has Internet made the political discourse dumber?

[funinspace]

I think so.

Before the advent of the computer, you had to write to the newspaper editorials section and hope the newspapers printed your letters about your opinions. Obviously, the newspaper staff would toss any crazy, conspiracy ramblings and only post letters they thought well written and argued.

TV Newsrooms were the same. You could call, but you had to leave a message and hoped they called you back. They were under no obligation to air your views.

Everyday people had no other place to air their views that reached international levels. They could only bitch and complain and talk about government surveillance or being probed by aliens at the local barber shop or pub.

Now, every idiot's opinions can be heard across the nation and a generation is growing up in the US thinking that because everyone has an opinion and is free to air it, that no opinion can be wrong.

There is still a filter. Before it was the editors. Today it is attention. We pay attention to whoever already has attention from other's. I see a danger here. In the first instance the well educated middle class were arbiters of what went in. In the second case it can get really ugly. If enough people pay attention to wrong things we can get a very nasty public discourse.

I think it is more than just a filter of attention. It is also being filtered by association. Before, the internet and even cable TV, one had to go to specialty magazines, clubs, or more unique newspapers to get something outside of the very mainstream major presses. And much of it took either time or at least some money. Cable TV increased the diversification of informational sources. And sure there were oddball small pamphlet publishing’s that strange people read, but it was on the margins.

I like the barber shop or pub analogy. I have said a few times that the internet is like plugging in mics into thousands of bars and recording what people are saying. Though obviously much of it is channeled/filtered better. We have a PR person for a company that tweets something seriously stupid, and arrives in Africa fired. 30 years ago, it would have just been a PR person making the joke to the friend/co-worker next to them…end of story. Today, no bar is needed to share among similar thinking people. Today, redneck evangelicals (I use this example as I have in-laws that we see part of this stupidity thru a shared connection via my wife’s Facebook account) can share Youtube vids, watch podcasts, from their right wing sites that they live within. And now it can be done with very portable pads/phones. I doubt these in-laws even watch any regular national news anymore, but for maybe some Fox News. They probably still see some local news, but wouldn’t bother with a paper. Their informational hubs are now their evangelical church, Tea Party/redneck type paranoid internet sources, pro-gun and grunt pro-military internet sources. My wife actually got into a bit of a spat with her brother, as she pointed out (with evidenced source) that he was just posting an old made up yarn on Facebook that was now being used to slander Pres. Obama. He kind of went hostile, starting off with pointing out with how liberal the media was and you can’t trust them, and it went downhill from there... This idiot brother has a college degree, along with his wife. They have so dumbed down their kids, that so far 3 haven’t bothered with college. Though 1 is working on an associates.

Where was I…I think the stupid has always been there, but I think it gets somewhat amplified by the fact that now vids, tweets, and web posts on social media allow things to remain out there to be seen by more people as much on the internet doesn’t just go away. I’m not sure where this will eventually lead, but I also think that much of the 20th century was a much of an anomaly as anything else. Before that, very little news got to most people. Lots of local rags made up crap with impunity. Ben Franklin used pseudonyms to slander people or push notions that he didn’t necessarily want to be known as by him. I think leaders were far more able to make up stuff and get away with it.

I'm not sure if the world is more extreme or not. I think the duality of the cold war, and the rise of the US as a super power probably dampened what would have been probably a more unstable world (whether that was good or bad). I do think the dominance of the US is waning and we could be shifting into a multi-polar world over the next 10-20 years, and that would increase perceived stability.

 

[ronburgundy]

But do you think that has changed the world? Do you think it's more extreme now?

I'm not sure if the world is more extreme or simply brought out of the shadows. Politics seems more polarized than ever to me, but I didn't live through another turbulent time, the '60's.

This relates to my first post in the thread about how what is believed and what is said co-influence each other. So, if more extreme views are said (and thus heard) more often and to larger audiences, then it would increase the % of people who hold those extreme views (making them less extreme in the statistical sense). Most people are conformists, but they don't go around counting the # of people with various views and going with the numerical majority. Whatever ideas are the loudest and heard most often will win out, even if its a voices of a numerical minority who control the information outlets heard by the most people. IOW, there really cannot be an impact on what ideas get voiced more that doesn't also impact a change in what ideas are actually believed.

