We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet.
Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving.
We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason.
And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further.
That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong.
What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
There is no feasible way for me to agree more with this.
I very much belong to those negatively affected by this phenomenon. I'd wager many a HN commenter is. My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information, as much of a not-echo chamber I can create. From stuff I don't agree with on almost anything - Breitbart and its national counterparts, neocon blogs, libertarian thinktanks - to sources I think of as pretty neutral - like the simple feeds of press conglomerates just feeding headlines - to the stuff I agree with vehemently and thus view as most dubious, I get it all, all day, all the time. Even syndicated across devices. I'm very rarely the one to ask "what are you talking about?" and constantly the one to explain topics. It's okay, being the AP of your social circles isn't the worst role to fill.
But it does something to you, doesn't it? I feel like my view of this world has darkened over the years. I'm only thirty years old now and I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks. My view of man has become shrouded in a perpetual gloom, my idea of a future a cycnical dystopia.
I know that isn't fair or true, but it's become increasingly hard to think otherwise.
I was genuinely alarmed when it came out that Facebook use averages 50 minutes/day. I have trouble believing that it can possibly be good for the world to have that number rise.
More broadly, the best thing I've done for my focus and mental health is slowing and controlling my information intake. Disabling push notifications, choosing aggregators over direct feeds, and reading international sites for domestic news have all helped reduce and refine my intake. Beyond technical approaches, I've pushed news out of my social media feeds and self-imposed a ban on on-going "personal drama" news stories (Casey Anthony, Oscar Pistorius, etc).
This has been good in itself, and has also come with surprising side benefits. I read more long-form content, not by force of will but because I have less occupying my 'media consumption' time. I also consume more "pre-digested" stories - that can lead to spin issues, but it also cuts down on emotional immediacy. I'd rather go through an interesting historical account of a crime than hear about every stage of the unfolding investigation.
I've come to value "no new inputs" time more than almost all of my active input stretches. I can't overstate the value of that processing time.
Making similar arguments, Tim Ferriss introduced concepts he called the "media fast" and "low information diet" when he published The 4-Hour Workweek back in 2007. The overarching idea was that you should devote some time and energy to actively identifying the least useful information you're consuming, and stop consuming it. IIRC, his taxonomy was that information which requires your action or affects you directly in the near future is useful, everything else is not. So he didn't follow election coverage at all for example.
I still think of this as one of the most useful ideas I've ever come across and have taken it pretty far over the years, for instance disabling all notifications on my phone, culling my Facebook feed very aggressively (and uninstalling their app), and following very few media sources--because most news is non-useful in this sense. It definitely gives me more peace of mind, and when I slip and start reading more crappy useless information I notice myself getting more anxious.
It's also made me feel that the world would be better off without ad-based media as we know it, because the companies which publish it are the ones most responsible for putting out this low information, amygdala-terrorizing crap. If you really need it (and you probably don't), you can get a pretty good, reasonably unbiased feed of what's going on in the world via news wires like Reuters and AP. But we have this giant industry which basically spins and distorts what those organizations produce, slaps ads on it, produces clickbaity headlines and gives it to you for free. It's free because deep down inside, we all know it's not useful. If it was useful we'd pay for it. We're reading it because our lizard brain hungers.
It's easy for a portion of people on HN to minimize their use of Facebook because most visitors to this site hate ads and have a general dislike and distrust towards the service Facebook offers. On the contrary, the general population doesn't have the same perspective on things since they aren't as technical and probably less educated as many HN visitors so they'll continue to use Facebook disregarding the potential consequences that may arise. Also it doesn't help a lot of people are still using Facebook and still remains a great way to keep up with people.
What if what we are seeing is that what used to be mainstream media is now niche media, though it is still distributed through the same channels? What if the fringe is the same, it is just that the mainstream no longer watches tv, or that cord cutters are politically similar in a way that upset the previous equilibrium?
Alternate theory with the same implication: what if television advertising has become so marginal that it no longer supports the serious business framework it once had?
Either way, my theory can be phrased as: What if television has become fringe media?
> What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
This sentiment brings to mind the movement to Design for Time Well Spent[0]. I don't know how the movement is doing. But I like to keep its principles in mind whenever I inflict things upon others.
