Social Media seems like the adult version of high school all over again. You have the bullies and popularity contests. Jon Ronson was one of the unfortunate who tried to tell the crowd that they shouldn't judge, and instead became one of the kids being picked on.
High school, or middle school is not materially different than the rest of the world.
The idea of "The adult version of high school" for situations that involve bullies, ingroup/outgroup and pettiness etc... is silly because it assumes that those things are only relegated to children.
Case in point: The G20 in Australia[1]. All the cool kids sit with Obama, Putin ate lunch alone and was on the outside of the class photo. If the highest level of political diplomacy is also "the adult version of high school"...well then I guess the whole thing is just high school.
My rule for social media is the following: only go when you know exactly what you're looking for.
The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good, so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends. This having been said, I'm now clearly in a professional environment, so I think about what I'm writing.
I walk through twitter in the same way I walk through the ghetto: mouth shut and head on a swivel. I'm not going to start disseminating my political opinions as if the average twit gave a damn.
This is not Twitter, and the poster is utilizing a pseudo-anonymous handle, perhaps unlike on Twitter. They don't care about disseminating their beliefs here because they won't be attributed to their "real" identity.
HN is not a black hole, information can flow out of it just as easily as it flows in. If they are careful to not disseminate their personal views on one public internet forum they should be just as cautious about voicing them on another. I believe that the pseudo-anonymity is far more important than the platform.
The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good, so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends.
My community (programming languages) is also active on twitter, but I decided completely to withdraw. There seems to be no benefit for me in hearing about the latest paper 5 minutes after it was put on arXiv. I felt that being active on Twitter gave me the illusion of understanding, but prevented me from deep understanding by infinite distraction.
My community (horse racing) is also very active on Twitter. However, I find it highly beneficial to stay abreast of the latest news, and have a chuckle from time to time.
Yesterday a certain horse was confirmed for a certain race (Smad Place in the King George chase at Kempton on December 26th). I picked up the information on Twitter and was able to place a bet immediately at 14/1. The price on Smad Place in this race is now 10/1, 9/1 in places. It was quickly adjusted down by most bookmakers within 10 minutes of the announcement.
Twitter really is a valuable medium to me. I want to hear about things 5 seconds after they've been announced!
How does that work where you're located? At least here (Finland) it wouldn't matter what the odds are when you place the bet, since the payout is based on the odds at the moment the race starts (that is, if you bet 1 € when the odds are 14:1 and then the odds go down to 9:1 you win 9 €). Of course here the state has monopoly on gambling, so it might work very differently.
Generally (in the UK and Ireland), the reverse is true. If the odds go down after you place your bet, you get your initial odds, if the odds go up (to say 18/1) before the race, you will get 18/1. Most reputable bookies do that these days.
In the UK and Ireland (Australia too), there are a few different ways to place a bet.
If betting with a bookmaker you can take the current odds or the Starting Price (SP). If you take the current odds, you're locked in to that price, regardless of which way the price moves. If you're taking the current price, you need to be quite sure the SP is likely to be shorter. The SP, as the name implies, is basically the price of the horse when the race starts.
One can also place a bet on the Tote (totaliser), which is common in many parts of the world and often government owned/run. For example, Hong Kong, the jurisdiction with the biggest gambling turnover on horse racing, only legally allows bets on the Tote. This is a form of parimutuel betting. All bets go into a pool, the winning dividend is the amount available in the pool, divided by the total number of bets on the winner (less the operator's commission). Therefore, the price will fluctuate with the number of bets placed and the monetary volume.
Quickly denouncing anyone who expresses certain sorts of opinions thus preventing certain sorts of discussion seems much the same to me regardless of which opinions it is aimed at.
I disagree, saying something outrageous on Reddit or 4chan is almost without consequence, given the anonymity on these forum.
The problem is people on Twitter putting their real name out and expecting no consequences for their actions everytime they tweet something.
