The Internet and the Age of Echo Chambers

I find the quote from the last paper very interesting (and it's a very convincing proposition on the face of it).

People actually investing the time and energy to engage with people debunking posts are very likely to be diehard conspiracy or faux-science nuts, not dissimilar to how (anecdotally) the most passionate Youtube commenters are usually most likely to be insane people.

It's a bit of a fatalist approach, but I do find the notion of simply not bothering to debunk this stuff sensible.

 

The problem may lie more in the intentions. For many, it may be a desire for control in a world that seems increasingly beyond their psychological comfort zone. In Jung's book on the UFO phenomenon he wrote:

At heart, there is a goal to achieve a form of control once sought in gods, but know it's aliens, or Illuminati, or Bilderbergs, or electric universes, or some other concept which offers exclusive understanding to the conspiracy lover which elevates them above those who don't accept the truth. There is far more religious faith to this stuff than intellectual failure and correcting it is not a matter of information but of confounding and disabusing zealotry.

 

This is a good point. I have noticed that right-wing xenophobic movements don't get much traction when times are good (economically). When the world feels like a safe, stable place, there is little need for people to cling to such beliefs.

But if you aren't doing well, if you feel like your success is threatened or has even been taken from you, it's easy to feel helpless, and some people react by lashing out at the "other." In fact, I don't find it a coincidence that many conspiracy-minded individuals are people who have failed to find material or professional success in their lives. They begin to explain their own failures via conspiracy theories, and eventually it snowballs out of control until you just see conspiracies in everything.

I suspect it's not a coincidence that conspiracy theorists are almost all white guys who have failed at life. It's a defense mechanism against facing up to your own inadequacy.

 

Hey, he's a hamster (deceased).

 

Definitely agree with you Emilia that this has gotten to be a problem here. My unfortunate impression is that the S&T subforum is a sad shadow of its former self, mostly because of people posting crap. And it's not just because they're using bad information, but making wild speculations based on faulty or just plain wrong logic.

I really wish I had a solution for you. If this only happened occasionally, we could easily ignore it and move on. Unfortunately, some (or one ) of the people posting this crap are so prolific in their posts that it makes it darn near impossible to carry on a decent discussion. It would be nice if saying "Use real science or GTFO!" worked, but sadly it doesn't. I'm all for speculation, but only speculation based on the facts and real science & math, and I think it would be an impossible task to prune the junk. I doubt you'd be able to give warnings for this either, so I'm not sure what recourse we have. This is one of the few times I wish we could downvote things to oblivion here.

 

As {Emilia}'s post put forth, be careful of the echo chamber. In the US, there are a lot of white guys with conspiracy theories, but such theories are not the sole province of whites nor those the obviously powerless. Mugabe, and Kim, Jon Un use them quite frequently as a way to feed a worldview to their people. But, can we just call such theories some wag the dog effort by such leaders, or should we be surprised to find the process of rising up in such a world of conspiracy make even the leaders as blinkered as any believer?

 

It would be nice to set up the forum so you have to present your academic credentials and have them authenticated. Maybe as part of the "Introduce myself" thread. If you don't have any, you aren't allowed to post. Of course, that would rule ME out....

Part of the problem is that many of us take the crap posts as a personal affront. We cannot or will not just turn and walk away when the whackos start flinging the crap. We just can't bring ourselves to ignore the insult. I'm afraid it makes us the mirror image of the other folks, and therefore we are part of the problem.

For myself, I don't have sufficient command of the sciences to thoroughly debunk that kind of post — but I think it's important to at least point out where people are making basic, obvious, and recognizable errors. (I do that with my friends on Facebook all the time. "Really? You couldn't have Googled that article one time and seen that it was debunked on Snopes five years ago???") Beyond that, I resort to my sarcasm/snark/satire to make sure I don't get too passionate about the argument. Have some fun with it, instead. Although I recognize that I tread on your grace as a moderator quite a bit. Thanks for being patient with me.

This is a good discussion and I hope it's possible to come to some conclusions.

 

Oh, certainly true. Like I said, I see similar things among my own FB friends all the time. And I have to restrain myself from jumping into the fray. That way lies madness.

 

Well, you give me a yell when some Moorish Scientists start flying planes into IRS buildings, shoot at federal agents, and take over wildlife refuges.

I have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether the beliefs of such leaders are sincerely held, or expressed in order to cynically manipulate the people. The effect is the same: it hardens such beliefs in people who already share them, and creates more believers. Such leaders are then left with little choice but to continue promoting their toxic worldviews. This is what ultimately gave us Donald Trump as the Republican frontrunner. Keep decrying the "establishment," keep saying "government doesn't work," keep glorifying billionaires, keep scaremongering about Muslims and Mexicans, and it should come as no shock at all when a large number of people throw their support behind a guy who's bought into all of it and promises to do something about it (unlike the bulk of the GOP, who complain about these things but have thus far done fuck all about them).