As for the 60's, the conflicts were more about actual ideas on specific issues, and that they didn't align as perfectly with political party, though the Dems were obviously more sympathetic to the youth/counter-culture movement. Keep in mind that the GOP did not really institute its "Southern Strategy" of becoming the party for racist theocrats until after the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and in Nixon's 1968 campaign. Up until then, there was less of an ideological/cultural dividing line between the parties and a less coherent vision within each party.
Now it is more about a kind of party-ism where attacking the other party overrides consideration of actual ideas, though it is clearly worse on the Republican side. At least among the actual politicians, there is far more evidence of the Dems trying to compromise (to a fault), whereas the GOP is single-mindedly focused on attacking and demonizing any Dem president or policy, without regard to any substantive disagreement.

The internet certainly allows people to create an information bubble, where almost all the info/ideas they hear are on their side or even more extreme than themselves. It used to be that you hung out with people largely as a matter of proximity, which meant more exposure to people who might disagree with you. Now people select social groups based upon ideological agreement to a far greater extent than they could before. In addition, the internet gives people more info about where ideologically like-minded people actually live, and there is evidence that over decades people have been slowly migrating toward more ideologically compatible sub-regions. It isn't the primary basis for a moving decision, but when people are moving for other reasons, it is a partial factor. Over time that has meant that individual neighborhoods have become more strongly "blue" or "red", with fewer areas having a relatively even mix. That means people are now both more physically and virtually surrounded by a bubble of ideologically like-minded others, which increases extremism.

That is another reason I like this board. Besides allowing for more in-depth discussion than social media, it reflects a broader range of views on almost every issue outside of God's existence, than you'd find in any social group on or offline. Hell, even on atheism, there is broad disagreement on how we should engage / criticize the dominant theistic culture. We aren't always civil and few people explicitly admit to being persuaded, but exposure to alternative arguments has a long term subtle impact that people aren't even aware of. Years from now, one of us will be in an discussion with someone with similar but more extreme views than us, and find ourselves unwittingly using info or arguments we heard here but did not accept at the time.

Viva la Información !!!

 

[fromderinside]

pant, pant, pant. Wait. Just a minute. I have to recover from ronburgandy's Free Thought praise flagellation. Whew. There. OK.

Bald statement section: Why does the internet certainly allow people to create an information bubble. Its completely open. The only thing permitted closed if ronburgandy' assertion is to hold is the mind of those doing the creating and they'e be that way with our without the internet. So its not the internet.

stand by.

 

[Achwienichtig]

When I was a God-fearing teenager, I used to go to the history channel message boards and argue with atheists about God's existence. I learned quite a lot from that experience, although it did take a while for their logic to get through to me. I think I have found the internet to be a valuable tool for my own intellectual journey.

Having said that, I believe the internet carries many dangers. Confirmation bias is one danger. But even more, I suspect that the internet fosters a kind of fly-by-night intellectualism. We no longer know the facts. We google the facts. We no longer try to understand the world, but we search for dumbed down explanations that we can understand without any effort. In short, it allows us to be very passive with our intellect.

 

[ronburgundy]

pant, pant, pant. Wait. Just a minute. I have to recover from ronburgandy's Free Thought praise flagellation. Whew. There. OK.

Bald statement section: Why does the internet certainly allow people to create an information bubble. Its completely open. The only thing permitted closed if ronburgandy' assertion is to hold is the mind of those doing the creating and they'e be that way with our without the internet. So its not the internet.

stand by.

As always, your incoherent word-salad babbling says and contributes nothing.

The only part of your post I can possibly interpret with a lot of reading between the squiggly lines of your prose is that, in your typical manner, you ignored my words and turned them into a strawman. You object to the modest idea that the internet "allows" people to create a bubble. I can only imagine you object because you magically interpreted the word "allow" to mean "forces" or "requires". Yes, the internet is "open". But people's psychological tendencies are not. People tend to seek to create ideological bubbles reaffirming their views, and the internet allows for the easy creation of such bubbles that was less easy and less plausible without the internet. This modest assertion was not at all "bald" but supported by an entire paragraph explaining how this would be the case and referring to the findings of empirical studies that have tracked the migration of people based on their ideological coherence with the communities they moved from and to.

 

[braces_for_impact]

pant, pant, pant. Wait. Just a minute. I have to recover from ronburgandy's Free Thought praise flagellation. Whew. There. OK.

Bald statement section: Why does the internet certainly allow people to create an information bubble. Its completely open. The only thing permitted closed if ronburgandy' assertion is to hold is the mind of those doing the creating and they'e be that way with our without the internet. So its not the internet.

stand by.

I know I said that the Internet easily allows people to seek out and exist inside their own bubble, so I'll answer this too. The reason I said as much is for a couple of reasons. One is the very nature of confirmation bias. People tend to seek out confirming information for whatever feels right for them; it's not very often people seek dis-confirming information, although often this can be more instructive.

Secondly, I said so because there's more and more research showing as much, this for example.