Twitter is open AND people chose to reveal their true identity ... what could go wrong ?
Twitter is a wonderful tool for businesses to create channels. If you have something to sell yes you should absolutely be on Twitter, if not, at least stay anonymous while going on rants or when saying questionable things. She should have.
I will relish the day when the Internet Outrage Machine becomes sloppy enough to fall on its own sword, repeatedly.
When that happens, we might see a countervailing trend wherein the internet largely turns against that type of behavior—likely via way of directing outrage and shaming towards those who engage in outrage and shaming.
Ideally, the dynamic would be kind of like a snake eating its tail.
It will fall the day that we're able to link the comments and accounts across multiple sites/services together to actual individuals. The "shaming" mentioned will continue for the culprits, just like it did for the victims, into their real-life.
I am actually torn about this. On the one hand, I understand and value that anonymity (at least, superficially) is big part of what makes the internet great. But on the other hand, I can't help but believe that we'll be in a completely better society if people didn't have a space to vent their rage in some sort of wide-reaching, public arena. Leaving their only recourse for dealing with such rage to be actual manifested "rage/hate/racism/sexism/other-ism", which is pretty darn easy to point out concretely, and to ostracize.
Well, when you look at that screenshot of the hatred spewed at Justine Sacco, you'll note that many, if not most of them are posting under their (presumably) real name and photo.
I'd like to think you're right, but there are plenty of people who seriously believe hateful or frankly stupid things. Which is to say, there are people who are proud of being racist, sexist, creationist or whatever, and services like Twitter enable them to find lots of other people who share their views. Rather than being ostracized, they get support, and that results in mobbing.
The use of real names on Twitter, Facebook etc doesn't actually stop this, though I presume it moderates it somewhat. (The "secret sympathizers" may be less likely to join the mob.)
Hmmm. You know how people claim that anonymity is the reason people act shitty on the internet? It seems to me what they fail to mention is "If they weren't anonymous, we would be free to attack them - that would shut them up".
I'm not so sure everyone would shut up. Some people are bold wrt their opinions. We might even create more such people..
Then people would eventually ignore the mere threat of repercussions. Now, we'd actually have to attack them, to make the repercussions real - and this is where it starts...
A lot of this rage is coming from moral righteousness, mobbing is happening over perceived racism/sexism/killing of cuddly lions. The ostracizing in real life you're expecting to see correct this is exactly the process that is going haywire. Normal people are doing this mobbing, I have seen it with my own eyes. They are people with a desire to punish, looking for a socially acceptable victim.
You mean, and goes the way of overheated talk radio? The day that (to take one name) Rush Limbaugh loses ratings and disappears, then take his run (25 years and counting, right?), multiply it by the fraction you think appropriate to the increasing speed of change, and you may get an expected date of death for the Internet Outrage Machine. But that only works if there is no successor to RL.
I dont't see how there is more outrage and shaming on social media than in the real world. Empathetic and benevolent behaviour could be expected when Twitter was a small community. Would everyone get Justine Sacco "joke" if she was yelling it in the streets ?
The people who would hear it would be her friends, who would laugh at the intended irony; anyone around over-hearing would grasp that is was meant as self-deprecation.
But the same people who compare this to yelling in the streets then turn around and tell the sealion analogy. One of the many problems with twitter is that some people perceive it as private dinner conversation and others as public soapbox, and it can very rapidly shift between the two.
But the way twitter works, one of your followers can retell the "joke" to all their friends, and they can tell it to all their friends. The system breaks down when they're not sharing something they agree with, but something they think is so harmful that no-one (except all their followers) should ever have to see it.
If the joke is "problematic", I'm not sure why sharing it isn't also problematic.
Maybe a 140 character broadcast system is a good medium for a nuanced analysis of when jokes are funny (and a circuit breaker in a sometimes uncomfortable discussion) or so harmful that they can't be justified, and where the line is.
I am really bothered by the expression ‘the online hate mob’, as if this was a consistent and coordinated group of people who have an active and positive role in hatred.
