The relentless Skinner Boxing which Facebook and similar platforms engage in has no parallel in broadcast media, which can't be algorithmically tuned to harm the victim as much as possible.
So it's more continuous a transition i suspect than people consider.
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!
A progression of machines for interacting with dreams more deeply. A progreassion of better and better dream amplifiers.
Dreams becoming a bigger part of our life
Expert dreamers making the big bucks
A whole population with one foot in dreamland.
You ever noticed how fiction is everywhere? And advertising. And propaganda.
You own the recording... I know there's still 5-15-30sec skip.
Hulu, Roku, et al do of course insert their own ads because they're ad supported.
If there's a hell I hope there is a special place for 24-hour news channels and folks who feed fear and skewed garbage to people and hurt them.
I sometimes wish I could run a 24 hour news channel that tried to do more of a mix of content / etc. It might not be popular, or profitable, but it wouldn't be doom and gloom and conflict and bait all day. Maybe some stories about rando people's lives and other things?
Not "some sort of willful ignorance". It just requires "ignorance". I think most of us know someone who thinks that reality TV is ... well, reality. "It says it in the name".
> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake
Perhaps you have very bright kids. My kid will ask me to buy two of whatever that person is pushing. He's simply not equipped to handle marketing at any level, yet.
> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake
This does not explain the Alex Jones show.
Ha I actually read this as enragement, which I don't think is even a real word.
I'm not dismissing malice or opportunism in the media, but it is also important to appreciate the situation mass news media is in. Mass media are extremely dependent on things like advertising and that's always been the case for as long mass media have existed. The price of subscription or buying a paper is simply too meager to cover the costs of running a paper, for example. Advertising introduces its own perverse incentives and limitations (you can't bite the hand that feeds you, for example).
24 hour news are, for the most part, useless, so they've got to fill the air time with sensationalized garbage, and because there's an arms race, the sensantionalism escalates.
What we are actually seeing is users going to TikTok because it is even more engaging.
People may say they want to keep up with their friends, but they will choose the more engaging activity.
There is no regulating or out-competing it.
Governments should provide identification, communication, community, payments, etc platforms for their citizens, but entertainment is always going to look like this unless stoicism is somehow engrained into our culture.
Entertainment itself is measured by engagement, so it will end with unlimited personalized ai generated content that will be almost impossible to put down.
SOME people cannot help themselves. I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. I can help myself just fine. Some people have much more addictive personality traits than others. Please, don't paint everyone with the same broad brush. It doesn't help the conversation in a meaningful manner
I also figured the “some” was implied because the world is a complicated place. I do believe we all have our weaknesses, though mindless consumption is more attractive to some than others.
I know adults who voted for Trump because they believed the apprentice gave them an unvarnished view of his character and decision making prowess in the real world. My own grandmother would cite episodes of the show.
I do believe that the Rush style radio talk show lays the foundation for Tucker Carlson and all of the conservative pundit TV programming. Which is the basis for the problems we see with Facebook / Fake News etc.
The HN "algo" is user driven by fellow readers up-voting/down-voting which is much more common interests. There are no "friend" relations on HN. The other platforms are all advertising based algo driven with intentional doping to make people addicted to the platform. This isn't even apples-to-oranges comparison.
After the dust from Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers settles and everything gets evaluated, I sincerly hope that Meta/Zuck,et.al gets investigated in the same line as Purdue.
No, they cant.
How many kids believe the photoshop pics they see?
Not to single her out, but Kim K is now selling headphones and her pic in her ad makes her look like a character from the sims. This is NOT how a normal human being looks without hours of photoshop work.
There is a reason we use to have laws around advertising to children.. they are too young to understand things.. this is also why you cant legally enter into a contract with a minor.
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.
I know he needs to be exposed to some marketing while I'm watching along to talk about it so he isn't completely defenseless against it later, but I don't think that time is quite yet. So far, I'm going with his being able to separate "real" from "pretend" as a minimum.
Also, I just never have liked Reddit.
We some how think this would be six hours replaced with "improving our minds", visiting museums and working on our calculus or oil painting.
I mean we could all do that. we more or less force our children to do that at school.
If there was a "improve my mind" button on facebook, do you think we would all press it?
I am torn between my pessimism and optimism
Back in the early 80s I was living in LA and I'd grab some food on the way home from work and the "News" on an independent station. They had 3 half hour News show back to back. They started out with "Local News", then moved on to "National News", and finally "World News".
At first it didn't seem much different than the big 3 Networks. Everyday I'd come home from work feeling fine but after a few months of doing that I realized by the end of the last broadcast I was very depressed.
It finally occurred to me, after a few months, that the station was gathering every tragedy they could find, rapes, robberies, murders, wars, airplane and auto crashes, etc. So I decided to stop watching it and immediately went back to my normal, happy, content self.
Since I've learned to monitor the "News" as opposed to consuming it and that's much easier to do when we can pick and choose what to consume and ignore it with just a click or tap. And since then I've had quite a few friends and relatives who're happy and content before and are now in a constant state of rage because they're pretty much addicted to watching FOX/CNN/MSNBC, etc.
That said, I would love to see a serious study on this because it's grown into a serious and national mental heath problem here in the U.S.
Love that the Catholic Church burned him at the stake for being too conservative. Really! Go Renaissance Popery!!
NPR and PBS are the best if you have to.
I think someone could make a few billion running a positive happy news channel.Lol, it is. :)
> Strawman argument then?
How about I rephrase, "Does 24-hour news have similar effects on viewers as this study shows social media has on kids, despite not being interactive?"
Yeah, I see your point. Apples and oranges. Still interested in that study.
Wait til VR is evil
Show them how it is done. How one can cut, edit and change the sound.
Ask who did it, for what reason, for which audience, to what end?
Equip them with the tools to question the things they see. Then they have the means to engage with marketing.
It’s a long road. There will be glitter and cheap plastic toys along the way.
Isn't that essentially what TikTok is? A 24/7 feed of all the positive, happy, dopamine-triggering content you could ever want, tailored to you. And yeah, they have.
I'm in my 50's and am literally doing the latter two on weekends. Have I become a trope?!? lol.