Yes, this is very spot on. I try to unplug as much as I can every Sunday. Get outdoors, go visit a museum, or spend a chunk of the day read a good book.
I also think unplugging for an entire week or more every year is healthy. Go camping for a week, or go somewhere remote, and get the hell away from the computer and phone.
Climate change is a very real threat and it's justifiably scary. Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy. Our security state now engages in mass surveillance of us in a time when our government is engaging in extraordinary rendition of suspected "terrorists" in secret with limited oversight. Economic inequality is worse than at almost any time in human history, including the gilded age prior to the great depression.
That's not rhetoric, those are simple statements of fact. Those things are scary and fear of them is justified.
We may be -- in this very moment -- at the safest point in human history. But the fear isn't about where we are. It's about where we're headed.
Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve?
We spend so much time lamenting the demise of journalism, the sensationalization of media, the fear-mongering, etc... But it's not like distinct "bad choices" led to this state - it's the simple consequence of TPTB (well, anyone, really) having the ability to engage wider and wider audiences (and ultimately everybody) in increasingly real-time creating such fierce competition for attention that we must eventually use our most powerful emotional appeals for even the most trivial messages.
I mean, look at me, being all fatalistic - I'm guilty too. But I'm legitimately curious where we go from here, or perhaps more accurately, where do people think the bottom really is, and what will happen when we get there?
I'm more than half convinced that the problem is with how these things are monetized. Basically, I think the per-view/per-click model of profit is disastrous.
I value a well-researched, well-analyzed, 3000 word Guardian piece far more than a 200 word CNN piece. But if I click through one of the former and three of the latter, I'm conveying (roughly) three times the value to CNN. And if I click a link, the 'transaction' is made (for CPC, at least); it doesn't matter if I hate the piece and click away.
This has left us in a place where you can either be niche (producing high user value) or manipulative (producing high user volume). Both interfere with detailed, consensus-reality news. Thoughtful, public-interest journalism in the vein of Murrow is the lowest-profit option for embedded advertising.
We've incentivized for a news model which is not just hostile to society, but hostile to users. I don't want my how-to guides to come as slideshows with slow page refreshes between panels, but that's what I get. And I don't want my news to come as hyperbolic fear-mongering with clickbait headlines, but that's also what I get.
So I think we're a little doomed, because humans inherently respond to drama and uncertainty, so we get a race to the bottom. But not truly doomed - I value lots of other things as well, and it's the monetization model that emphasizes our baser instincts. We don't need to nobly abandon market forces, just find a way to monetize that's based on something deeper than "pages loaded".
Have you ever felt this sense of weariness on the internet? The idea that nothing is new, you've seen and heard it all before, and just a state of the brain being fried? This happens with increasing frequency to me, and is part of the reason why I seem to be gravitating, inexorably as it were, towards a low-information diet. No facebook, no instagram/snapchat/social media du jour, minimal news, and certainly no trump fever.
I have a feeling the future will look more like the past than we'd like to believe. That eventually, similar to banner-blindness, we'll develop clickbait-blindness and long form, carefully researched and nuanced pieces will be a prerequisite if one wants attention.
That or /r/forwardsfromgrandma, but I hope it's the former.
I think the problem resides in the west's insistence on spreading the ideas of equality. Watching a youtube video from buzzfeed is (in the minds of many) a legitimate way to learn about things like group conflict or any other social phenomenon. Mass communication has indirectly given rise to mass access to bad information. However, that alone would not be a problem. What makes it a problem is once you are told that your opinion is equal to all others in society, you begin to believe that your buzzfeed backed opinion is on par with a nobel prize winning POLS professor.
>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve?
sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.
>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication?
No, it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. Just look at Great Britain: sure, they've got Rupert Murdoch, but they've also got the BBC.
Just stop watching tv and listening to radio. Cold turkey. I quit on 2011.
We need campaigns like the "quit smoking" or "keep america beautiful" (anti trash): no tv and no radio
I always intended to write a summary on my transition from media junkie to my present state.
I don't need to know about a person I have never met or a place I will never go. BUT with the internet I can (on my terms) find out about said person or said place when I need to.
If something is important, a friend or family member will tell me.
