zlacker

>>giulio+(OP)
I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive engagement at all costs.

>>sbf501+qh
Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it.

Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not present with TV. This seriously messes with the innate reasoning of most humans, because for all our individualism we are norm conforming herd animals.

Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake. If the same thing is pushed by all of their friends, now we're in the territory of peer pressure which is a different ball game!

>>gergov+lr
I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed volcano eruptions on the Affordable Care Act. So on and so forth. It's spurious to claim that outrage bait on television hasn't messed up people's brains just because the internet is doing a better job at it. They're just modeling what television was already successfully doing.

>>PuppyT+GK
This is a really weird comment, because Limbaugh was almost entirely radio. His TV show was short-lived and not really popular, as he wasn't comfortable in the medium and it showed. He got his start in radio as a DJ, and went on to basically remake the AM band from farm reports and local sports talk to talk radio as we now know it.

This is really basic bio stuff about Limbaugh, and it doesn't speak well of your other assertions if you got this part so wrong.

What's really funny is that during the 90s the "Greatest Threat To Democracy Ever" WAS talk radio, more or less solely because the Limbaugh program was so popular. The targets may change, but the talking points never seem to.

>>deltar+ju1
Hey, thanks for correcting me. You're right that the issue was Limbaugh's radio program, not his TV. I apologize for getting my example wrong, but I think my overall point is still a valid one (that just because social media is more effective at spewing bad rhetoric doesn't mean bad rhetoric is ineffective in other media).

>>PuppyT+Sv1
Your point was valid but your example was creepily wrong.