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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: 1) by khallow on Monday October 30 2017, @08:35PM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 30 2017, @08:35PM (#589656) Journal
    Hmm, there is some merit to that argument. But what makes "our ideas" ours?

    It's what sticks to our viewpoints (including our intellect and emotions). Ideas are formed or adopted due to interaction of our viewpoints with the world. Perhaps the idea is some implicit assumption - that's a viewpoint-based idea. Perhaps, the idea comes from communication with other viewpoints or our perception of the exterior world. That's a combination of viewpoint interacting with reality.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 31 2017, @06:08AM (2 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @06:08AM (#589880) Journal

    It is this alleged "interaction with the world" that is the problem, since the "world" is a world of facts, but those facts are manufactured by the concepts that give those facts form. This is the philosophical position of "idealism". It holds that there is no "pure experience" of the world as it is in itself. So you see how that causes problems for the various naive forms of empiricism?

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:08AM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:08AM (#589893) Journal

      It holds that there is no "pure experience" of the world as it is in itself. So you see how that causes problems for the various naive forms of empiricism?

      Hence, introduction of viewpoint.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:17AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:17AM (#589898) Journal

        Yes, but if "viewpoint" (a vague word, philosophically) is not grounded, and determines facts, we are left with a position of epistemological relativism. And since we are there, my relativistic position is to reject such a relativism. Prove me wrong!