IS IT GETTING MEAN AROUND HERE??

The sort of blind, unrelenting vitriol is definitely on the rise. If the internet has done one thing, it's made stupid people angry

The anonymity of the Internet has given voice to some of the thoughts people kept hidden before. In many ways it is a more accurate view of the world than the one we walk through each day. How's that for scary.

Quote:

The anonymity of the Internet has given voice to some of the thoughts people kept hidden before. In many ways it is a more accurate view of the world than the one we walk through each day. How's that for scary.

Ditto

The Internet is also a distorted lens through which the loud and obnoxious are more visible than the quiet and thoughtful.

Same in real life, to be fair to the interwebs.

I think the web has certainly emboldened people with ignorant ideas,

I'd guess I'd rather know the worst of what's on people's minds than not..

That does not explain it, because a good mind can quickly sift through the crappola. The Bad education, which is not even really education anymore but is rather indoctrination and worker training does better to explain what we see, and till about 10 years ago that was my answer. But there is some more fundamental failure. We are watching people give up on intelligence as being an aid in life, we are watching logic and its result science being degraded, we are watching a kind of hopeless purposeful ignorance in a lot of people now. And a huge emptiness, a lack of there being any there there when we talk about their inner life. And a profound lack of shame in their situation and lack of production as a human being, or for ******* over other people, the next generation being example #1.

This is big, and this sucks.

I have not figured out yet what is going on, but whatever it is is strongly connected to why this civilization is ending.

Quote:

I think the web has certainly emboldened people with ignorant ideas,

That does not explain it, because a good mind can quickly sift through the crappola. The Bad education, which is not even really education anymore but is rather indoctrination and worker training does better to explain what we see, and till about 10 years ago that was my answer. But there is some more fundamental failure. We are watching people give up on intelligence as being an aid in life, we are watching logic and its result science being degraded, we are watching a kind of hopeless purposeful ignorance in a lot of people now. And a huge emptiness, a lack of there being any there there when we talk about their inner life. And a profound lack of shame in their situation and lack of production as a human being, or for ******* over other people, the next generation being example #1.

This is big, and this sucks.

I have not figured out yet what is going on, but whatever it is is strongly connected to why this civilization is ending.

I think the web has certainly emboldened people with ignorant ideas, and allows them to come together in a sense, same as any other like minded group. I really don't know if that's a bad thing or not though; I'd guess I'd rather know the worst of what's on people's minds than not..

Maybe the whole medium is not suited for productive debate. Paper has its advantages in terms of needing longer production periods, the impossibility to correct article once printed, which calls for greater prudence and better fact checking? The anonymous nature of the net makes for less accountability, less self-control and thus less quality of output, more insults, etc...

Just thinking out loud here. Maybe the ultimate, best possible use of internet is tweeter: people expressing themselves to the world, one way, with immediacy and superficiality. Not people dialoguing with other people on a one to one basis (or within a small group) like we do in real life, when we try to build agreement.

Hawk, you should start a thread about the future of western civilization. I'm so interested. Times are changing.