It’s just a set of people who a. had a bad day; b. disagree; c. have arguments, or agree with people who do, and resent the fact that those arguments were openly dismissed.
“Troll” was an expression used by feminists (Ellison) 20 years ago, when they switched from presence-based meetings to on-line forum. They were confronted to dissent for the first time, didn’t know what to do with it. And roll all dissent into a intentionally de-humanised collective, where counter-arguments were gladly mixed with abuse to discredit them.
That kind of conflation became so prevalent, that is –ironically– also what drove people to miss Sacco’s cynicism.
Do you often get death threats from people who are simply having a bad day and disagree with you? Trivialization of the horrific elements of online interaction is just as bad (if not worse) as conflating them with legitimate dissent.
Yes. I ride a bike in London, and taxi drivers tend to act on it too.
I’ve been agile enough to avoid the worst, but my bike was smashed more than I can count (I use city-wide bike scheme). I’ve ended in the hospital twice: I got my front teeth smashed once; I also got my knee busted another time.
I am not trivialising threats, just arguing that putting them in context would help solve the issue — a lot more than putting thousands of teenagers in jail just because they didn’t mesure the consequence of their anger.
The on-line forums 20 years ago that I mention were on Usenet. My understanding is that the criticism and grief were less welcome on feminist channels than on Star Trek fan boards.
Trekkies? Many, but not one that would call you a rapist for disagreeing with them, i.e. none that think that is it appropriate and fair to you put you in jail, where you’d get beat and raped on a daily basis for a decade, with no possible recourse, for suggesting that their point of view might be partial. Did I mention suicide rates?
I know: That got very real very fast, didn’t it? De-humanising your dissenters can have such strangely overwhelming consequences. I mean, just look at every conversation the original article quotes: death-threats are hardly the worst. That’s why when someone claims (proudly) to have invented the key-word for empowering something like that, I pay attention. I couldn’t find the reference where she did, though.
Sometimes shaming is good. The drought shaming in California actually helped the biggest wasters cut down on their water use more than any fines would (they are too rich to be disuaded by fines).
Maybe stating the obvious, but it's fascinated me for a while how online interactions with high affect content are almost exclusively aimed at the interactors' imaginary constructions of each other - there's so little of a person in their tweets or forum posts that imagination ('fantasy', 'projection', or whatever) is required in considerable degree for there to be any realistic sense of the interactee in the interactor's mind.
And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targeted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.
Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.
By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!
That's most social interaction you've just described there. We generally converse with a projection, an idiopathic construct representative of another, of their state of mind, so we can interpret and respond to them appropriately.
Issues arise when this projected individual differs substantially to the actual. On a one to one face to face basis, one typically rapidly readjusts one's model of another rapidly, as it's free floating and has no broader corpus to fall back on. This varies when you deal with someone famous (large corpus, many precepts) or intimate (seemingly large corpus, actually selection bias and neurosis), and the model usually becomes less accurate.
Where it gets interesting is herd interactions, either on or offline. Lynch mobs, trial by media, witch burning, Internet hate machine, war - all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others, which are reinforced through perceived (abiline!) collective consensus.
Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self constructed, this is as old as man.
all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others
Inaccurate models not just of minds of others, but of the observers's environment, including non-minds. It's complexity reduction. Language is unable to represent the full complexity of what is being observed, the more so, the fewer words being used.
Yes, symbol set reduction can weigh in this too - that was the entire idea of orwell's newspeak, to reduce the available set of symbols and therefore thought - fundamentally providing a more malleable, more simplistic model.
Were humans not capable of and in the habit of treating assumptions as axioms, we could not function nor develop beyond an infantile inquisitive state, as we rely on inductive learning to link the symbols through which we interpret reality - so one can only work with this particular axiom (or assumption? Hah.) to effect change.
