I read this Bloomberg article and thought it was fascinating. While I hate the “as a (insert self-identified race/gender/sexual orientation here)” formulation for establishing credibility / credentials, I’ll start by saying that I’m not really into social media, at all. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve logged into FaceBook in 2016. I don’t even have a Twitter account (and think Twitter is a particularly-terrible way to communicate), Snapchat, or Instragram. LinkedIn seems to me to just be a way to get bombarded with messages from headhunters.
But, even for someone as invisible to “social media” as me, I managed to notice the effect that FaceBook posts and Reddit memes seemed to have on this last election. I remember when the Powerball jackpot got up to $1.5B earlier this year, and I had several people tell me “I read on FaceBook that if we just take those winnings and give everyone in the country an equal share, we’d all be millionaires” or something along those lines." It was apparently a meme that was widely shared on Facebook. I was shocked that people were either so ignorant about basic facts like our current population level (at least a rough WAG) or so terrible at simple mathematics.
The article says, “… as information gets more social – taking on the immediate, short-form characteristics of Facebook and Twitter – it acquires more qualities of the oral world” which it charitably describes like this: “That state of affairs created a special need for ideas that were easily memorized and repeatable (so, in a way, they could go viral). The immediacy of the oral world did not favor complicated, abstract ideas that need to be thought through.”
I suspect many of you have seen or are otherwise aware of the movie Idiocracy. Is that the future we’re headed for? Where people communicate with grunts and memes and are largely incapable of formulating thoughts larger or more complex than short marketing slogans? Are we going to see a President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in our lifetime? Are we heading into a (dumbed-down) post-literate age? If you think we are (or might be), what could feasibly be done to change our society’s trajectory? Or has the Straight Dope lost the war?
TL;DR = GTFO if you can’t read four paragraphs, because this conversation is about you, not for you.
When was this Golden Age when everyone read stuff? At best, “everyone” got their news form the nightly news on TV- and oral source. Seems like yet another desperate attempt to explain Trump by postulating some seismic change in the way society works. Perhaps we just make mistakes sometime…
…or, sometimes a Trump is just a Trump.
People who are interested in knowledge and facts will utilize the things that he access to for his purposes. People who are not, will do likewise. This has been true and will remain true. All Facebook changes is that when someone in group B says something, someone in group A is more likely to see it, because the conversation isn’t happening in the parking lot, between two idiots, it’s being publicly broadcast in real-time to everyone who happens to have any tenuous social connection.
Though I guess one could propose that group B now has a wider networking capability and easier path to the bottom.
The amount of times over the past month I’ve seen people saying things like “In the US we endured 400 years of slavery & then 100 years of Jim Crow” on Twitter does make me wonder.
I don’t know if I’d call it a “Golden Age when everyone read stuff”, but there seem to have been times in the past where “the people” (at least a significant portion of them) generally seemed to be engaging their higher brain functions more than now. At least in the political realm, the Revolutionary War era and the debates about the ratification of the Constitution seem to have been a high point. Perhaps something like the Lincoln-Douglas debates qualifies as well? Maybe that’s just my conservative rose-colored view of history speaking.
When I was a kid, you got to play with a computer at school if your grades were good, or if you had money. When I was a teenager, everyone had a computer. Now elementary students have smartphones. So instead of smarter people, and people who won the birth lottery, using the internet, practically everyone does. I have to talk to people younger than me who don’t know how to do much beyond Google and Facebook on the internet, whose only computer is a smartphone, don’t have a printer, etc. So basically the internet is now for people of all intellects.
When TV came out, they called it the “boob tube” in comparison to radio, not because it was some kind of porn, but because it was “simpler” than the radio. Now we have complex TV shows that you need to keep up with every episode or binge watch, otherwise you get lost. (And, of course, shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians.) I expect something similar will happen to social media. Maybe there’ll be a “Serious Facebook” platform somewhere. There are serious debates there, drowned out by the silliness. Kind of like a good TV show competing with terrible ones.
On a related note, I’m a little worried that schools in Canada are dumbing things down. I learned the 12 times table in grade 3. My niece learned the 10 times table in grade 5. That’s really basic math, and when I was in grade 3 I was not in any kind of advanced program. I’m actually terrible at math, but I have no trouble with such basic concepts as multiplication. I have to use a calculator for stuff a bit more complicated than that, but if I had to use a calculator to do basic division, I would be worried. (Also, phonics. Really?)
I think the Led Zeppelin effect might be at play here to some degree. That is to say, there was a ton of shit music being produced in the 70s but today it’s remembered as the impossibly great era of Zeppelin, early Sabbath and so on, while the shit 70s music has been consigned to the dustbin of musical history, never to darken our ears ever again.
