On social media and change: have you seen either of these?
I haven’t watched this, but it looks extremely interesting:
And I’ve only watched the first five minutes of this one, but I plan to watch the rest:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I think I saw The Social Dilemma when it was released (2020). I can’t say I remember it well. Perhaps because it was like preaching to the choir for me. I’ll have to rewatch it.
If people don’t see something, you can’t convince them to be wary of it. Then there is the almost universal response, “Yes, but I don’t do anything criminal. Why should I care?”
I heard it confirmed just within the last couple days that the Chinese government is getting all the data feeds from TikTok.
I recall being shocked by the much older movie, The Social Network (2010) when they portray Zuckerberg as specifically targeting the desires and anxieties of young women in the early phases of the project. Only a script, but it sounded plausible.
The 1st show inspired a “Walkaway” by Misha Petrov. Her 11-minute video explaining her journey is quite fascinating — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhN3ZHz781w
pkudude99- thanks for the link to Misha Petrov’s video, it was fascinating. I especially liked the description of her first university experience. I loved her comment that they were “literally raising toddlers”.
Maybe there is still hope if there are more young people out there like her, not afraid to speak the truth and say what they think.
Both new to me though I’ve long been aware of the machinations by Big Tech.
The second video brought home how similar are a generation’s childhoods in so many ways.
Really brings home how impactful is culture upon the young.
I saw the social dilemma several months ago. I highly recommend it. The folks in Silicon Valley are pulling out all the stops to get us to click and stay online. They’ve certainly learned more about dopamine pathways than most people.
If you’re not paying – you’re the product, not the customer.
No Free Lunch (Econ #2 thing of 2.)
Econ #1 thing: Incentives matter – and gaining status thru likes or retweets, is a huge incentive.
But since both Dems and Reps worry about Big Tech being used by their enemy, the Other Party, it’s a bit like some puppet strings pulling you left while other puppet strings pull you right.
Only by not being connected at all can you sing like Pinocchio:
There are no strings on me!
(I connect, therefore cannot sing like that. I’m using Brave and Opera now more than Chrome or MS Edge or Firefox, but I know I’m being tracked.)
Now being reported that the Uvalde shooter fired through windows from the parking lot, and was in the sights of an officer….but they guy asked permission to shoot from his superior and before they got it together, the perp was inside the door.
nbcnews DOT com/news/us-news/report-says-uvalde-police-gunman-sights-entered-school-not-pull-trigge-rcna36975
Earl:
I read an article about that 3 weeks ago, here. The article I just linked, published on June 17, also says it had been reported in The NY Times. The story is sourced to Chief Deputy Ricardo Rios of nearby Zavalla County. It doesn’t say whether Rios was there and witnessed it, or whether he heard it from the officer himself, or what. Some details are slightly different but it certainly seems to be the same story.
I originally read the story back then and didn’t know what to make of it, waiting to read more about it, but never did until today. One reason I didn’t know what to make of it was that the story involved not wanting to shoot children who were near the perp at the time. The new story – the NBC one you linked, about the Texas State U report – doesn’t have anything about children in the schoolyard, but this one from the Texas Tribune, about the same Texas State U report, adds a part about being afraid of hitting children:
This business of the children in the schoolyard puzzled me initially and it puzzles me now, because no other report from anyone, except connected to this story of the missed opportunity in the schoolyard, ever mentions children being in the yard. It seems that would be a major part of the story. I’ve read voluminously on Uvalde – that’s why I know that this was reported three weeks ago – and I listened to 11 hours of testimony in the Texas legislature, and neither this missed opportunity nor kids in the schoolyard were mentioned.
I’m not saying it’s not true. I’m just tired of all this murkiness with the stories, and I have no particular reason to trust the ability of the MSM to do good reporting on this or much of anything else.
It would also be really nice to know whether the Texas State people had access to all the interviews and videos and all of that, or whether they’re working off newspaper reports. I hope for everyone’s sake it’s the former and not the latter. But neither of the two articles I’ve read so far (the NBC one you linked and the Texas Tribune one I linked) sees fit to mention the sources involved in the Texas State study.
The Daily Mail article also mentions that the officer saw Ramos shooting towards the funeral home. It doesn’t mention the officer seeing him shoot at the school, although the perp was in the schoolyard, which was across from the funeral home. The Texas Tribune article doesn’t mention the officer seeing him shooting at the school either; it just says it was “about a minute” before he entered the school. And the CBS article, the one you linked, doesn’t say it either. It does say that the perp fired at the windows, but it doesn’t say the officer witnessed that, it just says, “a Uvalde Police Officer on scene at the crash site observed the suspect carrying a rifle outside the west hall entry” and then asked for permission to shoot – and may have been too far away to have gotten off a good shot.