The Internet is damoclean in nature - at first flush it presents a divisive frontier of information, which leads to the behaviours we see today - but prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement in the models individuals and cultures carry, assuming auto-innoculation doesn't happen too quickly. It'll be interesting to watch pan out.
prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement
That's certainly what happened after the previous two revolutions in communication: the invention of convenient writing and that of the printing press. So I have high hopes for the third! I doubt that will be part of the bright future though. It is antithetical to better communication.
Cultural relativism is a refinement of cultural absolutism, in order better to deal with the empirically undeniable discrepancies in moral judgements between different individuals and groups. Basically:
Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.
Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.
Clearly, the former is easier to handle than the latter, which has advantages in some situations.
>Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.
This strikes me as the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Many people believe one culture is better than another without necessarily believing one is entirely good/without fault and the other is entirely bad.
The problem with cultural relativism as I understand it is that it denies me the right to make any judgement. I mean, you phrased as opposing "they're bad" but in practice it opposes "they're worse"
I'd say I was being terse, and trying to boild down the matter to its essence, so as to enable clear thinking. Naturally, positions we hold are more complex.
it denies me the right to make any judgement.
I don't think a mature cultural relativist denies you any judgements, it's more an invitation to investigate more nuanced positions.
The other odd thing I find odd about these cases is the curious absence of genuine offense. I remember watching the Justine Sacco thing unfold and noticing that nobody really seemed particularly upset - to the contrary, people seemed positively giddy about the whole thing. Very little "how dare she say that?" and quite a lot of "haha she's toast, isn't this terrific?".
In a way, I guess dogpiling on someone like that is probably a lot easier when you know nothing about them except the thing you're reacting to.
For a surprising number of people, the presumption of offense is identical to the reality of offense. I can see why. It's a useful way to stir up the rage machine and direct its wrath without having to consider the opinions of whoever you purport to defend.
Maybe stating the obvious, but it's fascinated me for a while how online interactions with high affect content are almost exclusively aimed at the interactors' imaginary onstructions of each other - there's so little of a person in their tweets or forum posts that imagination ('fantasy', 'projection', or whatever) is requied in considerable degree for there to be any realistic sense of the interactee in the interactor's mind.
And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targetted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.
Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.
By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!
I find similar things in youtube comments, facebook threads etc. A facebook page or youtube video with, say, pro Israel message gets a mob of commenters shouting down anyone who speaks about the plight of Palestinians. Meanwhile a page or video about "occupation" will have a mob shouting down anyone who speaks about Israel's right to exist. Very few in the mob actually make point by point rebuttals or even actual sense.
The same can be seen in religious forums, atheists, etc. Try to post in a religious stackexchange - with the notable exception of judaism.stackexchange.com your post is likely to be censoredor heavily modified if it's too critical or raises inconvenient issues.
At least, sites like quora and stackexchange have rules that tend to promote a clean end result, with quality answers. On social sites like facebook, however, things usually devolve into over 90% "bad" argumentation as defined by paul graham.
I think there is some internet study that anger and outrage motivates people to respond more than good things.
On Twitter, where people shout into the void and most people in the mob don't have a reputation to carefully manage, you can attract even more angry crap.
On YouTube it's the same principle - comments are public so the angry confrontations with low wuality argumentation are more likely.
The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians are just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P
>"The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians are just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P"
Oh, we hear you. We, or at least I, am just not quite able to parse what you're saying.
Are you implying that Youtube is supposed to enforce some sort of "free-market" on the comments? Or are you baiting for some sort of "mob shouting" reply that you reference in your post? Do care to elaborate, as we Libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists), are listening.
Well, it was a bit of a joke, at the end of the post... showing how inflaming comments or outrage makes people comment more than nice stuff which they can agree with. Together with the description of public comment systems becoming proliferated with the negative spirals, it was also a bit meta :)
It was a natural post. Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage, and outrage is traffic. I didn't think about whether or not I might be ruining Sacco's life.