Some irony I think: educatable people spend their working lives building retirement plans and associating with like minded others. Then once they no longer work they are in front of a tv (or worse have the TV on all the time at home) watching less minded and less educated and less sophisicated people.
Watching tv is going back in the progress you made building your life. Why on earth would a college educated person watch talk-tv? Its like undoing your entire education.
As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision.
I feel like it must have been so overwhelming yet intangible - in some ways a nuclear holocaust is much less painful than losing a loved one in a car accident or seeing your country splinter into violent factions. A nuclear holocaust is a quick, binary event - either it happens, or it doesn't.
I also can't imagine what the fear of being drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like.
Would love to hear what anyone with experience has to say about those "ages" of fear relative to this new one of mass-media/technology-produced fear.
Over 100 million of us watched The Day After when it aired, a TV movie about nuclear war. So not only was it top of mind, the range of media alternatives was so much smaller.
I'm not sure where some of these other responses are coming from, but the cold war was very much front and center for my generation, growing up in the 70's and early 80's. If you want to get a good feel for the grinding fear that the possibility of nuclear war instilled in people, just watch the movie "Testament" or read the book "Alas, Babylon" and you'll get a good idea of what that fear was based upon. As another poster indicated, there was nothing "binary" about nuclear war unless you were lucky and were within the blast radius and it killed you instantly.
> As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision.
If they had Facebook back in the days of the cold war, the country would have gone insane with fear in less than 1 year. Social media is an amplifier for base, brutish emotions.
<I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation
It was NEVER top of mind. Remember, the only news was evening broadcasts for 30 minutes or ap/upi reports in local papers. New York times didn't make it to my state except Sundays. It was NEVER a conversation growing up. Back then to find out if your team won you would have to wait for the paper 2 days later if it was not the local team.
<drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like
We
Wwii everyone enlisted. No question. Different times. Vietnam draft was real anxiety.
Late 70's, 80's, nobody worried much about it except at the fringes in the US. The Nuclear Freeze movement got a lot of attention in Europe, 99 Luftballons got some play in the US, kids danced. But the masses in the US had gotten used to the Detente/SALT Treaty era.
The early boomers were scarred somewhat (and still are) by red menace training. They might take stuff like Red Dawn as a serious drama, while it was a bit more like Rushmore for the rest of us.
Having lived through the Cold War imagine how pissed off I am at the authoritarians and fear mongers pushing an insignificant terrorist threat for power accretion and profit. Cold War information weapons have been turned against the people. Fuck that, and the people who did that.
One of the big drivers of fear in the US is the basic feeling that life is harder than it used to be. The implicit guarantee from society that if you finished school and worked hard you would have a good life is broken. Trump has tapped into this feeling, with unexpected success.
In reality, we have met the enemy, and them is us. The US's major problems are internal, not external. The US's economic problems are mostly because we haven't figured out what to do about automation. What are average people with an average high school education going to do? That's the big problem.
As for threats, terrorism is down in the noise of routine shootings. ISIS can hurt us a little now and then, but no way could they invade the US and take over. Militant Islam will continue to be a headache worldwide, but most of the strongly Islamic states are failed states. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt - all were once strong states able to project power, and now they can't.
Climate change is more of a threat outside the US than to the US directly. The US isn't going to get unlivable temperatures like parts of the Middle East. Rising temperatures mean agriculture moves north, and the US has lots of underutilized north. Most of the US is above the levels affected by sea level rise. (Except Florida. Florida has a big problem. Miami already has to pump out their city regularly.)
Nuclear weapons proliferation is a worry, yet one that doesn't show up much politically. North Korea has nuclear weapons, at least medium-range ballistic missiles, and a dictator with the power to use them. It's getting too easy to make nuclear weapons. After all, the technology is 70 years old now.
China is the next superpower, and nobody knows what they'll do. Probably nothing really foolish. Their leadership is not stupid.
Are we really living in an age of fear, or is that a feeling people in the media get from listening to their own output too much?
This story's opening hits too close to home.
I grew up in what was predominantly a minority and gay neighborhood in NY. My mom was moderate-left and a musician who you can easily associate with the things and people you'd associate with NY musicians in the 70s.