Both articles explain – as does the Daily Mail article from three weeks ago – why the officer may have hesitated. The British paper from three weeks ago adds: ” Any shot was further hampered by Ramos’ constant movement, making taking a safe shot even more difficult. Rios said that cop feared he’d be condemned if he’d opened fire and hurt a child in the process of trying to take down Ramos.”
The officer may also have worried about taking down Ramos, considering Ramos hadn’t killed anyone yet, and considering the sentences some officers have gotten for taking down people who are wielding weapons or trying to take the officer’s weapon or taser. No wonder he asked the supervisor’s permission.
Is thenewneo “social media” ?
Neo: ‘The officer may also have worried about taking down Ramos, considering Ramos hadn’t killed anyone yet, and considering the sentences some officers have gotten for taking down people who are wielding weapons or trying to take the officer’s weapon or taser. No wonder he asked the supervisor’s permission.’
This sounds like a reasonable explanation about a situation that turned into a disaster, law officer trying to cover his backside and hesitating when it appears the policy was to shoot as fast as possible in a school shooter situation. Perhaps the assumption was also made that the exterior doors were locked. One failure to act after another created death and destruction.
Neo, about the law officer who asked his superior for permission to shoot … due maybe to “being afraid of hitting children”
That doesn’t have to mean kids in the schoolyard (– which we’ve long discounted, since it seems likely they ran away already). I think the officer may have feared his bullets going through windows or walls & hitting children.
Not a ridiculous concern.
What has changed since 2000? The internet and social media became a fact of life for most of us. And it has changed the culture. The worst parts of it are accessed by impressionable children. It changes the way they think, their valuers. It is changing the culture.
The Governor of Kent icky said it well.
“Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin called on Americans Friday to “wake up” and recognize that school shootings are a “cultural problem.”
“We have become desensitized to death, we have become desensitized to killing, we have become desensitized to empathy for our fellow man and it’s coming at an extraordinary price and we have got to look at the root causes of this,” Bevin told The Associated Press.
“We can’t celebrate death in video games, celebrate death in TV shows, celebrate death in movies, celebrate death in musical lyrics and remove any sense of morality and sense of higher authority and then expect that things like this are not going to happen,” he added.”
https://www.snopes.com/ap/2018/01/26/kentucky-governor-says-shootings-cultural-problem/
It makes sense to me. What can be done? The $64 question.
It was not The Social Dilemma I had seen before, rather it was The Great Hack (2019) about Cambridge Analytica helping Republicans “rig” elections. It looks to be a similar production company and has a couple of the same expert commentators.
I watched The Social Dilemmna just now, and it is good. All of this material is coming from a left wing perspective (in the Great Hack too), but here they do a passable job of staying focused on the forest and not getting hung up on a few trees worth of partisan politics. As a fan of true crime documentaries I’m familiar with the “re-enactment drama” video clips, and this uses the similar “thesis enactment drama” video clips. Some of that is a little cheesy but not too bad.
I’ve been a fan of Roger McNamee for some time who always has valuable things to say, but I also liked the big white guy with very long dreadlocks, Jaron Lanier. He amplified the fact that the users “are the product” in social media. He states that your attention is of no value by itself. It the ability of the system to predict your future behavior and its ability to modifiy (even slightly) that behavior that is of value.
Lanier the virtual reality guy he was prescient in different ways twitter and other platforms are like the blipverts from the old max headroom series compressed data has a catalytic effect
TommyJay,
“the Chinese government is getting all the data feeds from TikTok”
Trump was right about this but will never get credit.
He was adamantly trying to get TikTok banned because he knew what China was doing!!!
He also was fighting universities that hosted(?) Chinese “Confucius ” campus institutes — likely spy & recruitment centers.
And of course, Trump did all he could to encourage & incentivize American co’s in China to bring those outsourced fabs or offices back home.
He deserved much more support, & more years.
The comments on the Social Media Dangers Documentary include a LOT from teen-agers, all positive so far as I scrolled down, and agreeing about the problems; either they thanked their parents for keeping tech to a minimum (even if they hated it at the time), or voluntary went off social media after recognizing its bad effects.
Maybe there is hope for the world after all, with a new generation not completely in thrall to the screens.
Social media has its uses but it is all too often toxic (see “dopamine”, above).
Yes, it’s a drug, that provides
Immediate gratification—actually, instantaneous gratification.
Immediate reinforcement—or its, opposite, REJECTION / CANCELATION.
The increasing disconnect with REAL things, real relationships, real consequences.
(Both of the above are likely to induce hysteria, crisis and the destruction of any critical thinking, careful assessment, critical analysis.)
The systematic and intensification of the corruption of language (nothing new, here).
Lies and rumors are spread without check so that ultimately the truth is “created” because it is agreed upon.
IOW truth, history, facts, events—language—have become articles of FAITH. To be adhered to RELIGIOUSLY.