And who could forget the time when they filed the sexual assault of a guy under "first world problem": https://archive.is/f0ZbV (archive link because no traffic for Gawker).
I've been on forums where people said the most atrocious things to each other. But there was never any come back from it because A) The audience was relatively limited and B) None of us used real names or spread out ID around too widely.
You could pay me to use social media, but considering the potential reputational costs I'd have to be paid a lot.
Welcome to twitter. It's completely unclear to me why anyone would use it, especially after writing a book about how using it wrong can get you fired and ruin your life.
He should actually just give this a rest. The article does not contribute to the discussion, it just further plugs his book.
She was terribly wronged but no one else keeps bringing her up except him, for obvious financial gain.
If he has something new to say then great, but cherry picking ridiculous tweets out of thousands of them, many of them complete trolls, only gives voice to an obviously ignorant minority.
Will you post the same comment the next time some woman writes about how awful it is to be a woman in tech? Doing the same thing, that is cherry-picking a couple tweets here and there and giving voice to an obviously ignorant minority?
It is pretty clear that as a species, our group dynamics have both pro- and contra- modes that can be applied by the group towards the individual. Its a sliding scale .. we eat our martyrs and pamper our sinners, alike.
Its cases such as this one that remind me personally that you cannot trust a mob, a crowd can be as banal and base as any wild animal, and groups need guidance to be of benefit to the individual cells which form the whole. There are no guarantees with the mob - strength, unity, enterprise - these must all be applied towards the effort to prevent the mob from consuming itself. Humans are cannibalistic - if not digestively, at least figuratively - and we form whatever cultures we can select from the infinite void in order to undo this cannibalistic urge. But yet, still it persists.
Ronson's a cogent writer, but I can't help think he's suffering from cognitive dissonance. Perhaps because he still clings hopelessly to the idea that the modern concept of "social justice" is somehow beneficial, he keeps trying to find excuses for why mobbing, shaming, hate mobs, rushes to judgement and so forth could theoretically be okay in some situation and so we shouldn't consider such behavior automatically bad.
To his immense credit, he doesn't go around defending specific instances of hate mobbing, but his reluctance to fully commit to opposing the technique hampers whatever it is he's attempting to accomplish.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085680
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039274
Maybe on 7th grade of our system (when we were 13-14).
It looks like that's the mental age of SJW's.
The idea of "The adult version of high school" for situations that involve bullies, ingroup/outgroup and pettiness etc... is silly because it assumes that those things are only relegated to children.
Case in point: The G20 in Australia[1]. All the cool kids sit with Obama, Putin ate lunch alone and was on the outside of the class photo. If the highest level of political diplomacy is also "the adult version of high school"...well then I guess the whole thing is just high school.
[1]http://www.pbs.org/video/2365401766/ time:50:08
The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good, so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends. This having been said, I'm now clearly in a professional environment, so I think about what I'm writing.
I walk through twitter in the same way I walk through the ghetto: mouth shut and head on a swivel. I'm not going to start disseminating my political opinions as if the average twit gave a damn.
I wonder if I'm the only one ...
Yesterday a certain horse was confirmed for a certain race (Smad Place in the King George chase at Kempton on December 26th). I picked up the information on Twitter and was able to place a bet immediately at 14/1. The price on Smad Place in this race is now 10/1, 9/1 in places. It was quickly adjusted down by most bookmakers within 10 minutes of the announcement.
Twitter really is a valuable medium to me. I want to hear about things 5 seconds after they've been announced!
If betting with a bookmaker you can take the current odds or the Starting Price (SP). If you take the current odds, you're locked in to that price, regardless of which way the price moves. If you're taking the current price, you need to be quite sure the SP is likely to be shorter. The SP, as the name implies, is basically the price of the horse when the race starts.