Bob Grant, Curtis Sliwa and Rush Limbaugh irrevocably changed my family. My mom is now a religious-conservative, homophobic, racist bigot. She shouts at people for no reason. She's gotten into arguments with family members at family dinners and then called the cops on them to have them removed.
My brother is, thankfully, just conservative. Small miracles.
Also, don't discount the role religion plays on fear (yes I am a Christian.) The popular idea in the church is that we are currently living in the end times and the world will progressively become more sinful/dangerous until the earth is destroyed and recreated by Jesus. This is a relatively new idea since the 19th century, but represents the current theological and emotional state of the church today. Look at Islam and you will see a similar expectation of the apocalypse. I think a lot of fear and paranoia in our culture stems from unhealthy religious belief systems.
This flood of information, especially negative information, is one reason why I think time meditating is so important. I find that meditation helps me concentrate on what is important and I feel primed to take care of what needs to be done, as far as maintaining personal relationships, what work is most important, looking after spiritual, mental, and physical health, etc.
Turn off the TV and stop binging on the news media.
>Bad news gives people a great survivor emotion. There's a great euphoria that pours off the bad news item... This survivor emotion is very necessary for news papers and news reports, also it helps to sell advertising which is all good news and is therefore very threatening. Good news threatens people with change. Bad news merely enables them to enjoy the grief of their neighbours.
> this is a global phenomena and needs to be seen in that perspective
You are correct that it's global, though like many negative-cultural things, America is currently clearly "leading" the way, and the west of the developed world is trailing far behind, though, unfortunately, they are trying to catch up.
I find this sort of answer unsatisfyingly incomplete.
All the examples of people who profit off fear: mass media, lawyers, politicians, and industrial pharmaceuticals have all existed for decades longer than the current age of fear. That makes them insufficient as a cause. There must be something else.
I posted a similarly-minded article, also from Rolling Stone, and it got flagged. While Trump was in the article's title, the flagger may not have read it since it was a bigger-picture article about the media and political system as a whole.
What's the line between flaggable and acceptable when it comes to articles such as these?
According to [some survey], Americans are most afraid of corruption of government officials...
This is so rational (obviously corruption is common) and long-term-focused (corruption will eventually destroy the state, but it will take a really long time) that I'm a bit impressed by my fellow citizens...
I have asked no less than 10 people why they listen to talk radio when it is clearly propaganda. The response is strangely always almost verbatim "I like to stay informed". It amazes me that they always say the same thing in response. I have found a similar thing when I mention I have no Facebook account...the response is almost always "I just like to keep in touch with people"...but they never seem to point out these are typically people that they stopped talking to years back for a reason. Has this person called you in the last 10 years? When was the last time you actually saw them in person?
Whenever I get the exact same response from multiple people I start to question the role of social media and "news" in brainwashing of the masses.
I am as anti-Facebook as they come while still using Facebook. I care about people in my past even if I haven't talked to them in ten years. I am curious what they are up to, and it makes me happy to see people from my past living happy lives. Being connected to people is a positive feature in my life, even if it comes at the expense of privacy.
Social media is what you make of it. If the beginning and end of your exposure to current events, politics, and information is Facebook, then yes, there's likely to be some uninformed opinions being created.
>I have asked no less than 10 people why they listen to talk radio when it is clearly propaganda. The response is strangely always almost verbatim "I like to stay informed".
I have the same experience when I ask people why they read The New York Times.
Fear, like Sex, is a foundational human motivator that has been shown to persuade people to buy things. I don't believe there is anything new going on now. https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60
There might be some kind of homoeostasis for anxiety. If you're not facing serious threats, anxiety gets amplified, and if you're facing serious threats it gets reduced, so it doesn't vary too much. It would be similar to how some say there is a happiness set-point.
Is this time any different than previous? Well at least the fear of nuclear annihilation is smaller. It's kinda normal for the US to think it's on the brink of a disaster. And it's normal for Europeans to think the US supremacy will end at any moment. And still it doesn't and the US is better off than any time before.
What is different today is the Internet. Before that we had TV and radio, which also magnified fear, but not to the extent as the Internet where you can find the "news source" that best fits your particular fears.
[+] [-] cel1ne|9 years ago|reply
Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving.
We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason.
And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further.
That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong.
