SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television's values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—'like' buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly performing. (It's telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates' appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment's motto of 'Dare to know' has become 'Dare not to care to know.'
It is a development that further proves the words of French philosopher Guy Debord, who wrote that, if pre-capitalism was about 'being', and capitalism about 'having', in late-capitalism what matters is only 'appearing'—appearing rich, happy, thoughtful, cool and cosmopolitan. It's hard to open Instagram without being struck by the accuracy of his diagnosis.
Now the challenge is to save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know. Television has even infected Wikipedia itself—today many of the most popular entries tend to revolve around television series or their cast.
This doesn't mean it is time to give up. But we need to understand that the decline of the web and thereby of the Wikipedia is part of a much larger civilizational shift which has just started to unfold.
Wired: How Social Media Endangers Knowledge
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday October 30 2017, @04:32PM
What has changed dramatically is the reach of the popularity contest. It used to mostly stop at the door of the school, office, or your front door (until select days when that door was open to visitors). The contest was controlled by the clock, and the friends showing off from far would take days to weeks between updates.
Now it's constant, even accumulating in people's phones while they sleep, to hit them in the face first thing the next morning, and every two minutes until they sleep.