One can also place a bet on the Tote (totaliser), which is common in many parts of the world and often government owned/run. For example, Hong Kong, the jurisdiction with the biggest gambling turnover on horse racing, only legally allows bets on the Tote. This is a form of parimutuel betting. All bets go into a pool, the winning dividend is the amount available in the pool, divided by the total number of bets on the winner (less the operator's commission). Therefore, the price will fluctuate with the number of bets placed and the monetary volume.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting
The same occurs on these very boards. Everything looks copacetic when you're an insider.
The problem is people on Twitter putting their real name out and expecting no consequences for their actions everytime they tweet something.
Twitter is open AND people chose to reveal their true identity ... what could go wrong ?
Twitter is a wonderful tool for businesses to create channels. If you have something to sell yes you should absolutely be on Twitter, if not, at least stay anonymous while going on rants or when saying questionable things. She should have.
When that happens, we might see a countervailing trend wherein the internet largely turns against that type of behavior—likely via way of directing outrage and shaming towards those who engage in outrage and shaming.
Ideally, the dynamic would be kind of like a snake eating its tail.
I am actually torn about this. On the one hand, I understand and value that anonymity (at least, superficially) is big part of what makes the internet great. But on the other hand, I can't help but believe that we'll be in a completely better society if people didn't have a space to vent their rage in some sort of wide-reaching, public arena. Leaving their only recourse for dealing with such rage to be actual manifested "rage/hate/racism/sexism/other-ism", which is pretty darn easy to point out concretely, and to ostracize.
The use of real names on Twitter, Facebook etc doesn't actually stop this, though I presume it moderates it somewhat. (The "secret sympathizers" may be less likely to join the mob.)
I'm not so sure everyone would shut up. Some people are bold wrt their opinions. We might even create more such people..
Then people would eventually ignore the mere threat of repercussions. Now, we'd actually have to attack them, to make the repercussions real - and this is where it starts...
1. Anonymity
2. Mixing of cultures that rarely (if ever) meet in the real world
3. Loss of nuances when speech is converted to text
4. Loss of context due to text constraints (can't write many complete, complex thoughts in 140 characters)
5. Less potential for physical consequences
But the way twitter works, one of your followers can retell the "joke" to all their friends, and they can tell it to all their friends. The system breaks down when they're not sharing something they agree with, but something they think is so harmful that no-one (except all their followers) should ever have to see it.
If the joke is "problematic", I'm not sure why sharing it isn't also problematic.
Maybe a 140 character broadcast system is a good medium for a nuanced analysis of when jokes are funny (and a circuit breaker in a sometimes uncomfortable discussion) or so harmful that they can't be justified, and where the line is.
It’s just a set of people who a. had a bad day; b. disagree; c. have arguments, or agree with people who do, and resent the fact that those arguments were openly dismissed.
“Troll” was an expression used by feminists (Ellison) 20 years ago, when they switched from presence-based meetings to on-line forum. They were confronted to dissent for the first time, didn’t know what to do with it. And roll all dissent into a intentionally de-humanised collective, where counter-arguments were gladly mixed with abuse to discredit them.
That kind of conflation became so prevalent, that is –ironically– also what drove people to miss Sacco’s cynicism.
I am not trivialising threats, just arguing that putting them in context would help solve the issue — a lot more than putting thousands of teenagers in jail just because they didn’t mesure the consequence of their anger.
The way I remember it, trolling started out on usenet as a way to, well, here's probably the best example : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.startrek.te...
I know: That got very real very fast, didn’t it? De-humanising your dissenters can have such strangely overwhelming consequences. I mean, just look at every conversation the original article quotes: death-threats are hardly the worst. That’s why when someone claims (proudly) to have invented the key-word for empowering something like that, I pay attention. I couldn’t find the reference where she did, though.
And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targeted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.
Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.
By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!
Issues arise when this projected individual differs substantially to the actual. On a one to one face to face basis, one typically rapidly readjusts one's model of another rapidly, as it's free floating and has no broader corpus to fall back on. This varies when you deal with someone famous (large corpus, many precepts) or intimate (seemingly large corpus, actually selection bias and neurosis), and the model usually becomes less accurate.