What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
[+] [-] Gruselbauer|9 years ago|reply
I very much belong to those negatively affected by this phenomenon. I'd wager many a HN commenter is. My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information, as much of a not-echo chamber I can create. From stuff I don't agree with on almost anything - Breitbart and its national counterparts, neocon blogs, libertarian thinktanks - to sources I think of as pretty neutral - like the simple feeds of press conglomerates just feeding headlines - to the stuff I agree with vehemently and thus view as most dubious, I get it all, all day, all the time. Even syndicated across devices. I'm very rarely the one to ask "what are you talking about?" and constantly the one to explain topics. It's okay, being the AP of your social circles isn't the worst role to fill.
But it does something to you, doesn't it? I feel like my view of this world has darkened over the years. I'm only thirty years old now and I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks. My view of man has become shrouded in a perpetual gloom, my idea of a future a cycnical dystopia.
I know that isn't fair or true, but it's become increasingly hard to think otherwise.
[+] [-] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
More broadly, the best thing I've done for my focus and mental health is slowing and controlling my information intake. Disabling push notifications, choosing aggregators over direct feeds, and reading international sites for domestic news have all helped reduce and refine my intake. Beyond technical approaches, I've pushed news out of my social media feeds and self-imposed a ban on on-going "personal drama" news stories (Casey Anthony, Oscar Pistorius, etc).
This has been good in itself, and has also come with surprising side benefits. I read more long-form content, not by force of will but because I have less occupying my 'media consumption' time. I also consume more "pre-digested" stories - that can lead to spin issues, but it also cuts down on emotional immediacy. I'd rather go through an interesting historical account of a crime than hear about every stage of the unfolding investigation.
I've come to value "no new inputs" time more than almost all of my active input stretches. I can't overstate the value of that processing time.
[+] [-] apatters|9 years ago|reply
Making similar arguments, Tim Ferriss introduced concepts he called the "media fast" and "low information diet" when he published The 4-Hour Workweek back in 2007. The overarching idea was that you should devote some time and energy to actively identifying the least useful information you're consuming, and stop consuming it. IIRC, his taxonomy was that information which requires your action or affects you directly in the near future is useful, everything else is not. So he didn't follow election coverage at all for example.
I still think of this as one of the most useful ideas I've ever come across and have taken it pretty far over the years, for instance disabling all notifications on my phone, culling my Facebook feed very aggressively (and uninstalling their app), and following very few media sources--because most news is non-useful in this sense. It definitely gives me more peace of mind, and when I slip and start reading more crappy useless information I notice myself getting more anxious.
It's also made me feel that the world would be better off without ad-based media as we know it, because the companies which publish it are the ones most responsible for putting out this low information, amygdala-terrorizing crap. If you really need it (and you probably don't), you can get a pretty good, reasonably unbiased feed of what's going on in the world via news wires like Reuters and AP. But we have this giant industry which basically spins and distorts what those organizations produce, slaps ads on it, produces clickbaity headlines and gives it to you for free. It's free because deep down inside, we all know it's not useful. If it was useful we'd pay for it. We're reading it because our lizard brain hungers.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j8m88|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsc|9 years ago|reply
What if what we are seeing is that what used to be mainstream media is now niche media, though it is still distributed through the same channels? What if the fringe is the same, it is just that the mainstream no longer watches tv, or that cord cutters are politically similar in a way that upset the previous equilibrium?
Alternate theory with the same implication: what if television advertising has become so marginal that it no longer supports the serious business framework it once had?
Either way, my theory can be phrased as: What if television has become fringe media?
[+] [-] thex10|9 years ago|reply
This sentiment brings to mind the movement to Design for Time Well Spent[0]. I don't know how the movement is doing. But I like to keep its principles in mind whenever I inflict things upon others.
[0]: http://timewellspent.io/
[+] [-] kilroy123|9 years ago|reply
I also think unplugging for an entire week or more every year is healthy. Go camping for a week, or go somewhere remote, and get the hell away from the computer and phone.
[+] [-] acqq|9 years ago|reply
For this to work, there would have to be solidarity among the other platforms, all of them turning off on the same day (yes, even HN!)
But I can actually imagine the world's productivity boost on such a day.
