gilesgoat wrote:Years ago before the internet you would have NOT stepped in the public square shouting "X is an idiot", unless you had a really strong reason for doing so, nowadays "this can happen anytime on a worldwide scale" .. and once is done is done ...
There still is speaker's corner.
Hyde Park, London is known for its Sunday soapbox orators, who have assembled at Speakers' Corner since 1872 to discuss religion, politics, and other topics.
gilesgoat wrote:IMHO there's a true fear in part of "losing of identity" because of this "explosion of information going all over the places" this "social that is even too social" this "info that sometime is really TMO" and so on ... it gets to a point that MAYBE all this "should be taken a bit lighter and should be taken a bit in smaller doeses at the time".
Yeah that is true. I think many cultures fear becoming a "melting pot" rather than a "mixing bowl" in all this and that's a valid worry. I think we can still keep up the diversity of cultures, but without the "you can't be part of this culture because your ethnic origins are not the same" (which both sides spout whether it's the usual racism and concepts of 'white genocide' on the right, or excessive worry about 'cultural appropriation' on the left which is also valid as it's worry about the melting pot). I thought we were doing, seemingly others thought otherwise.
I know what you mean with interpretation and dramas/internet shitstorms as well. Part of this is social media. When using your real name, it's best to be as vanilla and unoffensive as you can (which is why I'd definitely like to keep semi-anonymous things like traditional message boards!)
Maybe we are "understanding better each other" maybe we are seeing all the good AND bad sides the same time "more than before" and that's why things are going as they go.
Interesting point. Maybe so. Maybe this is just a pain period that we have to get through while we understand the good and bad and each others' concerns and frustrations.
Mah .. I don't know .. I mean "I know what I want to do" but I'll keep it for myself alone, in these times you really don't know any more what's really "good" to let people know or what not.
We do probably overshare I think, that includes our ideas and theories about the world, and politics, and whatever else. I think we had this idea that there was a definitive truth the internet could collectively just 'find' on any subject and rather than that being the case, it's more that it's just opened up massive philosophical questions of what the "truth" is. Is it what's on Wikipedia? Is it scientific consensus? Just how do you even prove to one individual who is determined to believe the Earth is flat, that it's not? How do you prove to someone that they walked on the moon, or that the holocaust happened, without taking them to see the footprints or fingernail marks with their own eyes, and will they even still believe it's not just an illusion of some sort?
And so when we do share a theory or idea or opinion or even just what we see as a simple fact backed by peer reviewed studies and consensus, there is always someone to argue vehemently the opposite, and to feel very strongly about it.
gilesgoat wrote:IMHO there's a true fear in part of "losing of identity" because of this "explosion of information going all over the places" this "social that is even too social" this "info that sometime is really TMO" and so on ... it gets to a point that MAYBE all this "should be taken a bit lighter and should be taken a bit in smaller doeses at the time".
Yeah that is true. I think many cultures fear becoming a "melting pot" rather than a "mixing bowl" in all this and that's a valid worry.
Is it? Nazism is a culture. I don't think keeping nazism intact is a worthwhile project.
"My way is the way of not fighting":- the book of Enter the Dragon.
Yeah, I remember the old internet. It was great. You needed a modicum of ability with computers to use it, it was new and exciting and a lovely place. But then the general public gained access in their masses. And unfortunately the general public are arseholes. All of a sudden the anonymity that we all thought would enable the flow of new ideas did just that, only the ideas were awful, because the people with the most awful ideas shouted the loudest and longest.
So places like FB took away the anonymity and forced people to use their real names - which didn't work, because FB is still a cesspool of racists, bigots and haters. And friend networking on social media means that you can friend/follow other people that you want to hear more of so you hear more of the shit that you spout yourself which reinforces your horrid worldview and don't have to come into contact with anyone that might challenge your views.
And then there's the ad networks - big websites need big funding and ads can provide that, so you make posts and articles that get views so you get those ad dollars and nothing sells quite as well as hate so people start just making shit up, and people start spreading it for you, and follower counts and likes are a pretty decent metric of how popular you are so the ad networks and brands start offering free shit to popular people which leads to more anxiety and hate spreading and so on and so on ad nauseum. Now we have this never-ending tidal wave of shit flowing around the world and not stopping.
And all we wanted to do was discuss our retro games and hobbies on usenet (which was also a cesspool in places but required specialist software and knowhow to get onto so was a touch more immune to the general public's blithering idiotry).
