SocialMediaThought

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This is a good article tying MarshallMcLuhan's ideas of how electronic communication would take is to a "post-literate" "post-rational" society, to the recent habits of thought on SocialMedia, not just ConspiracyThinking and TheEndOfConsensus but also the actual raw visceral / "emotional" / knee-jerk reactive way of thinking and acting that McLuhan saw in television.

(The capitalist (and perhaps Netocrat) have always wanted the internet to be TelevisionWithABuyButton (to manipulate the ConsumTariat), which is what I think FaceBook invented. (TheProblemWithFacebook)

https://palladiummag.com/2021/04/17/americas-new-post-literate-epistemology/

A society becomes post-literate when electronic media compresses its experience of literacy to such an extreme degree that the simultaneity of the oral replaces the sequentalism of the typographic as the dominant pattern of thought and sense-making.

It's a somewhat conservative framing that I wouldn't use myself (eg. I'd avoid the word "tribal" and stick to "oral" and "pre-literate" to avoid giving the wrong impression), but the basic story is important.

Compare :

It should be a "crisis behaviour" : https://techpolicy.press/study-of-social-media-collective-behavior-should-be-a-crisis-discipline-researchers-say/

Quora Answer : If you want to keep your friends, why should you never talk about sports, politics, and religion?

Jul 17, 2020

Because these are topics on which people who are quite similar, possibly inclined towards friendship, can believe passionately in opposite things.

As it's very hard to either change someone's opinion on them or overlook the difference often the friendship breaks.

This is basically what has happened to the world today.

We all recklessly hooked up all our casual acquaintances on social media. People we "liked" when we didn't know them too well. But we sure as hell feel it's important to tell social media exactly our opinions on religion and politics and sports.

And suddenly we found that these people were idiots supporting "the other side". Of course we tried to explain and persuade them, but they just doubled down on their wrongness. Obstinate bastards!

And in a couple of years, the world was transformed from one full of friendly familiar acquaintances to one where we were surrounded by unreasonable enemies, in constant stress and fight or flight mode. And polarization is spiraling out of control.

The truth is, we weren't evolved to handle the degree of insight into other people's passionate opinions that social media gives us.

And it's driving us collectively mad.