 

Well, if we take Plato and Aristotle at their word, there has never been a lack of ill- or mis- informed folks which didn't bother them except where such folks got access to the levers of power (the downside of democracy is that everyone gets a say) unfortunately elitism never works in practice. However, technology has allowed the, for want of a word, untermensch to become the danger Nietzsche feared. That is, if we take the voices of the Internet to be a coherent and cohesive one.

Is the babel a danger or a distraction? That would depend on the capacity of the society to generate a general sense of stability to the population. So long as there is no threat of someone coming in and taking everything you own, folks like the Oregon idiots will be no more than a dangerous nuisance. But, on the borders between Syria and Iraq one might be willing to listen to anyone that gives a hope of making sense of the mess even if it's strap a bomb to yourself for your kids' future.

Setting the weltanschauung has been the purview of a small society for most of human history. Gutenberg made the first chink in that wall of privilege. TV, and radio were like sappers blowing a hole in the wall. The Internet as been an underground river that's undermined the blessed thing for good or ill.

 

Taking your thoughts from last to first, the complexity of society. In this regard, the integration Europe has had historically since the 40s is a model worth studying for insight into the current morass. In a snap description from Babylon 5, Europe realized it could no longer afford the mistakes of the past. Interstate trust, regardless of past cultural antipathies, had to be fostered despite and in fact because of those histories of mutual ill will. Britain and France burying the hatchet in the late 19th century was a great shift for the continental players which I think even Bismark didn't appreciate in spite of the Crimean War. Unfortunately, it often takes great bloodshed for societies to reevaluate their international and intercultural priorities. Whether Israel and Egypt, or Ireland and Britain, reevaluation seldom comes without first having a bloodletting which the societies eventually find they can no longer tolerate, that is to say stopping the madness becomes more important than getting even.

In the age of the Internet, letting down the boundaries of what is allowable society becomes a contentious issue. This comes back to who decides what is 'Us' information as opposed to not 'Us'. The Middle East Refuge issue in Europe is an obvious hot spot for this discourse. There has been a status quo in Europe which the flood has destabilized. Can Europe help these new folks learn the value of trust in spite of the alien as they had to do?

The next two, education and journalistic standards work hand in hand. While not a chicken and egg issue, it is far easier to address journalistic standards where education is valued and anti-intellectualism is not lauded. Education is a delicate issue where it intersects with fostering the desired qualities of the next generation. Political conception of what a people are is always a counterpoint to what is allowed in the schools. They in turn continually produce revolutionaries and reactionaries but seldom any that aren't a clear product of their societies and times. The Internet is a profound challenge to that ancient status quo. Ideas can come from anywhere, unvetted and without control. Collectives of political power can form and grow independent of universities, social clubs, and other guardians of political correctness. It is a true Anarchy of thought.

So, can society integrate this beast? I think it can, but we will have to challenge government and business to loosen its grip. While the internet exists, and technologies exist to cross continents and oceans almost as easily as the information between computers, the old paradigms of nationalism and trade will keep running afoul of this 'out of control society of information'. The chaos won't go away, but it is beyond one social vision as is to contain and co-exist with. The Internet is going to need its own European Union of the Minds though what shape that will be, I hesitate to guess.

 

The truth of the matter is that the so-called "Age of the Internet" gives users more access to information and competing ideas. That's not the problem. The real problem is the decline in critical thinking skills. Worse, you have subsequent generations being sheltered on one hand (for fear of being triggered) and indoctrinated on the other hand. And when you are told what to think or have your feelings sheltered, without challenge, people are accuse of malfeasance based one's self interests of feelings. If the emphasis on critical thinking at the educational level, people would be able to verify, on their own, what information is valid or not. Besides, if you truly believe in "Free Speech", censoring the Internet, even websites that purposely give out bad information, is a bad thing in the long run. We go down that road, we end up like China.

 

My rambling did present a panglossian view of Europe, there, on the face of it. While, as you point out stress brings out the anti-European parties, the idea of the European Union does have the merit of dragging and or coaxing the unwilling into more willingness to find solutions through compromise. It's by no means perfect politically, but that there is fostered a social view beyond being Spanish, French, German, what have you is something that is worth translating to how information itself is shared and accepted. Currently, the Internet and its content is viewed through business as a means to profit, by governments as a conduit of power, and there are many other descriptors from militants to turtle fanciers with a hand. The value of what Europe has learned politically which can be taken to handling the information overflow is that the players don't have to fear the complexities of thought out there nor fear that there is no simple solution or perhaps any solution.

Too much of education is geared toward prepping folks for life in a corporate cubicle. Critical thinking is inherently dangerous to that end, In the US, there is growing ill-regard for arts, theater, and Liberal Arts in general as impractical and useless studies. The perpetual pointing to Asia, Korea, China and others with Olympian SAT scores is done to shame the educational system in the US for not doing the same. The reality of those Asian school systems for the students is nothing to truly envy. It does produce dynamite corporate drones, though.

One would have thought the fantasies of what TV and Radio would achieve in creating a global village would have retarded some of that rosy speculation. Plus ça change, and all that. Perhaps, there is a place for elitism after all.

