Is Social Media Disconnecting Us From the Big Picture?

[applegrove]

Is Social Media Disconnecting Us From the Big Picture?

By JENNA WORTHAM at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/magazine/is-social-media-disconnecting-us-from-the-big-picture.html?_r=0

"SNIP...............


Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that Donald Trump could be elected president, but I was. I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, two of the most liberal places in the country. But even online, I wasn’t seeing many signs of support for him. How did that blindness occur? Social media is my portal into the rest of the world — my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels. And it completely failed me.

In hindsight, that failure makes sense. I’ve spent nearly 10 years coaching Facebook — and Instagram and Twitter — on what kinds of news and photos I don’t want to see, and they all behaved accordingly. Each time I liked an article, or clicked on a link, or hid another, the algorithms that curate my streams took notice and showed me only what they thought I wanted to see. That meant I didn’t realize that most of my family members, who live in rural Virginia, were voicing their support for Trump online, and I didn’t see any of the pro-Trump memes that were in heavy circulation before the election. I never saw a Trump hat or a sign or a shirt in my feeds, and the only Election Day selfies I saw were of people declaring their support for Hillary Clinton.

To be clear, I’m not blaming the algorithms for what I assume to be their role in augmenting my worldview. They did exactly what I told them to do, blocking out racist, misogynist and anti-immigrant comments, hiding anyone who didn’t support Black Lives Matter, all with such deftness that I had no idea that a candidate who ran a campaign on exactly those values had gained enough popularity to win the election. But considering that more than 40 percent of our country’s population consumes news on Facebook, finding alternative perspectives shouldn’t have been that hard. I knew about Eli Pariser’s theory on filter bubbles, or the idea that online personalization distorts the type of information we see, and even so, I still chose to let algorithms shape how I perceive the world. Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.

..............

What happens when we would rather look inward? I have found something of an answer in a short story called “The Great Silence,” by Ted Chiang, about humankind’s search for signs of alien life. The story is narrated by a parrot in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, home to one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. “Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe,” the creature begins. “But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?” The paradox is not to be missed: We are more interested in locating alien species than understanding the humanity among the species we already live with. The story ends on a somber note. “Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction,” the narrator explains. “They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.”

Chiang’s lesson hits hard in this new political and cultural moment. Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with. But if we can’t pay attention to one another, we might as well not live on the same planet at all.


................SNIP"

[onecaliberal]

1. Trump didn't win. The election was hacked and stolen.

[applegrove]

2. No telling evidence of that at voting places. Just the usual suppression of turnout,

Last edited Thu Nov 24, 2016, 12:02 AM - Edit history (1)

gerrymandering and electoral college and such baked into the cake.

[onecaliberal]

3. No, there is statistical evidence. There are counties with more votes than registered voters

In several states.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. If this is true, then the list of them is public and well known

Where can I find it? It will be unambiguous evidence of fraud, rather than people just talking of statistical likelihoods.

[onecaliberal]

5. There ARE counties that have more votes than registered voters. In more than 1 state.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Which ones?

[Nitram]

7. Give me a break. I can believe the Trump voters get their news and information from social media,

Fox Noise and their favorite hate radio host. The rest of us have learned where to get news they can trust, or at least can triangulate to hone in on the truth. Trump voters, like many conservatives, won't listen to news that contradicts their world view.

[applegrove]

8. But would you agree newspaper circulation has gone way down and people often

get their news online in a way they didn't used to? And that facebook takes note of what you read and then services you on those topics?

[Nitram]

9. Absolutely.

I suspect the "low information voter" tended to vote for Trump.

[duffyduff]

11. All of the "news" originally comes from traditional sources.

Blogs and other online stuff doesn't count. They don't have the means to provide original reporting.

[Nitram]

12. Yes, the real news. But many don't know how to make that distinction...

...or have been brainwashed top believe it is the left's version Fox News.

[applegrove]

13. But people get conditioned to only hear one side. They are not accepting of the

other a algorithms reinforce people's biases.

[Igel]

10. Except that "news they can trust" is often selected.

Unpleasant news we don't want to trust, and often assume it's more untrustworthy than it is--while things that fit our personal biases and needs are automatically given a dollop of trust before we get past the headline.

It's the same with triangulating on the news. I make it a point to read stuff from positions I find wrong. The facts that are in common with the positions I approve of I assume are likely true. But more often than not the opposition's set of facts also hang together to form a narrative. And absurdly often there's a scenario in which nearly all the facts are true and the stories on both sides are apparently spun. Then when I go back and read either version I can see gaps in the narratives. A pronoun that has a misleading referent. Two sequential facts presented as causal (but not claimed to be causal) and which the reader assumes have a causal connection in a fit of post-hoc fantasy. A quote in which the first word or two doesn't link up properly with what went before, or where the syntax puts logical focus on one thing while the story requires that the focus be on something else.

The Guardian conveniently had a story a few days ago on conservative sites. But for each site, as justification the paper pointed to a story that agreed with The Guardian's view. Basically, "See, you can read them, they agree with us so it's safe." It was a marvel of self-serving blindness. The mind still boggles at it.