IOW there is NO truth…or rather, since everything has become a CULT, so likewise has truth.
All this, together with COVID lockdowns, and all kinds of lies created spread and perpetuated by OFFICIAL and therefore supposedly RELIABLE sources—the systematic FABRICATION of a fantasy-laden, oppressive, crisis-and-hysteria-encouraging UNREAL REALITY, complete with AN OFFICIALLY CERTIFIED “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” pounded into people’s minds by an utterly corrupt and complicit media—has exacerbated the problem of TRUTH, which essentially is a problem of FREEDOM.
Seeing that it promotes, encourages and creates the conditions for freedom’s opposite, SLAVERY.
So that the truth must be—will be—squelched at every turn…since anything that goes against THE NARRATIVE(TM), that goes against the grain, will, “1984”-like, be deemed a lie, a HERESY, a danger to everything and everyone.
Therefore, this monstrous Orwellian creation is FOR THE “GOOD” of everyone and everything—of every individual and, especially, of society (as O’Brien might put it).
Because one certainly wouldn’t want to go against the TRUTH… (Would one?)
Compare and contrast (just two of too many examples).
“A people’s revolt against eco-tyranny;
“From the Netherlands to Sri Lanka, people have had enough of the elite’s green hysteria.” [IOW the revolt against another false god…must be canceled, ignored, denied, censored]—
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/07/06/a-peoples-revolt-against-eco-tyranny/
“BDS at Harvard;
“The university’s treatment of Israel raises questions about the quality of its education.”—
https://www.city-journal.org/bds-at-harvard
The knives are coming out. (Actually, they’re already out: one clear manifestation of the destruction of higher education, a process that began years ago…)
And…alas…everything one may have wanted to know about Facebook—that is, ZUCKERMAN—but was afraid to ask…and the pitiful ramifications…
“How the Media Used Russiagate Conspiracy Theories to Create a News Cartel”—
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18626/russia-conspiracy-theories-media
+ “Bonus”:
“How Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Rigged the 2020 Election to Defeat Trump”—
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/18/how-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-rigged-the-2020-election-to-defeat-trump/
}}} “We can’t celebrate death in video games, celebrate death in TV shows, celebrate death in movies, celebrate death in musical lyrics and remove any sense of morality and sense of higher authority and then expect that things like this are not going to happen,” he added.”
JJ — disagree thoroughly. This stuff happened in the various media for decades prior to the current problems. Even early video games. I recall “People Pong”, where you had a bunch of people falling down over spikes, and you had to use your pong paddle to bounce them upwards. And yeah, the spikes did lead to red-pixel “bleeding” when you failed. This would have been early 1980s — 80->82.
The chief difference is that we used to be taught that there was a very real difference between media violence and real violence**. And we weren’t usually raised to be total narcissists on top of that, with nothing but our own whims to be concerned with. That latter is relevant to willingness to face God and having to explain ourselves, an obvious possible constraint on one’s actions. Nowadays, kids barely fear the opprobrium of their parents, much less that of a far more stern and judgmental God.
Let’s bring that back: Stern Parents.
** Seriously — how many bad guys died in westerns? How many got shot, and recovered just fine?
Wile E. Coyote? Marvin The Martian? Yosemite Sam? Elmer Fudd? Daffy Duck? How many times did they get shot, blown up, or otherwise brutally abused?
Tom and Jerry, anyone? Face it, they were the basis for “Itchy and Scratchy” on The Simpsons.
And it’s not just modern media. The original Grimm tales were markedly more brutal than today’s bowdlerized versions. And Punch and Judy were epically violent.
Part of it is that all of those were morality tales as well.
Modern violence lacks any kind of morality tale aspect, really, in the classical sense. There are morals, yes, but they’re libtard morals disassociated from actually useful social mores.
P.P.S. — The fact that it’s Snopes should be a red flag to anyone. On basic factual stuff, Snopes is fine. But any kind of political shit? They are far less trustworthy than Wikipedia. And Wiki just isn’t
Obloody, point taken. Cartoon violence – Road Runner, Yosemite Sam, etc. does not have the impact of the more realistic, self-participating violence of computer games. And the westerns of our youth were all morality tales pitting good against evil. And evil never won. You didn’t want to be evil. At least 99% didn’t and the1% apparently never imagined the idea of shooting random people just for the thrill or because of a suicide wish. Mass shootings were rare (Six between 1949 and 2000).
The pattern for recent mass shooters is that they are young males, psychologically unstable, avid consumers of the dark side of social media, and drug users. Except for psychologically unstable, not many teens fit that description prior to2000. I’m not a professional like you, so I and Governor Bevin may be barking up the wrong tree. What’s your explanation for the increasing frequency of mass shootings since 2000? Unless we can get to root causes, we won’t find any answers.