Well, I’m sure there were plenty of partisan hacks, lowbrow fuckers and lowest-denominator-appealers back then, too. In fact, I know so because I’ve seen some of the leaflets published back then, and many of them are… shall we say… abominably terrible. Plus when you think about it even Franklin’s famous “join or die” snake doodle is a XVIIth century Facebook meme, isn’t it ?
Led Zep produced a lot of crap; Sabbath was crap. There was such a wide variety of good and commercially successful music produced in the '70’s that you can’t begin to fit it into a category.
Yes, agree with the OP.
My expectation would be that intellectual curiosity is largely a genetic predisposition, and so fixed. Better nutrition and the rise in acceptance of geek culture may help to expand that by a small amount, though since it would already be a minority group, I wouldn’t expect that expansion to be particularly large. 95% of everyone is so going to be fairly unexceptional.
It’s my understanding that the mostly-preliterate world was a world in which storytellers would provide the entertainment, and we still have some of the best-received oral-tradition stories because eventually someone did write them down. The content of them seems to be as complex and nuanced and as requiring of someone’s full attention (and some time) as a rather solid tome of a book.
I worry about the phenomenon you’ve described, too, but I don’t think you’re on the right track to compare Twitter etc to oral communication.
It’s a magpie phenomenon, the short attention span and the quick drift of attention to whatever is new and shiny.
The same physical equipment that lets you read Twitter and Facebook will let you read the Straight Dope Message Board. People hardly ever resurrect zombie “threads” on Facebook; hell, you can’t even FIND a conversation that you recall reading last week! Everything is of-the-moment and most of it sliced into thought-pieces that can be expressed on a chinese fortune cookie sized slip of paper.
I’m older than you (‘68 vintage) and never was required to learn the 11 or 12 tables. One of my coworkers was bemoaning that his son has never learned about logarithms; I asked him to name one instance where he’s used logarithms outside of maths class and he couldn’t name one. Engineers of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations used them all the time, but now we have calculators: I learned the kind of operations those engineers used in 10th grade but never used those operations again. As a chemist, I actually have used logarithms professionally (pH is a log; one of the ways to give equilibrium constants is as their log), but not operated with them directly.
To me which specific collection of bits and pieces of math, science or literature my nephews have to study isn’t truly relevant. The question is: is what they are learning useful? The parts they are learning as a “base” on which to build other skills, is it truly wide and solid, or is it something that’s there because someone found it important in my grandfather’s time? Their brains aren’t bigger than mine: they’ve got to learn about things which were never part of my own schooling, something else has to go to make room for those bits.
I can’t say I’ve used logarithms much, but the times tables are something I use all the time. and they’re a base for more complicated math (eg division, simplification, at least the former I use all the time too). It’s possible kids are learning other things earlier, it’s not like I have access to her curriculum, but it did seem strange that they reduced the number of “times”. (When I looked up times tables on the internet for her, I only could easily find 10 times tables, so maybe 12 times is non-standard.)
In the past decade mediums have been created that flatten every distinctive feature regarding an individual’s qualifications and authority.
On Twitter and Facebook, the village idiot is just as respectable – and informed – as a super-genius.
About four years ago, when a lot of people were quite surprised by election results in my corner of the world, I was reminding people that social media was only showing them a slice of what people in the real world actually think.
Now many more people are on social media, and those early adopters are leaving it because of the noise, and the decrease in the signal:ignorance ratio.
It takes a long time to acquire “street smarts” but it does, mostly, function.
We’re in for a rough patch as millions of people in our society learn their “web smarts.”
Not everyone posts what they really think online. Also people love bandwagons, it’s like the click thing, people jump on any bandwagon that seems to be winning or is more dominate despite what they really think. Then you have the group of people that will appose anything that’s mainstream, popular…etc.That said, before the elections, I knew there were a ton of secret voters out there, some even just to be contrary.
Too many people live in their own world bubbles, where they jump on these bandwagons thinking this is the way of the world because it’s all they know, it becomes all they want to know. It’s like a pot smoker that surrounds themselves with other pot smokers…soon you may think everyone smokes pot but that’s not reality at all.
Plus, while it’s possible to fact-check every single statement you read, who has the time? I used to be able to read two newspapers each morning and feel reasonably confident that what I read was at least somewhat factual. Now, I’m constantly seeing posts that invite me to “read the original publication with the research data and judge for yourself.” No way. I just don’t have four or five hours to confirm every single thing that might trigger my “skeptic’s antennae.”
While this doesn’t excuse people who believe that Mars is going to be larger than the Moon tonight for the first time in 432 years, it sure makes things difficult when comparing two contradictory points of view. Thank goodness for SDMB.
Not yet, as illiteracy rates have been dropping the last two centuries:
However, this can only be maintained with continued inputs of energy and material resources. That will be difficult given diminishing returns and population increase:
Why would anybody who knows how to multiply numbers with more than one digit need to learn times beyond 10? Learning the general technique is a lot more useful.
