I recently read that Mark Zuckerberg should spend $45 billion on undoing Facebook’s damage to democracies. It was all about filter bubbles in social media. I got involved in a discussion on a German thread on Google+ and ended up writing the following in a reply to an English speaker. I had begun by saying that national TV helped fabricate national consensus, which allowed for wars with our neighbors. Now this is gone but the filter bubbles are not. They simply no longer follow national boundaries, but they’re still there and so we’ve replaced international strife with internal strife. John Behrens then said that this was basically the right wing message: am I saying that we need a national culture? No, of course not.
Mark Zuckerberg should spend $45 billion on undoing Facebook’s damage to democracies
To be honest, I never gave much consideration to the right wing messages. I’m surprised that they would say such a thing. But assuming that they did, my counter argument would be that I only said national TV facilitated national consensus. It doesn’t mean that we need to get back to this kind of broken setup, since we also don’t want to get back to nationalist feelings and wars with our neighbors.
We do need to think of ways of solving the problem of centrifugal forces fracturing our society. Some people would claim that it is the natural consequence of unfettered capitalism leading to alienation.
I’m not so sure. As Christopher Alexander argued in his paper A City is not a Tree, it would be good if we had multiple, overlapping spheres of influence. When parents have kids that go to kindergarten and they don’t get to select kindergarten based on their Facebook friends, that’s a good thing. If we make sure that foreigners get distributed evenly, then that’s a good thing. If we don’t split scouts according to religious affiliations, then that’s a good thing.
Perhaps the concept of a single daily paper is broken. If you’re a right winger and you read Auto Motor Sport, then your love for the automobile will take you into circles outside of your right wing Facebook friends. That’s the kind of overlapping, interest based structure I’m thinking of. If we have “all in one daily newspapers that cover everything” then these local monopolies get accepted or rejected as a whole, because in actual households, we can’t read more than one. Too big! Too much! But we can read low volume, hobby based publications (websites and alll that). Sadly we have accepted a culture of no religion and no politics for entertainment based websites and forums, which leads to no debate in arenas where we haven’t selected based on our favorite religious affiliations or political agendas. I also don’t want to read NRA nuts talking about Open Carry in my D&D Community, but as far as I can tell, these are missed opportunities for piercing filter bubbles.
#Politics
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I am often surprised that people are so reluctant to talk politics *of any kind* in the Google+ OSR community. It’s like they were scared, or something.
– Enzo 2016-01-26 08:20 UTC
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Yeah. But there are also some rare positive examples. If you follow a person like +Jürgen Hubert, you’ll get plenty of politics and calm statements and a willingness to argue. Sadly, he sometimes also links to discussions that go “off to the deep end.” ¹ ² Perhaps this is what we fear most of all: having to talk to people espousing views so radically different from us that they’re unacceptable. I think this is part of the problem. In a polarized world, piercing one’s filter bubble basically means engaging with extremists from the other side. Nobody wants that. What we have lost is that gradient of opinions on multiple axis.
To take the software world as an example: I used to really like Eric S. Raymond (ESR) for his writing, and for his work on Emacs and other software projects, but when I look at his blog, my eyes are rolling so hard I can hardly read. But I still go there occasionally because when I read some of his political posts, at least he makes arguments one can read and disagree with respectfully.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-01-26 08:48 UTC
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Participating in hobbies has given me a greater appreciation for diverse beliefs on the right wing: from L5R I know a former Orthodox seminary student in the US who is one step away from people calling for a modern-day (whatever number crusade this is) crusade against Islam; then there’s RPGPundit and Joe Bloch who very idiosyncratically expand the definition of “conservative.” However I must confess that certain things outside my latitude of acceptance I don’t feel like arguing because they depend on basic end-goal axioms like the meaning and value of equality.
– Roger GS 2016-01-26 13:48 UTC
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From where I come from, where most grown men have assault rifles at home because of how the Swiss army works, and yet we all think the Americans are nuts and trigger happy, this photo documentary of chubby people, old people, dog owning happy people and family with kids proudly presenting their firearms with a smile is uncanny because my first reaction is “NUTS!” and then they all look so harmless. This is how it feels when peeking outside the filter bubble, I guess.
→ Why Do You Own a Gun? by Jordan G. Teicher with pictures by Kyle Cassidy.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-01-26 17:52 UTC