Where it gets interesting is herd interactions, either on or offline. Lynch mobs, trial by media, witch burning, Internet hate machine, war - all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others, which are reinforced through perceived (abiline!) collective consensus.
Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self constructed, this is as old as man.
Were humans not capable of and in the habit of treating assumptions as axioms, we could not function nor develop beyond an infantile inquisitive state, as we rely on inductive learning to link the symbols through which we interpret reality - so one can only work with this particular axiom (or assumption? Hah.) to effect change.
The Internet is damoclean in nature - at first flush it presents a divisive frontier of information, which leads to the behaviours we see today - but prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement in the models individuals and cultures carry, assuming auto-innoculation doesn't happen too quickly. It'll be interesting to watch pan out.
Progress doesn't always look like progress at the time. In fact, it rarely does - what we usually see and call progress is actually entrenchment.
And cultural relativism is a marvelous excuse for the evil of man.
Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.
Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.
Clearly, the former is easier to handle than the latter, which has advantages in some situations.
>Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.
This strikes me as the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Many people believe one culture is better than another without necessarily believing one is entirely good/without fault and the other is entirely bad.
The problem with cultural relativism as I understand it is that it denies me the right to make any judgement. I mean, you phrased as opposing "they're bad" but in practice it opposes "they're worse"
In a way, I guess dogpiling on someone like that is probably a lot easier when you know nothing about them except the thing you're reacting to.
And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targetted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.
Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.
By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!
The same can be seen in religious forums, atheists, etc. Try to post in a religious stackexchange - with the notable exception of judaism.stackexchange.com your post is likely to be censoredor heavily modified if it's too critical or raises inconvenient issues.
At least, sites like quora and stackexchange have rules that tend to promote a clean end result, with quality answers. On social sites like facebook, however, things usually devolve into over 90% "bad" argumentation as defined by paul graham.
I think there is some internet study that anger and outrage motivates people to respond more than good things.
On Twitter, where people shout into the void and most people in the mob don't have a reputation to carefully manage, you can attract even more angry crap.
On YouTube it's the same principle - comments are public so the angry confrontations with low wuality argumentation are more likely.
The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians are just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P
Oh, we hear you. We, or at least I, am just not quite able to parse what you're saying.
Are you implying that Youtube is supposed to enforce some sort of "free-market" on the comments? Or are you baiting for some sort of "mob shouting" reply that you reference in your post? Do care to elaborate, as we Libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists), are listening.
"Free-market" doesn't imply "no rules".
http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i...
That's Gawker for you. They never care for the people they write about, they only care for the clicks. Just like when they outed the CFO of Condé Nast: http://www.salon.com/2015/07/17/gawker_drags_media_coverage_...
And who could forget the time when they filed the sexual assault of a guy under "first world problem": https://archive.is/f0ZbV (archive link because no traffic for Gawker).
You could pay me to use social media, but considering the potential reputational costs I'd have to be paid a lot.
Shaming someone attempts to make them feel bad about their actions. Attempting to get someone fired, and spamming them with threats is not shaming...
She was terribly wronged but no one else keeps bringing her up except him, for obvious financial gain.
If he has something new to say then great, but cherry picking ridiculous tweets out of thousands of them, many of them complete trolls, only gives voice to an obviously ignorant minority.
Its cases such as this one that remind me personally that you cannot trust a mob, a crowd can be as banal and base as any wild animal, and groups need guidance to be of benefit to the individual cells which form the whole. There are no guarantees with the mob - strength, unity, enterprise - these must all be applied towards the effort to prevent the mob from consuming itself. Humans are cannibalistic - if not digestively, at least figuratively - and we form whatever cultures we can select from the infinite void in order to undo this cannibalistic urge. But yet, still it persists.
To his immense credit, he doesn't go around defending specific instances of hate mobbing, but his reluctance to fully commit to opposing the technique hampers whatever it is he's attempting to accomplish.