Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world.
New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.
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[54🌻] Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?
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Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.
The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.
It’s no longer an information superhighway but rather turning into a giant storefront. And that’s the problem. I search for anything and the first 3 pages are Amazon link backs. Or fake websites with AI generated content used only for ad impressions.
Facebook and the like definitely erode some parts, but as a whole, there is way more fuckery going on by big tech.
And this isn’t even mentioning the tracking and fingerprinting and violations to privacy and security we are all promised.
Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.
Because to most people outside Lemmy the “internet” (by which they mean the world wide web but that’s me being a pedant) IS social media. There might as well not be anything outside the walled gardens of social media to them because they’ve been conditioned to only stay on one, maybe two platforms for years at this point. The old “what’s a browser?” question these days gets answered with “I don’t need a browser I have Facebook”. Completely nonsensical to us but to them it’s totally natural. Not being derogatory about them or anything but the 60k lemmy users and however many million on Reddit are not the majority. Facebook with it’s 3 billion (with a b) users, IS the majority of the internet.
I recently (yay Black Friday Week!) got asked by someone in their 70s, who never worked with a computer, to help them pick a laptop:
- Me: OK, so what do you want to do with it?
- Them: I just want to login to the internet.
- Me: […] You can do that on your phone.
- Them: But how do I go onto the internet.
- Me: Use the browser to go to the webpage you want, or search for it in Google.
- Them: So I have Internet on the phone?
- Me: Yes, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to watch YouTube, read your mail, or access Facebook.
- Them: [unconvinced] And should I upgrade to a smartphone?
- Me: [facepalm] You already have a smartphone.
- Them: Oh, and I don’t want TikTok.
- Me: You don’t have TikTok.
- Them: [pointing at the YouTube icon] This isn’t TikTok?
- Me: No, that is YouTube [damned be the Shorts]
They still want a laptop, which is fine, even if they don’t know what for (“not for gaming, not for fancy rocket stuff like you do”) after having showed them some basic office stuff on mine. Still not sure whether to recommend them a Chromebook, a tablet, or what.
If they don’t know what they’re going to use it for, I’d focus on practical things most non-technical people use laptop for:
- Fair battery life to carry it around.
- Operating system that does auto-updates, needs little to no administration.
- SSD so the thing feels fast, and starts quickly. May not need a large storage capacity.
- Built-in webcam for video calls with relatives, etc.
The rest can be done on the software side:
- To browse safely, install security tools (antivirus, browser extensions like privacy badger) and verify auto-udate is on.
- Install an office suite (et Libre Office). Even if they don’t write documents, they’ll probably need to read them.
- If using Windows, tweaks settings to disable abnoxious things like ads, telemetry.
- Backup software. Ideally with automatic remote backups. Window’s built-in backup sucks.
The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.
I agree the Google and MS are a problem, but Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are also a problem, albeit a different one.
Yeah not saying they aren’t shit. Just that the internet isn’t just social media. I surf with mullvad blocking all nuisances (social media included) and I don’t even really feel its effects unless I actually try to visit facebook.com or equivalent.
I think this is where you’re wrong. Facebook, together with google, ms, apple and amazon, are building all the tech nowadays and thus shaping the internet according to their priorities, and this is the biggest problem.
Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread?
Because when people say the internet sucks, they’re not talking about TCP/IP or HTTPS or SSH or FTP. They’re talking about their experience interacting with websites and other people online, i.e. the social aspects, essentially the World Wide Web portion (but also hardware as a service). Everything you mentioned is in that tiny sliver, and is what people take issue with.
the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google
and cloudflare
The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google
I think the real problem is that the entire Internet is basically just a dozen multi-billion Big Tech companies and the entire “Internet economy” is so tightly weaved into advertising money.
Yeah what a future! Literally everywhere you look or turn, there’s someone yelling in your ear for cash. Can’t wait 🙃
It’s honestly wild that our species has gotten here. When are we setting up on Mars again??
What’s really wild is that you don’t have to go that far into the past (just ca. 20 years) when the Internet was all about Information wanting to be Free. It was hopeful time of people coming together around new technology. There were a lot new businesses with wild innovations.
And then, just in a decade it was all gone. Replaced by unregulated behemoths that merged until there’s a dirty dozen left, controlling most of global money and information.
Enshittification of the Internet.
Super not enthused with how centrist this is. Comes off as more of the “can’t we all just get along and live in unity??” stuff people say, when really they mean “the left needs to chill and stop making everything a big deal.”
Kinda hard to just ‘get along’ when the other side is trying to destroy democracy and strip large portions of the population of their basic human rights.
I mostly agree with you.
But I also think it’s important to think of the neighbors we disagree with very differently than how we view right wing politicians and corporate executives. Our neighbors may have some shitty opinions and ignorant positions, but they might be decent people at heart. No right wing politician or billionaire CEO is going to be decent at heart.
I’m not sure where you live, but living/growing up in the south… I can tell you that those beliefs run deep. Deep deep deep. Deeper than you can fix by just being pleasant to your neighbor.