I saw a meme a while ago - "The internet used to be millions of pages, with people creating new stuff all the time. Now it's four websites that are full of shit and screenshots of the other three pages".
I remember thinking "well, you're not wrong".
"Oh dear lord, I slightly soiled myself. Oxfam won’t be pleased."
Barney wrote:Yeah, I remember the old internet. It was great. You needed a modicum of ability with computers to use it, it was new and exciting and a lovely place. But then the general public gained access in their masses. And unfortunately the general public are arseholes. All of a sudden the anonymity that we all thought would enable the flow of new ideas did just that, only the ideas were awful, because the people with the most awful ideas shouted the loudest and longest.
So places like FB took away the anonymity and forced people to use their real names - which didn't work, because FB is still a cesspool of racists, bigots and haters. And friend networking on social media means that you can friend/follow other people that you want to hear more of so you hear more of the shit that you spout yourself which reinforces your horrid worldview and don't have to come into contact with anyone that might challenge your views.
Of course, what is awful and horrid is generally in the mind of the beholder and even people like you and I can find ourselves in echo chambers of our own opinions and beliefs.
Barney wrote:And all we wanted to do was discuss our retro games and hobbies on usenet (which was also a cesspool in places but required specialist software and knowhow to get onto so was a touch more immune to the general public's blithering idiotry).
I remember how bad alt.2600 could be. And how much people complained about the influx of AOLers.
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
Indeed, Usenet was, in places, an atrocious cesspit. Usenet trolls were worse, arguably, as they were professional trolls - the real deal - not just loud-mouthed idiots shouting vacuous hate (in my mind, the latter is really "a hater", while a genuine "troll" is only baiting for the lulz - but as with the "cracker / hacker" distinction, the mainstream popular lexicon dulls and loses all the subtleties).
So was it really any different or was it just a case that when there's only a small handful of trolls, it's not overwhelming and it can be easily compartmentalised and ignored. But when the Internet went truly global and popular, their numbers have swelled into an actual problem?
To explain what I'm getting at - that when you look at something, you also have to consider the lens through which you're looking at it - there's the idea that "Internet and texting is making people more illiterate with shit spelling and abbreviations and crap".
And the reason to think this is that, well, since the Internet and texting, you're seeing much more crap spelling and poor English. Ergo, the Internet and texting caused it, right?
Well, no. The average person was always this crap. The average standard was always this poor.
But the difference is that, before the Internet and texting, the typical everyday places you'd ever read text were newspapers, magazines, books, shop signs, official signs and forms, etc.
The stuff that was written by professional writers. That was proof-read and edited before publication (because, when you're printing onto paper, you can't just tap "backspace" a few times and fix mistakes - you've got to double-check that there's no mistakes before going to the press, as you can't "undo" that later).
Where you could gain a glimpse of the average person's writing standards, it was just as poor as anything now seen on the Internet (if not, I'd argue, that it was actually worse because the Internet is actually helping to improve literacy).
And, well, the examples would be "the greengrocer's apostrophe". So named because greengrocers would make their own hand-written signs and, for fuck's sake, they'd never get the use of the apostrophe correct.
Similarly, you could sometimes pass a small local garage that decided to paint its own signage, advertising the fact that it sold "car's".
The point being that the average person was always this shit at English. All the Internet and texting is doing is allowing you to see what was always there all along.
If you've got a family member that's an English teacher then you'll know that this is right. I've seen homework from kids, university students, adults and entries into writing competitions - via someone in my family - and they always looked exactly this crap from the pre-Internet '80s since.
There's no cliff where standards fell off. It was always this bad. But, these days, you get texts from your mates and you're talking to some random person on the Internet - like me - and you get to see that the average standard was never that great.
No, on the contrary, the Internet and texting has been good - excellent - for improving literacy. Because folks get better at stuff from practising, and now everyone's reading and writing texts back and forth, multiple times a day. Between friends, arranging things. Looking up shit on Google. All that.
And this is what I mean about expectations - and keeping them realistically low.
Before the Internet, you'd typically only ever be reading professional writers. So of course their standards of English were higher, as it's their job.
And, also, when you're printing stuff onto paper, there is no "backspace" key, so there was a whole train of editors and proof-readers and typesetters, and other folks who'd be double-checking, triple-checking and quadruple-checking every word multiple times before ink would be allowed to hit paper.
