One aspect of online communication that does lead to poor debate is the art of the picky quote - I'm sure we all do it: scan a post, leap onto a particular comment and then extrapolate a whole bunch of unintended meaning from some minor throwaway point.

The chances are little thought went into that individual comment, even if the post as a whole was an attempt at some point.

The cycle repeats, and on each iteration, the protagonists feel compelled to defend some point that was perhaps in context correct, but by the time it has been extruded though partial quotation after partial quotation, the original point is lost.

Points are always lost for saying "that is not what I meant". You are never allowed to admit that all your internet posts are dashed off without thought (unless you are FT2 where every nuance was apparently carefully honed into senselessness).

Another little thought that I had this morning whilst walking the dog was about the complexity of the world and how there is a lot of stuff that is just too hard for people to deal with.

I deal with local planning issues, and you soon submerge into a Looking Glass World of Governmental logic. My local residents association took a specific line on not telling people what to think about a major application and then tried to get the residents to tell it what they thought.

The net result was that the residents association realised that a lot of apparently intelligent people were most aggrieved that they had not done their thinking for the people, or had not magically divined what their obvious opinion was and stepped in to represent it to the local authority as it was clearly obvious what needed to be said.

This got me to thinking that in a complex world, people have got into the habit of delegating their thinking to others, and the Web is just an extension of this - modern issues are far more complex than whether you can get the blacksmith to fix the horse and cart before harvest time, so people continually look for ways to delegate critical thinking that is beyond their knowledgebase to other places. They do not take kindly to this process not producing the right results, (which is even more interesting in the American context where there is a strong disposition to blame governmental bodies simply for existing it seems!).

It is here we get to the Wikipedia part of the problem - Wikipedia has many characteristics that superficially look like it is an authoritative source, so people uncritically delegate their thinking to it.

In a complex society, people making decisions and taking actions at places remote from you have the power to affect your life in significant ways. The only way you get a choice in that is if there are paths of feedback that allow you to affect the life of those decision makers and action takers in significant ways. That is what accountability, response-ability, and representative government are all about. Naturally, some people are against that. In the U.S. context that I know about, there has been a concerted campaign for as long as I can remember — but even more concerted since the Reagan Regime — to get The People to abdicate their hold on The Powers That Be and just let some anonymous corpseration send them the bill after the fact. The way I see it, Wikipedia is just another step down that road to perdition.

Jon Awbrey

There's always a tension between central and local control in any system. The decision of how much control to centralize vs. distribute, is impossible to make, since it's sort of a traveling salesman problem, but even harder. Worse still, in real life, such things are decided by "authority", which is central-by-definition, so even the meta-decision for deciding whether to shift decisions to central command vs. "foreward" command, is sticky, and tends to work well in one direction (toward centralization of authority), but not the other. Which is a shame.

The US, whose opinion on government you comment on, is a comparitively young country, and the farther west you go on the continent, the "younger" it gets (till you get to the west coast, where it starts to look a bit more eastern again). You can look at firearms ownership and carry laws as a proxy for that. At least half of US states allow concealed carry of pistols by citizens with no criminal record and varying amounts of training, but the two states that probably never will allow this are New York and California. The country is more leftist and urban on the coasts, and it gets more libertarian and conservative where the population (historically) thinned out in the heartland, and people had to live without good government contact more recently. This is not a minor phenomenon-- when the population in these interior mid-southern parts of the country filled in, those people managed to elect a lot of Republicans-- people who distrust government on principle, except when it's going to war against some other country.

The amount of residual self-directiveness of populations shows up most clearly in emergencies and in combat, in situations when central command almost always breaks down at some point, and you're left to see how the system self-organizes (if it can) and how well it does. I've seen citizens working alongside cops and firemen and paramedics in emergencies, delivering emergency care, medical care, and sometimes even law enforcement.

In WW II I know something of the combat history of Americans, and one of the things that stands out is how difficult it was to decapitate American forces by killing their commanders. In case after case when officers went down, and communications were broken, new commanders not only took over from the junior officers, but in many cases from the enlisted men. Nor did loss of central command stop fighting. Rather than dig in and/or give up, there are case after case where the enlisted men organized, solved local problems, and sometimes simply headed toward the sound of battle, all by themselves. In the history of warfare this is not all that common. In very many actions such stuff made a huge difference for the Americans, whose kill-ratio wasn't *entirely* due to their superior supply-state.

