baslow
2 years ago
Bad Information


...it is only from a privileged position in which the certainty of their world is a given that today’s pundits can consider conspiracy theories as cognitive deficiencies that need to be corrected and remain deaf to the existential anxiety they express.
...we should realize that debunking is a distraction, a Whac-A-Mole game for fact-checkers and information watchdogs. Instead, we should address the dearth of political vision on which conspiracism feeds.

Antoine-Frédéric
2 years ago
@baslow To put it as briefly as possible, capitalistic social media have offered an excellent territory for hostile disinformation agencies for years, and will keep doing so until they’re dismantled (or bankrupt).


On one hand, the sociological tradition of the University of Chicago is mostly qualitative (interview, field research), rejecting statistics, which offers an excellent complement to the intensive quantitative data capitalistic social media get on their users. On the other hand, I’m not even sure they’d need to read Goffman; they could just correlate how profitable a user is with how many times they click on links, or on the "show more" button, or watch videos, per hour, and draw their own conclusions (links are bad, long posts are bad, videos are bad), without even developing a general correlation between cognitive resources and Goffman’s total institutions.

Antoine-Frédéric
2 years ago
@baslow What I mean here of course is that by degrading culturally cognitive resources so much, they offer an excellent territory for hostile disinformation agencies. And as you can see in your TL, I think Mastodon does too; even if Trump didn’t think about all of this, (maybe he was just looking for a successful Twitter clone?), he found in Mastodon, rather than XMPP, Telegram, or even Matrix, the tool he needed to spread lies and deceive/abuse his followers.
Antoine-Frédéric
2 years ago
@baslow For example the dude who’s created the "like" button didn’t think it would be used to harm people, similarly for the people who correlate how profitable a user is with the cognitive resources they consume. Twitter didn’t have a characters limit to degrade cognitive resources but because it was meant to be sent within 160-characters SMS; however it’s more commercially successful than Tumblr, because of this. Apparently innocuous work by well-intended developers who would refuse to work on the larger model I’m trying to understand.
baslow
2 years ago
sigh... After a while away, I am re-acquainting myself with the editing and display facilities afforded me in Bonfire...and I'm getting things wrong. Bear with me, as I relearn old stuff and learn new stuff...