So what I'm suggesting is that the human race has always had "fake news", bad actors, loud-mouthed idiots and so forth in roughly these proportions all along. It was ever thus.
The problem with the Internet is that we're now exposed to that.
Because cyberspace has no distances. There is no spatial dimensions in cyberspace.
Folks reading this could be anywhere on the planet (even potentially in low Earth orbit, as the ISS has an Internet connection - though I'm sure they'd not waste the precious bandwidth on one of my crappy long posts).
So, in the real world, if someone's an arsehole, then you can walk away. Steer clear. Cross to the other side of the road. Go somewhere else. Avoid the dodgy places that are frequented by those folks you don't like.
But as cyberspace has no distances, then everyone - the entire human race - is effectively all sat in the exact same room. So we're always constantly sharing this space with every single arsehole, troll, bully, bullshit merchant, scamster, etc. at all times.
Before the Internet, if you didn't like something Stephen Fry said or did then, well, you'd have no realistic means of ever telling him. But now, via Twitter, you can bombard him with all your petty criticisms to your heart's content (that is, if Stephen has ventured back onto Twitter again, because he does - rightly so - take sabbaticals from it, exactly because, yes, every arsehole out there has the means to depress the shit out of him with their tirades of venomous bullshit).
What I'm getting at is that the Internet has changed the delivery method, but it's not changed the underlying message. The Internet is "a series of pipes" - but what goes into those pipes is down to us and, yes, some people treat the Internet pipes as a sewerage system.
When making an observation, don't just consider what you see, but also consider the lens through which you're looking at it.
Are you really seeing greater illiteracy? Or was it always this bad and the Internet is just letting you properly see this?
Are there really any more lies in the world than there ever was? Or is it just that, because those lies can come from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world, on a truly global massive scale, then their impact is more pronounced?
Are people now bigger arseholes? Or were there always this many arseholes in the world all along, but you could previously by-pass and ignore them, and now every disagreeable idiot in existence can tap their thumbs on their pocket phone and tell Stephen Fry (or whoever) that he's a cunt and that God will punish him for being a godless gay and so on and so forth.
I'm tempted to say "welcome to the human race".
The Internet is not creating these things. It's just doing far too good a job of globally delivering them for everyone to see.
It's crammed the entire human race into a single room, so to speak, and while this has great benefits, it also has the major downside that you're trapped in here with every arsehole on the face of planet Earth. Plus, you know, boring rambling arseholes like me dumping "long posts" all the time.
I got to see, by proxy, the average standard of English before the Internet. So, for me, when folks complain about the Internet and texting ruining English standards, I'm thinking "nah, mate. Was ever thus. You're just finally seeing what I saw before the Internet was ever a thing".
It's like when the sexual assault statistics rise and the police point out that this isn't a genuine rise in the amount of it going on, it's just that people are far more prepared these days to actually report it - as it's taken more seriously and they bother to properly compile statistics on these things now.
So I'm going to pull the same thing here. The Internet is just giving us far, far better "reporting" of all the arseholes that occupy this planet. There's not really any more of them, doing anything different than they ever did. But now you're getting their every bigoted thought tweeted to your phone 24 / 7, so it feels worse.
(But, yeah, as to the point that the Internet has gotten far, far too centralised into a handful of websites, that is a problem. Not just because of privacy, advertising, "fake news" and all that shit, but because what it's done - to return to my analogy - is quite literally cram some 2 billion people into the same room. A room labelled "Facebook". When there's millions of websites, we can be more spread out. But Facebook isn't just concentrating information and concentrating power, it's concentrating all the arseholes of the world into the same forum as everyone else. The balance does need to be fixed and the Internet's intrinsic "decentralisation" restored.)
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
The 'old' internet was different primarily because it was accessed by a relatively small number of relatively like-minded people, who tended to self-assemble into small, even more like-minded communities (e.g. this one). If you did find places which were more heterogenous - typically, chat channels - the old and new internets were largely similar.
The remaining difference since then is the social media companies sorting people into very very large like-minded communities.
Yeah, that was kinda my point, though it was late and clumsy.
Back in the day we had smaller communities and it was easier to defend against a few trolls on usenet than multitudes on Facebook. And of course before the internet you were only exposed to the people in your immediate vicinity - at the pub, at work and your neighbours. Extreme views certainly existed but they rarely impinged on the general population as a whole.
And of course there was AOL. The beginning of the end of the internet as we knew it.
