Although I admittedly have little experience in social media, not even having had an FB account, mates have and I did once create an anon Twitter account just to observe and occasionally do the odd social experiment. My findings were... ugh!
Twitter, IMHO, is a little like a social Big Brother. You say something "wrong", you get "cancelled", you want a civilised discourse, nobody listens, they label you bigot/racist/phobic/etc. and then you're the badguy. I once saw these two arguing over some celeb cussing some racist word under his breath and TL;DR the Right was saying it was inadvertantly and not intended to be heard, Left said it didn't matter coz someone heard it, Right gave an insane analogy of what if he said it in his own home on private property but a burglar heard it, Left said then he should still face the consequences. Okay, apart from being a conversation as insane as something from Monty Python, it's scary to think that people actually believe you should be accountable for a borderline thought crime. I mean the idea of not being allowed free speech in your own home? Pretty fcking insane.
Twitter's not about facts, just opinions and so-called feelings, feelings that aren't real, just fed to you by the people/groups you follow. I wonder how many people understand the "science" they regurgitate to "prove" their point of view. I wonder how many people actually know the full historical accuracy of what they so passionately spout opinionated BS about.
That model in the one video is spot on: lesser the knowledge, higher the confidence and more vocal they have and are. One take home is being able to laugh at people acting so arrogant about their own ignorance.
My lurking and some curious social experiments on Twitter were eye-opening. It's bad, it's really fcking bad; like if your freezer cuts out while you're on holiday for two weeks in mid summer. Friends/fam of mine weren't kidding about how social media's the root of all the messed up politics today. I blamed mainstream media, and though I still do, I blame social media even more if Twitter's anything to go by. Based on my few brief observations and experimental interactions (deliberately refuted a few people on both sides), I can say, yeah, they're loud, aggressive, toxic, love piling in on a guy, repeat utter historical fallacies, and smugly present pseudo science. And they're all so extreme. I mean a "debate" is like watching a group of 12yo's at it. Worse, I think there's a sort of conditioning going on. No matter the topic, anything controversial and there's no middle ground, the "you're either with us or against us" routine is basically telling people not to think for themselves and promoting tribalism/cliques.
I'm proud not to be a part of that shite. I mean we carry phones to keep in touch, we can create groups on Whatsapp, I see no need for FB, and from my limited experience, Twitter's just one side of angry morons yelling at the other side of angry morons. Don't get the point of it. Glad I fell out of touch and live under a rock. I like my rock.
Or, at the very least, we should go back to a time when getting online was difficult and required some level of intelligence.
Totally agree! I've been saying this since the 2000s and I didn't even have proper internet then, I was tethering my phone. Besides the obvious of idiots teaching idiots to be bigger, more vocal idiots online, I always held that making life intellectually easier is unhealthy. It's basically like encouraging people to drive 500 meters to the shops just to get a bottle of Coke.
now they push a couple of buttons, cut and paste to get a degree, I doubt many will remember anything of their projects content after12 hrs.
My one mate's wife used to type random sentences from students' essays in quotation marks into Google and search them, then call students on it. Only once did one do it blatantly. The rest were often just reworded info with minimal effort, clearly directly sourced from Wikipedia since most of the essays contained nothing except what was on Wikipedia, no more, no less (she always checked Wikipedia against essays). Anyway, after a while, the parents stirred, the school stirred, she was reprimanded and told it was coincidental (30 odd kids IIRC, over loads of essays, yeah, coincidental, very). These kids are our future leaders and scientists. Lord help us. Lucky I'll be dead at an early age; uncontrolled epilepsy has its up sides.