#babel
Why the Past 10 Years of American #Life Have Been Uniquely #Stupid
source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
#Babel is not a #story about tribalism. It’s a story about the #fragmentation of everything.
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The #digital #revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.
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“Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political #extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, #social #media makes a political #system based on #compromise grind to a halt.
#politics #society #problem #filterbubble #extremism #altRight #internet #journalism #press #future #discussion #ethics #moral #democracy
"Babel 2001, a tower of radios playing at once, addresses ideas of information overload and failed communication".
Why the Past 10 Years of American #Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the #ArabSpring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when #Google #Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of #Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by #language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what #humanity could do.
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This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched #Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
#society #internet #network #social #fail #problem #economy #hate #mobbing #shitstorm #news
kinetic ziggurate reflections...
#kineticsculpture #tower #babel #rotating #ziggurat #mirrored #landscape #iran #tower #animatedgif