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posted by mrpg on Monday October 30 2017, @03:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the idiot-web dept.

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


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @07:48PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @07:48PM (#589617)

    The author exalts text over television. In 1911, a newspaper editor advised that an image is "worth a thousand words." It's possible to inform with pictures, sound or video, just as it's possible to entertain with text. The beating of Rodney King was captured on video, and it captured the public's attention in a way that a textual account would not have. In this era of the smart-phone, there are millions of amateur photographers, podcasters and videographers. Each one can potentially reach audiences of millions, globally, on an ordinary person's budget, with little to moderate censorship. The Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter have been credited to social media. There's an abundance of dreck, but that is nothing new: the penny dreadfuls and yellow journalism predate electronic media.

    Before there was writing, there was culture and knowledge. People expressed themselves by speaking; they told stories. With electronic media, the spoken word can be recorded, so it need not be ephemeral.

    The article quotes Amusing Ourselves to Death, claiming that the written word "enables us to [...] 'detect abuses of logic and common sense [...] to weigh ideas'" as though we can only think critically when we write and read. Are we to believe that all those parliaments that hold spoken debates, those courts that take spoken testimony, and those schools that have spoken instruction are doing it wrong?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @08:03PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @08:03PM (#589627)

    It's possible to inform with pictures, sound or video, just as it's possible to entertain with text.

    Yes, of course. But you miss the insidious side of the picture book: the pure immediacy of perception with these media means that what is being conveyed is not necessarily what is meant to be conveyed. The "media" of language, of abstract symbolic representation of concepts, allows for actual knowledge, a distance and objectivity, that can be lost with video or pictures. Text, or speech, is much better suited to knowledge.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:57AM (#589912)

      ...what is being conveyed is not necessarily what is meant to be conveyed.

      That certainly happens with purely written communication, since words hold different meanings for different people.

      The "media" of language, of abstract symbolic representation of concepts

      Language was spoken before it was written.

      allows for actual knowledge, a distance and objectivity, that can be lost with video or pictures.

      People write what they choose, just as they film what they choose. The camera can, of course, be used to deceive, but it can also be used to show us the objective appearance (and sound) of people, things and events. We can lose our objectivity when reading, just as we can when we see something recorded by a camera. Writing can, and often does, convey emotion; writing can be intimate.

      Text, or speech, is much better suited to knowledge.

      Pictures and video can, and often do, include text and speech. The article, disregarding speech, expresses the view that the written word is a generally superior form of communication. I disagree. Some knowledge is best conveyed not through writing, but pictorially or by hearing. Much of the knowledge of biology, music, the visual arts, and cooking is of that kind. We aren't abstractions; we are physical beings in a tangible world. I see the value in writing, but I also see its limitations. The new media have different limitations, and they offer different value.

      I think it's likely that with smart-phones, people are writing more than ever. I find touch-screen virtual keyboards execrable, yet many others accept them to the point of preferring text messaging to telephone calls. While such communication tends to be banal, it's not displacing something more polished. Someone who wishes to write is not compelled to use a touch-screen virtual keyboard. Bluetooth keyboards exist, and computers, typewriters, and pens are still readily available. Someone may even want to read. Social media platforms offer audiences that are potentially enormous. Remuneration for authors there may be little or nothing; perhaps that is a motivation for this article.