[+] [-] NumberCruncher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbingham|9 years ago|reply
Climate change is a very real threat and it's justifiably scary. Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy. Our security state now engages in mass surveillance of us in a time when our government is engaging in extraordinary rendition of suspected "terrorists" in secret with limited oversight. Economic inequality is worse than at almost any time in human history, including the gilded age prior to the great depression.
That's not rhetoric, those are simple statements of fact. Those things are scary and fear of them is justified.
We may be -- in this very moment -- at the safest point in human history. But the fear isn't about where we are. It's about where we're headed.
[+] [-] astrocat|9 years ago|reply
We spend so much time lamenting the demise of journalism, the sensationalization of media, the fear-mongering, etc... But it's not like distinct "bad choices" led to this state - it's the simple consequence of TPTB (well, anyone, really) having the ability to engage wider and wider audiences (and ultimately everybody) in increasingly real-time creating such fierce competition for attention that we must eventually use our most powerful emotional appeals for even the most trivial messages.
I mean, look at me, being all fatalistic - I'm guilty too. But I'm legitimately curious where we go from here, or perhaps more accurately, where do people think the bottom really is, and what will happen when we get there?
[+] [-] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
I value a well-researched, well-analyzed, 3000 word Guardian piece far more than a 200 word CNN piece. But if I click through one of the former and three of the latter, I'm conveying (roughly) three times the value to CNN. And if I click a link, the 'transaction' is made (for CPC, at least); it doesn't matter if I hate the piece and click away.
This has left us in a place where you can either be niche (producing high user value) or manipulative (producing high user volume). Both interfere with detailed, consensus-reality news. Thoughtful, public-interest journalism in the vein of Murrow is the lowest-profit option for embedded advertising.
We've incentivized for a news model which is not just hostile to society, but hostile to users. I don't want my how-to guides to come as slideshows with slow page refreshes between panels, but that's what I get. And I don't want my news to come as hyperbolic fear-mongering with clickbait headlines, but that's also what I get.
So I think we're a little doomed, because humans inherently respond to drama and uncertainty, so we get a race to the bottom. But not truly doomed - I value lots of other things as well, and it's the monetization model that emphasizes our baser instincts. We don't need to nobly abandon market forces, just find a way to monetize that's based on something deeper than "pages loaded".
[+] [-] exergy|9 years ago|reply
I have a feeling the future will look more like the past than we'd like to believe. That eventually, similar to banner-blindness, we'll develop clickbait-blindness and long form, carefully researched and nuanced pieces will be a prerequisite if one wants attention.
That or /r/forwardsfromgrandma, but I hope it's the former.
[+] [-] demonshalo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grillvogel|9 years ago|reply
sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|9 years ago|reply
No, it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. Just look at Great Britain: sure, they've got Rupert Murdoch, but they've also got the BBC.
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
We need campaigns like the "quit smoking" or "keep america beautiful" (anti trash): no tv and no radio
I always intended to write a summary on my transition from media junkie to my present state.
I don't need to know about a person I have never met or a place I will never go. BUT with the internet I can (on my terms) find out about said person or said place when I need to.
If something is important, a friend or family member will tell me.
Some irony I think: educatable people spend their working lives building retirement plans and associating with like minded others. Then once they no longer work they are in front of a tv (or worse have the TV on all the time at home) watching less minded and less educated and less sophisicated people.
Watching tv is going back in the progress you made building your life. Why on earth would a college educated person watch talk-tv? Its like undoing your entire education.
[+] [-] roymurdock|9 years ago|reply
I feel like it must have been so overwhelming yet intangible - in some ways a nuclear holocaust is much less painful than losing a loved one in a car accident or seeing your country splinter into violent factions. A nuclear holocaust is a quick, binary event - either it happens, or it doesn't.
I also can't imagine what the fear of being drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like.
Would love to hear what anyone with experience has to say about those "ages" of fear relative to this new one of mass-media/technology-produced fear.
[+] [-] malz|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
[+] [-] TimJYoung|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
If they had Facebook back in the days of the cold war, the country would have gone insane with fear in less than 1 year. Social media is an amplifier for base, brutish emotions.
[+] [-] SandersAK|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
It was NEVER top of mind. Remember, the only news was evening broadcasts for 30 minutes or ap/upi reports in local papers. New York times didn't make it to my state except Sundays. It was NEVER a conversation growing up. Back then to find out if your team won you would have to wait for the paper 2 days later if it was not the local team.
<drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like We
Wwii everyone enlisted. No question. Different times. Vietnam draft was real anxiety.
[+] [-] hindsightbias|9 years ago|reply
The early boomers were scarred somewhat (and still are) by red menace training. They might take stuff like Red Dawn as a serious drama, while it was a bit more like Rushmore for the rest of us.
[+] [-] Zigurd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
In reality, we have met the enemy, and them is us. The US's major problems are internal, not external. The US's economic problems are mostly because we haven't figured out what to do about automation. What are average people with an average high school education going to do? That's the big problem.
As for threats, terrorism is down in the noise of routine shootings. ISIS can hurt us a little now and then, but no way could they invade the US and take over. Militant Islam will continue to be a headache worldwide, but most of the strongly Islamic states are failed states. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt - all were once strong states able to project power, and now they can't.
Climate change is more of a threat outside the US than to the US directly. The US isn't going to get unlivable temperatures like parts of the Middle East. Rising temperatures mean agriculture moves north, and the US has lots of underutilized north. Most of the US is above the levels affected by sea level rise. (Except Florida. Florida has a big problem. Miami already has to pump out their city regularly.)
Nuclear weapons proliferation is a worry, yet one that doesn't show up much politically. North Korea has nuclear weapons, at least medium-range ballistic missiles, and a dictator with the power to use them. It's getting too easy to make nuclear weapons. After all, the technology is 70 years old now.
China is the next superpower, and nobody knows what they'll do. Probably nothing really foolish. Their leadership is not stupid.
Are we really living in an age of fear, or is that a feeling people in the media get from listening to their own output too much?
[+] [-] busterarm|9 years ago|reply
Bob Grant, Curtis Sliwa and Rush Limbaugh irrevocably changed my family. My mom is now a religious-conservative, homophobic, racist bigot. She shouts at people for no reason. She's gotten into arguments with family members at family dinners and then called the cops on them to have them removed.
My brother is, thankfully, just conservative. Small miracles.
[+] [-] jontayesp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|9 years ago|reply
Turn off the TV and stop binging on the news media.
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/business/media/rolling-sto...
[+] [-] wu-ikkyu|9 years ago|reply
-Marshall McLuhan
[+] [-] nkoren|9 years ago|reply
Then I realise: Oh, they're just giving statistics for America. The non-existence of the rest of the world is assumed.
In fact I largely concur with with the central thesis of this article, but this is a global phenomena and needs to be seen in that perspective.
[+] [-] grecy|9 years ago|reply
You are correct that it's global, though like many negative-cultural things, America is currently clearly "leading" the way, and the west of the developed world is trailing far behind, though, unfortunately, they are trying to catch up.
[+] [-] c2the3rd|9 years ago|reply
All the examples of people who profit off fear: mass media, lawyers, politicians, and industrial pharmaceuticals have all existed for decades longer than the current age of fear. That makes them insufficient as a cause. There must be something else.
[+] [-] kawera|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|9 years ago|reply
I posted a similarly-minded article, also from Rolling Stone, and it got flagged. While Trump was in the article's title, the flagger may not have read it since it was a bigger-picture article about the media and political system as a whole.
What's the line between flaggable and acceptable when it comes to articles such as these?
[+] [-] daveloyall|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|9 years ago|reply
This is so rational (obviously corruption is common) and long-term-focused (corruption will eventually destroy the state, but it will take a really long time) that I'm a bit impressed by my fellow citizens...
[+] [-] Ccecil|9 years ago|reply
Whenever I get the exact same response from multiple people I start to question the role of social media and "news" in brainwashing of the masses.
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|9 years ago|reply
Social media is what you make of it. If the beginning and end of your exposure to current events, politics, and information is Facebook, then yes, there's likely to be some uninformed opinions being created.
[+] [-] edanm|9 years ago|reply
Same goes for some friends that I'm not in active contact with.
You can disagree with how other people conduct their lives, but I'd be careful to conclude it's "brainwashing".
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
I have the same experience when I ask people why they read The New York Times.
[+] [-] droopybuns|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamlayers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kukx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cicero|9 years ago|reply