointless harm caused by our hate/rage addiction and reject it, and maybe even regard it like an addictive substance (perhaps encouraging people to avoid social media, set up resources for addicted people, regulate social media companies, etc).
> I do recall online discourse being a lot angrier and less civil (not merely "more critical", but a lot more personal attacks, hateful generalizations, caricatures, etc).
Tangentially related: I wonder how Usenet groups or 1990s/early 2000s mailing lists compare to today's social media in terms of toxicity. Seems like the "netiquette" mostly worked those days; then again, one can probably easily spot ridiculous trolling or bullying in list archives as well (I like old mailing lists, so I think I have seen many remarkable rants over the years -- to the point that they have seemed conceptually interesting, a peculiar form of utterly irresponsible postmodernist stream-of-conciousness-literature if you will).
The nature of e-mail -- free-form composition, often resulting in lengthy, thoroughly argued replies -- probably did keep some of the anger and emotional arguments at bay, though. Could be that 1990s/2000s hackers were also more eloquent people, but this feels like more of a myth.
Hypothesis: if most online environments would still encourage barebones free-form composition (like e-mail; social media pushes one toward tight and thus sometimes overly straightforward expressions [1]), we would possibly notice more high-quality writing and wordsmiths in the internet. (Proof: go read the lengthy posts of your favorite HN commenter.)
1: See Uni of Chicago-Illinois communications researcher Zizi Papacharissi's work on "affective storytelling". An 2015 article with 250+ citations, analysing Twitter coverage during the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and online iterations of the Occupy movement: https://zizi.people.uic.edu/Site/Research_files/Papacharissi...
Toxicity isn't the only factor. USENET[0] may have been nasty but that nastiness was also very public and untargeted. Social media adds the ability to be extremely targeted with your abuse in ways that are nearly invisible to those who aren't clued into it. You can weaponize it way easier than you can a message board.
[0] And, for the purpose of this discussion, imageboards and other forums with little moderation, such as 2channel, Futaba, 4chan, etc.
"I mean, there was anger at politicians, but it was mostly "all politicians are corrupt"."
I lived in VA at the time and I remember plenty of people who got instantly mad when they just heard the word "Clinton" or "Bush". Since then it just got worse with "Obama=Muslim" and even worse with "Trump".
> And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups
I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations are only from the US but the thinking that there are “others” who can’t be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.