"Oh dear lord, I slightly soiled myself. Oxfam won’t be pleased."
The Observer, yesterday wrote:One possible way for the prime minister to square the circle – to write the letter yet avoid a delay in the event of no deal – would be to persuade one or more EU leaders to veto an extension, once a letter had been sent. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a rightwing eurosceptic, is the name most often mentioned. But few in the EU think even Orbán would risk helping out Johnson in this way. A senior Tory minister remarked: “There are EU budget negotiations coming up and Hungary needs funding. Orbán would be putting all that at risk.”
I don't necessarily think it will transpire --the Quids Pro Quo would have to be mighty-- but what else does the Hungarian Foreign Minister discuss with Gove, Raab & Barclay, within the normal span of intergovernmental contact? Allegedly, the fate of Hungarian migrants within the UK... that feels like excus-a-tory cover.
Just a thought: unless those quids were from the back pocket of Orbán's special pal, Vlad the Impaler. It fits nicely into Putin's grand destabilisation strategy.
"The secret to happiness is low expectations." : TRUE BUT THIS IS *NOT* what consumerism wants you to, say that in USA and you'd be jailed or killed "because you are a socialist" and/or "againist the american system"
There's is still "one power we have" .. "click that button and/or unplug the network cable, leave that cell phone in the drawer or switch it off" ..
And throw you Alexa/Google/whatever "assistant" out of the window.
Spend more time "out" of the home, get a pet, travel more, enjoy simplicity, try to live without the internet for a while.
gilesgoat wrote:Spend more time "out" of the home, get a pet, travel more, enjoy simplicity, try to live without the internet for a while.
And turn off that smartphone when there is no need to use it. Do not succumb to the pressure to be always available at all times just because other people expect you to be.
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
Varadkar was keen on talking before the Benn Act when he thought that the choice would be ‘new deal or no deal’. Since the Benn Act passed he has gone very cold and in the last week the official channels and the backchannels have also gone cold
You do realise that no deal isn't an endpoint, right?
Once no deal happens, we then have to negotiate deals - from a much more desparate position than the one we're in today.
Anyone who thinks no deal is a "bargaining chip" is basically saying "Well, if I threaten to shoot myself in the foot, they'll have to cooperate with me." They may well try and cooperate with you, to stop you harming yourself. But eventually, they will give in and let you blow your foot off.
I guess if you're lucky they might help you put a bandage on it afterwards. If you're not lucky, they'll kick you in the bleeding part until you agree to anything to get them to stop.
gilesgoat wrote:IMHO there's a true fear in part of "losing of identity" because of this "explosion of information going all over the places" this "social that is even too social" this "info that sometime is really TMO" and so on ... it gets to a point that MAYBE all this "should be taken a bit lighter and should be taken a bit in smaller doeses at the time".
Yeah that is true. I think many cultures fear becoming a "melting pot" rather than a "mixing bowl" in all this and that's a valid worry.
Is it? Nazism is a culture. I don't think keeping nazism intact is a worthwhile project.
What? That's... not even remotely what I meant. Anyway Nazism is an ideology, not a culture. What I'm referring to here is what Nazis usually say about how multiculturalism has 'failed' and all cultures should "assimilate" into some kind of white mass.
gilesgoat wrote:IMHO there's a true fear in part of "losing of identity" because of this "explosion of information going all over the places" this "social that is even too social" this "info that sometime is really TMO" and so on ... it gets to a point that MAYBE all this "should be taken a bit lighter and should be taken a bit in smaller doeses at the time".
Yeah that is true. I think many cultures fear becoming a "melting pot" rather than a "mixing bowl" in all this and that's a valid worry.
Is it? Nazism is a culture. I don't think keeping nazism intact is a worthwhile project.
What? That's... not even remotely what I meant. Anyway Nazism is an ideology, not a culture. What I'm referring to here is what Nazis usually say about how multiculturalism has 'failed' and all cultures should "assimilate" into some kind of white mass.
How is an ideology different from a culture? I don't think keeping separate cultures going is a good idea. Separate development has had a racist overtone.
I thought nazis are all about killing off all "non-whites", or keeping them out, or maybe both?
I think cultures should merge, with bits from this and bits from that retained but all altered by the merger, and which bits will be kept and which abandoned will be chosen by future generations, when it happens, not prescribed in advance.
"My way is the way of not fighting":- the book of Enter the Dragon.