It happens in all armies of course, but it's far more common in armies from countries that have recently had frontiers and the gun-toting people who came from them-- Australia, Canada, the US, and so on. As those countries grow older, the people from them will probably grow more "effete" and less able to solve their own problems when "authority" is missing. Australia and Canada are well down that road already, and I've watched the process happen to the US, even in my lifetime. Adult people standing around waiting to be told what to do, always signals a failure of society of some kind. If nobody's giving you orders, you should be looking around to see what you can do on your own, and the hell with the government's policies. If something needs doing right now and can't wait, and there's nobody from the government to do it, that's their problem. If they show up later and compain about what you did to fix things, tough shit. Most Americans feel they should have been on the spot when needed, and if not, they give up their right to grouse. That also is far from a universal attitude.

All this actually applies to Wikipedia. Good or bad, there a reason it wasn't invented in the UK or Germany. They copied it once it got going, but the audacity of it, good or bad, is characteristically American. It's got "Invented in the US" written all over it.

Good grief, Milton, you really gotta stop sniffin that banana oil …

Jon

Can't help it. Uncle "Raul" Duke has always been my favorite character.

You know, Jon: this is part of the internet too.

Let's face it, we are inundated with dullness — our capacity for metabolizing that dullness is very limited — and every time we absorb, without metabolizing, a bit of that dullness we become a bit duller ourselves.

Jon Awbrey

I really must reject the entire thesis implicit in this thread title. People are stupid already. As the saying goes, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the general public. It isn't fair to blame the Internet.

Maybe what is true is that people know more that isn't true, because nonsense is more easily spread than it used to be.

Yes, we are all frail, but the promised hand that would lift us up by our bootstraps has yet to show itself — all we see are fickle fingers pointing the way down slippery slopes in every direction, yea, unto bottomless pits where all our piety and wits are washed out down to the very last drips.

Jon

It occurs to me that every generation has produced its poets and bards who transform the banality of their day into entertaining art forms that feed the public's insatiable thirst for creativity and novelty in the arts and entertainment.

Notwithstanding a number of lame attempts at crafting humor and parody out of the wreckage of WikiCulture, none of us seem talented enough to craft Wikipeda: The Comic Opera.

Q.E.D.

Jon

The Web Is Bankrupting Scholarship (TWIBS)

I don't know if this topic should be spun off to its own thread or whether it's best to develop it as a variation on the theme that's already in place, so I'll just post a note of it here for now.

Since this is a rather dull, platitudinous remark, what's the point?

To make a point that may actually be to the point and amusing at the same time: often these days I have one of my children surfing the 'net, and they turn to me and ask "what's X?" and a yell back, "You're on the internet! Look it up yourself!" and they sheepishly reply "oh, right."

Nice parenting …

Jon

Continuing Discussion on the Dumbing ↓ Device —

Nicholas Carr, “Does The Internet Make You Dumber?”, Wall Street Journal, 05 Jun 2010.

I know it's a little crusty, but it keeps being re-cycled on Facebook.

Jon

Do you believe me now?

Jon

Bumping up for the sake of a current discussion on the Peirce List —

Reference Points —

• WR • The Web Is Making People Stupid
• WR • The Web Is Like Watching Civilization Run In Reverse
• WR • The Fixation Of Belief : Tenacity, Authority, Plausibility, Inquiry
• Joseph Ransdell • “On the Paradigm of Experience Appropriate for Semiotic”
• Joseph Ransdell • “The Relevance of Peircean Semiotic to Computational Intelligence Augmentation”
• Inquiry List • TWIMPS • Note 1
• Inquiry List • TWIMPS • Note 2
• Inquiry List • TWIMPS • Note 3
• Inquiry List • TWIMPS • Note 4
• Inquiry List • TWIMPS • Note 5

Jon

Assisted Living Today - How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds [Infographic]

People have managed to be incredibly stupid for millenia without the internet - they just never had the technology to broadcast it as widely before. I imagine that the percentage of stupid to non-stupid people is pretty much stable when seen on the largest time scale.

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
--John Maynard Keynes.

I learned in my book history class that the advent of the printing press caused both praise and consternation. More people could access and afford good books, but it also meant that idiots could write stupid books cheaply and sell them as authentic to the masses. The Internet came along and allowed more people to access and find good information, but it also meant that any idiot could make a website and spread the stupidity. Web 2.0 supposedly could remedy that with people countering "This is not true!," yet that fails with people still covering their ears and eyes and singing "lalalalalala... I can't hear you!" Then you have a cacophony of stupidity overwhelming the logic.

At least with books, you do have filters that could theoretically keep out much of the stupidity. Reputable publishers, reviewers, peer reviews, etc. can help. Social media has no such filters. Sure, you can post a comment, blog post, tweet, etc. to counter the stupidity, but there is no guarantee your message will get through. You could be like The Lorax (T-H-L-K-D) yelling at nothing.

Copied from Content Fixation And Regressive Education

Copied from Content Fixation And Regressive Education

Reprising these comments for the sake of another discussion elsewhere —