The Polarizing Effect of Mainstream Media Habits

Endnotes

These are synonyms. What's the benefit of titling the essay "A and A"?

People used to rely on news outlets to know what's happening around the world; now, most of us get our news from social media.

Who is "us"? Perhaps "people" is too general a category for useful analysis.

For example, we used to read articles to determine 'what' is happening, and then we used to think for ourselves on 'why' this happened and 'how' we should feel about it. Now, with convenience at our fingertips, we are in the midst of a reversal. The politics we are partial to already define for us 'what' has happened. This is a product of the increasing bipolarization and division in our society. To a large degree we already know what we will believe and what we will not accept, establishing a dangerous dichotomy of thought. Along these lines, the convenience of social media - the content of which is continually shaped by unseen forces and algorithms that prey on our technological footprints - has fed into this dichotomy. Now most follow their news to better understand the 'how'--how should we feel? How should we react? What fits the narrative of the rhetoric we've already accepted? And because we share articles that fit in with our beliefs and connect with others who have similar views to our own, social media makes it easy for us to bolster this mindset of finding support for our biases rather than allow new information to broaden our insights. The news we intake becomes recycled based on our previous biases. Here lies the ultimate danger of social media without due regulation: the guided polarization of digital news only exasperates the existing divisions in our society.

Without a definition of "we," this is not very effective at giving the reader a reason to believe your statements. If I am not part of "we," and I am certainly not, who else is not part of "we" and why? If there is a central idea conveyed by the text so far—which there should be one quarter the way through the draft—it is one ironically resulting from the reader's resistance to the text.

Surely one can say what one needs about Gusave Le Bon in less than 175 words. One might even have expected Freud to be worth a mention as well. Perhaps BF Skinner? Is the idea to use psychology as a living form of thought or to have a reference to drop in?

It's natural for our experiences to dictate our way of thinking in the Lockean framework of epistemology, but the problem with polarization in social media today is that it leaves little to no room for genuine discourse.

What had Locke to do with this exactly? The first part of the sentence doesn't seem to have much to do with the second, which is a cliche. Personally, I don't know what it means. One never looked for "genuine discourse" in the street over the last several thousand years, I believe. Genuine life is to be found in the street, which "social media" now place indoors on the spy satellite in your hand. But thoughtful and interesting discussion among informed people disagreeing about important matters—which I think is what you means by genuine dialogue—exists in all the same places that it used to exist, and in tens of thousands of other places that could not have existed without the tools made possible by (as it happens) free software in the Net. Democratization of communications has not done harm to the possibilities of human thought: its effect on the effectiveness of science and the richness of human education is what those of us who built it and fought over it wanted. There are also the phenomena you are writing about, which are dangerous to the project of freedom of thought and are in amplitude correspondingly powerful. Failing to see half the picture would not be insight, and the dialogue incident to the failure would be genuine but not real.

What social media offers us is a steady and consistent affirmation from our peers who think similarly to us. Social media is intrinsically designed to connect us with others who will encourage our way of thinking, even if our logic is flawed or our news misguided.

No, I don't think that's true. That makes presently-existing social media the only possible form of social media, which is not even factually true now, let alone "intrinsically" true in some mystic techno-determinist sense. Similarly, capitalism is a form of organization in society, but it is not therefore the same as society. The error of turning present correspondences into stipulative definitions was first fully explored by one of humanity's greatest social scientists, ibn Khaldun, more than 600 years ago.

In other words, for many social media has made home to a great convenience of getting the assurance we want from others who already agree with us that productive speculation or positive self-doubt becomes a foreign process. Many people then become so encouraged by their opinions that they begin to confuse them for facts.

At what previous moment in the history of humanity was this not true, for which people? Leon Festinger didn't go from the elaboration of repression of cognitive dissonance to the study of paleolithic tool-making by Brownian motion: the mental activity you are describing, far from being the outcome of presently-existing social media, is a fundamental defining trait of humankind.

In order to bridge the gaps in our society, we must, at the very least, understand the diverse markup of our communal struggle for survival.

That's merely a rhetorical question. An actual effort to answer, by considering what really happens psychologically under present circumstances, would use scientific inquiry to collect information, and hermaneutic structures to interpret their meaning, both within the mental constructs of informants and using external interpretive forms that "natives" wouldn't use for themselves. It would, in short, be anthropology, not blogging.

It would perhaps be helpful to make more clear the model of presently-existing "social media." The platform technologies maximize not confirmation, but engagement. Phenomena like "rage-watching" and "doom-scrolling" show the immense extent of the difference.

If we want our society to progress more efficiently towards unity, we must depolarize our social media. To do this, we must begin by introducing legislation and regulation that prevents companies from providing overly filtered access to misguided illusions.

