Credit to Chris Williamson for coming up with this though. I just found it worth sharing.
We have a deluge of data - we have very little information.
Words are made up and we actively change and redefine them when we use them based on context.
I get the sense that you were trying to correct the OP, but really OP is just defining “information” the way you’re defining “data”
The concept being conveyed is the same.
We had very little of it, and had to put in a ton if effort to seek it out, but now it’s thrown in our faces nearly all the time with the litteral flick of a finger. Neither of these situations seem optimal, but whatever the optimal situation is, we must have experienced it at some point because the transition didnt happen instantaneously
We got the meteoric rise of Obama, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street from the democratization of information.
It was devastating to the old guard. But then they realized they could use the same tools we’d used to spread information to spread disinformation. Then when people called them on their bullshit, the regular propaganda stopped being the goal.
No longer was the purpose to make us believe what they had to say. It was too make us not believe anything at all. They flooded the world with so much bullshit that nothing seems true anymore, and in the confusion they’re openly enacting fascist policies while pretending the news is fake.
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
[HyperNormalization] describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.
-Wikipedia
You can turn it off, at least.
I don’t use FB, Twitter, TikTok, etc. I use federated social media but federated social media is moderated, has no algorithm, and no ads, so it’s a very different experience.
At some point there was a giant drop in the information-to-bullshit ratio.
The iPhone came out in 2007. That was the year the worm turned, imo.
People born in 2005 will be 20 this year.
STOP MAKING ME FEEL OLD, SIR!!!
I recently found out I’m about as old as Java and I still haven’t decided if that sounds worse for me or for Java.
…wait, when did Java get invented?
First public beta/alpha release in 1995
Oh, I’m way older than that. I was born 2 weeks after yhe whole earth died, because the russians almost atomic bombed us on a false alarm. Until one man refused to sign off on the bombing of America.
Which, based on that description, doesn’t ACTUALLY narrow down the decade. Which is kind of scary that the earth almost ended…more than once…from the same thing. I mean it was twice that it happened, in two different decades, but still though…maybe atomic weapons are a bad idea in the hands of russia…
Governments used to want to control the narrative, now they’ll spill out so many narratives that people are overloaded on trying to figure out what is actually true. This has been going into overdrive with machine learning improvements and it’s probably just picking up traction.
This is the exact reason using Google to look anything up anymore is insanely more difficult if you don’t have the skills to parse through all the different waves of information. No matter what side of the argument you’re on Google will guide you into being “right”
Flooding the zone with shit
Kojima warned us about this.
More like, there was a brief window when the growth of the accessibility of information outpaced the growth of our ability to abuse it.
Do we need like a philosophical thoughts community? Shower thoughts to me are more like “if you have a PhD all meetings you go to are doctors meetings.”
Meanwhile, on Lemmy its like “The undulating nature of the universe can be predetermined based on a set of twelve isotopic values.”
This should be a shower thought
Counterpoint: “Any thought you have in the shower is a shower thought”
I keep wanting to make a post in shower thoughts asking how the hell other people remember they need shampoo, but by the time I leave the shower I forget both the shampoo and the post.
I got shampoo today, because my husband remembered, and I therefore suddenly remembered the post, though I no longer need it.
Seems like the kind of post I’d expect your average showerthought-enjoyer to not mind seeing on their feed.
EDIT: I’m up for philosophical thoughts community though
Did he think it in the shower? 🚿
Probably in the ice bath
I personally think that moment was in 1993, when the Encarta CD was released.
It had a huge amount of information, but it didn’t feel overwhelming.
The internet also didn’t feel overwhelming.
In 2005, I think the internet already felt overwhelming.
But I guess if you weren’t the nerdy type crawling the web, then social media and smartphones were the game changer and I would put the date closer to 2010.
I miss the pre social media internet so goddamn much
Social media has existed since BBS. What changed is there’s suddenly big money in it, and virtually no barrier to entry.
I miss the pre-“centralized Big Tech” Internet so much.
absolutely, the Iphone was the game changer.
the internet is as useful as it’s ever been it just stopped being a physical place you go, the computer, to something you carry with you everywhere as another layer of reality.
Before iPhones we had much useful BlackBerries, Nokia with advanced Symbian, some Windows CE/Mobile devices. Even feature phones had something called WAP, but it was f…ing expensive.
Who needs a stylus?
Bring back full QWERY keyboards.
What happened in 2005?
Not quite 2005, but in 2006 olga.net was taken down by the music industry. It only got worse from there.
Rise of social media
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
- Douglas Adams
Yes you’ll cope better with technology you grew up with, but technology is also an exponential cure. For about 5500 years a guy on a horse was the fastest messaging system, then we went from beeps through a cable to video calls within 200 years.