If you try to talk to them with kindness and openness, they dig in their heels and start spewing fox news talking points like it’s the most obvious thing in the world (I’m pretty sure they like it so much because it confirms every awful belief they already had). Try to present different sources, they’re rejected as fake news. I’ve tried everything with people around here since before 2016 and nothing seems to help. Mostly I just keep to myself.
Living in the south, if you’re not indoctrinated, is very isolating. Even living in the cities doesn’t really help. You still need to dig deep and look carefully for people who don’t think you deserve fewer rights.
Edit: thinking about it more, I think the isolation is the point, and it’s how so many people in my state believe some of the same basic things when it comes to religion and politics. You learn pretty young around here that if you don’t get with the program, you’re not going to have many friends. If you didn’t go to church, especially, you lost out on most of the community’s socializing for the week. It feels very cliquey in the smaller towns especially, almost by design.
It seems that americans think the entire world is the american south. Generally in more civilised places outside of the U.S, people care less about other people’s beliefs.
People who want to destroy democracy are influenced by their brain too. But they do react more extremely than others.
The thesis here is consistent with people believing political violence is justified, with human brain’s tendency to form a “us vs them” mentality. But it doesn’t explain why some act more extreme and violently.
People react differently because of multiple factors, such as living through different circumstances, different cultures, being more or less subject to cognitive biases, seing more or less misinformation, … For instance if you see more misinformation about polical adversary being evil, AND your biases and culture makes you more likely to believe it.
That isn’t an excuse for any violence. Understanding these mechanisms may help prevent reduce violence or hate. That’s a worthy goal even if some groups have a much greater responsibility for political violence.
There’s a difference between violence never being desirable, and violence never being necessary. Calls for pacifism at all costs only serve those in power.
Many people live daily with violence being done to them and their communities, but are continually admonished against the wrong kinds of resistance…
Interesting video, makes a lot of sense. Just a couple of things to add:
In the old days of forums it’s worth remembering that people on the internet had more in common with each other than they do today - i.e. generally they were people who were in to computers.
What really gets me down these days is the extremely low-effort of posting everywhere you go. I think that partly comes from the impersonal nature of online communication. Nobody knows who anyone is any more.
I agree it would be better to go back to independent message boards but it’s a shame there’s no “call to action” - it would be nice but how do we get people to do it? This is a popular YouTube channel, it would be great if it started some kind of ball rolling.
I was posting low effort messages on BBS’s back in the 80s, and on the Usenet through the 90’s. The tradition continues.
I remember being told off by a moderator in the 90s for not writing full-sentence replies. You can’t even imagine that today. Of course back then, as the video touches on, if you didn’t like the culture or policies of a forum you just moved to another one, there were no cries of “censorship” because you choose where you want to be.
But I think that makes a good point, in the past people could choose whether they wanted to go on a forum for serious discussion, or a different forum for more casual low-effort posting. These days all these different “posting cultures” are forced to be together and end up annoying each other.
I completely agree with your assessment especially with how most social media these days really dumbs down the entry level effort needed to participate in discussions.
And to your point, participating on a BBS (which usually requires a more specific interest and consequently a similar engagement level) will generally reward you with a community that is more civil, friendly and worth frequenting.
I’m starting to think that Kurzgesagt is either paid media and/or propaganda. I really liked their well researched approach. But this one is straight out in your face. They outright deny the filter bubble that each one of us have experienced firsthand on corporate social media - and then blame you for the ill effects. Also, if you look at the imagery - the emoticons and especially the thumbs up symbol, they are trying to invoke memories of specific social media. It feels very much like they’re trying to garner sympathy for those antisocial-media.
BTW, this isn’t the first time their motives have been called into question. They have in the past, taken money from bigphrama to paint them as benevolent superheroes.
I don’t know why you would think they’re paid media or propaganda. It’s not like they’ve been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a “philanthropic” organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of “effective altruism,” an ideology which functionally equates to “let’s try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality,” and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It’s also not like they’ve been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.
Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s
Have you read the sources? They are below the video. If you have, does the video misrepresent what’s in the sources?
You can find sources to justify any POV - there is no need to misrepresent anything. Something doesn’t automatically become right just because there’s a research paper on it. In fact, that is one of the tricks big companies use to mislead people and scuttle reforms. Look at the history of the tobacco industry, climate change, lead in gasoline, city planning and zoning, etc. There are countless examples.
They’ve always been pretty transparent about that kind of thing though haven’t they?
I don’t think they’re denying the filter bubble exists, just giving a different theory on why things have turned bad.
They haven’t been completely honest about their funding and biases. Second, they are trying to say that it’s human nature and not the filter bubble that’s responsible for things going bad. But those are not independent things. The algorithms created the filter bubble because they are designed to exploit human nature in order to trap human attention. That filter bubble in turn affects human nature in a negative way to cause polarization.
I also cannot believe how people looking like doing deep research for the topics cannot find out about different approaches than big corporate apps and old school way of forums/IRC.
As someone who got into Fediverse and FOSS social media months ago I have seen more great things already implemented and working than articles/vidoes like that are just making ideas about.