By imposing the legislature's view of the truth? The executive's sense of only sufficiently-filtered access to well-guided illusions? The courts' judgments about precisely-appropriate access to judicial fictions replacing illusions? Surely when told that "we must begin" assaulting freedom of thought from a different direction, it would be permissible to ask why.

A very well-composed draft, with occasional blemishes of execution that some more unsparing self-editing would have removed. I think the best route to improvement lies in confronting some implicit assumptions in the substantive analysis, which I've tried to surface in detail above. These are steps of rethinking as well as rewriting, which I have no doubt would reveal yet more useful aspects of your ideas.

-- By KjSalameh - 09 Oct 2020

Polarization and the Division of Society

People used to rely on news outlets to know what's happening around the world; now, most of us get our news from social media. For example, we used to read articles to determine 'what' is happening, and then we used to think for ourselves on 'why' this happened and 'how' we should feel about it. Now, with convenience at our fingertips, we are in the midst of a reversal. The politics we are partial to already define for us 'what' has happened. This is a product of the increasing bipolarization and division in our society. To a large degree we already know what we will believe and what we will not accept, establishing a dangerous dichotomy of thought. Along these lines, the convenience of social media - the content of which is continually shaped by unseen forces and algorithms that prey on our technological footprints - has fed into this dichotomy. Now most follow their news to better understand the 'how'--how should we feel? How should we react? What fits the narrative of the rhetoric we've already accepted? And because we share articles that fit in with our beliefs and connect with others who have similar views to our own, social media makes it easy for us to bolster this mindset of finding support for our biases rather than allow new information to broaden our insights. The news we intake becomes recycled based on our previous biases. Here lies the ultimate danger of social media without due regulation: the guided polarization of digital news only exasperates the existing divisions in our society.

Social Media and the Masses

The idea of our influences directing us toward belief and action is not new. Le Bon, a polymath dedicated to the work on crowd psychology, makes the case that since the dawn of time we have always been under the influence of religious, political, and social illusions (See The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind). He states that because the masses have always been under these influences, we are ingrained to seek out an illusion to grasp to under any and all circumstances. He noted that while philosophers in the 19th century have worked greatly to destroy these illusions, they have not been able to provide the masses with any ideal that could effectively sway them. Accordingly, the masses now flock to whichever rhetorician wets their appetites. Le Bon may have written his seminal work at the turn of the 20th century, but his words seem appropriate now more than ever. Social media has become a universal outlet to which we grasp onto our illusions, and refuse to diversify ourselves to viewpoints that differ than our own. Living in this new digital age, we are thereby narrowing our visions of reality and widening the divisions we have from one another and, perhaps even, from truth. Truth itself has become fragmented, relying on the whims of the reader. All the while most of us remain clueless to the puppeteers behind the curtains.

It's natural for our experiences to dictate our way of thinking in the Lockean framework of epistemology, but the problem with polarization in social media today is that it leaves little to no room for genuine discourse. What social media offers us is a steady and consistent affirmation from our peers who think similarly to us. Social media is intrinsically designed to connect us with others who will encourage our way of thinking, even if our logic is flawed or our news misguided. In other words, for many social media has made home to a great convenience of getting the assurance we want from others who already agree with us that productive speculation or positive self-doubt becomes a foreign process. Many people then become so encouraged by their opinions that they begin to confuse them for facts. In order to bridge the gaps in our society, we must, at the very least, understand the diverse markup of our communal struggle for survival.

Process of Polarization and Potential for Progress

Social media and similar digital mediums largely influence our thinking through targeted advertisements. Every time we swallow the mental pill on Facebook, Reddit, and the like, the databases on those sites store our personal and private data to their advantage, keeping close track of what we search and what our interests are. This misuse of our privacy and the self-selective filter bubbles social media creates for us works to keep the masses addicted. We connect with others who have beliefs aligning to our own, we 'like' their posts and share their posts, and without second though allow behemoth companies to track our personal information and internet consumption tendencies. Social media works by continuing to offer us exposure to our interests; unfortunately this is the problem. Since we are more likely to accept ideas that align with our pre-existing beliefs, and thus continue to scroll down our social media feeds, the posts that pop up first on our accounts are the news sources that work with our existing confirmation biases. Under such a system, what should be expected except for a widening of the rifts that divide us?

If we want our society to progress more efficiently towards unity, we must depolarize our social media. To do this, we must begin by introducing legislation and regulation that prevents companies from providing overly filtered access to misguided illusions. It is not enough to fault the masses alone. If we read more articles from various news sources, share those with friends that hold our current viewpoints and create further connections to others with entirely different perspectives, we may begin to undo the process of polarized information that has so heavily influenced our social media and negatively impacted our society. But to be truly successful, we must target the unseen as much as the obvious.

-- KjSalameh - 09 Oct 2020

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