Maybe, there is a place for Illumnatis! as required high school reading?

 

I think these issues are difficult to talk about in large part because they are so complex. Talking about complexity is complicated, right?

A lot of the attitudes that lead to epistemtic closure stem from values and cognitive biases. (From a certain point-of-view, values themselves are cognitive biases, aren't they?)

You can't eliminate bias, but you can train people to recognize it better. In my experience, we try to impart to people that everything is biased, and you should be critical of what you consume, but what goes unsaid is that you need to examine your own biases and be critical of yourself, too. We are not perfect machines of informational discrimination. The Dunning-Kruger effect certainly applies here. It's not just a matter of intelligence, but awareness. The less you recognize (and thus understand) your own biases, the more accurate you believe your worldview is.

The instillation of values is part of socialization. I don't think I need to explain that. You get values from your parents, other elders, your friends, your community, and on up the sociopolitical hierarchy. But what affects you most, in terms of values, are the people and events closer to home. What stimuli from farther out can do is reinforce (or challenge) those values. So, if a value imparted to you from a young age is that strength is more important than compromise, you will gravitate toward worldviews which reinforce this. Again, this is pretty obvious but maybe we don't think about it as much as we should. It's not that people are absorbing nonsensical worldviews because they want to--they really believe the information they are assimilating is accurate. Nobody wants to think they are a moron, after all. But I think it is also a mistake to assume that people embrace these warped views of reality because they dislike complexity. That may be some of it, but the collection of beliefs and values and narratives that make up an echo chamber are very complex, themselves. It's part of why they seem so impenetrable from the outside. They certainly aren't simple, even if the underlying values ("government is too big," "government is working against us," "foreigners are a threat") are simple. Liberal values, at the core, aren't complex, either: all people deserve dignity and respect, all people have rights, governments are accountable to the people. The details of how you implement those are complicated, of course, but the ideas themselves are straightforward--and in fact, I suspect people trapped in bizarro-world echo chambers would still agree with the values I just listed. They are just approaching the world with a very different set of information.

With all that in mind, what can be done about it? What was said about education is good. I agree that people need to have better critical thinking skills. But a common theme I've noticed in people with dangerous, counterfactual worldviews is a lack of self-knowledge. Examining yourself is uncomfortable. Reflection is often dismissed as psychological mumbo-jumbo with no practical purpose. I think it would help to try to convince people--preferably from an early age--that understanding your own thoughts and behavior is essential to being a well-rounded person. You can't stop at being suspicious of information provided by others. You need to be suspicious of yourself, too. People self-deceive very easily. There are few things more dangerous than someone claiming absolute certainty about the world. One can be (reasonably) certain about specific things, but each individual is limited and can only hope to grasp part of the puzzle, and will only have their own mental representation of it, at that.

This is difficult to counteract when some media sources, much like religious leaders, claim such certitude for themselves. Information is arranged in such a way that it produces a compelling yet inaccurate narrative. Humans are extremely susceptible to narratives. We are bad at absorbing facts and figures readily, but give us a story and we take to it immediately. This can be used to inform, but it can also be used to mislead and deceive--our brains are not good at telling the difference. But control over media--much less what people post on the Internet--is a non-starter, so the best we can hope for in that department is that you attract a lot more people to accurate, reasonable narratives than narratives which inspire fear and inhumane attitudes.

Values are harder to address since they are instilled early. For what it's worth, I think almost any value can be reframed in a way that makes it agreeable to whatever political leaning you are after. Do you value strength? Well, people acting in concert for the good of society makes us all strong. Do you value self-reliance? Self-reliance requires self-knowledge, which includes knowing when something is too much for you to handle--and you need help. This is just spitballing, but my point is that changing people's values is hard, so the way you work with that is to carefully reframe what those values mean in practice, and if a particular value tends toward toxic thoughts or behavior, try to tie it back to more liberal, sensible values instead. Any thought, taken in isolation and followed to its conclusion without guidance, can produce really terrible ideas and outcomes.

I haven't mentioned neotribalism but it's really in the subtext of everything here. People listen first to those closest to them, as I noted about values. Again, that's not a revelation. But it is a sign that a lot of people live in isolated pockets, unaware of what's really happening in the world around them. At that level, where people get their information is key, and you have local media (which will reflect the attitudes of the community) competing with national media and social media. I think national media have less and less relevance for most people, with local media, community discussions, and online/social media bubbles comprising where people get their information.

There are people here on TrekBBS who say they get most or all of their national/international news from here. TrekBBS is, all told, not the worst place to get one's news, but there are certainly much better outlets. I definitely wouldn't use it for that purpose. But think about how many people get what they know from their local paper, local TV news/radio, and what their family and friends post on Facebook. In fact, the latter are probably much more powerful than we admit. It's not Joe Reporter telling you something, it's not an AP news story, this is your brother from across town telling you about how Obama is coming to take all your guns. You don't know what the hell InfoWars is, but that story sure is troubling.

At this point, you have a decision to make. Do you accept the story as true? Do you shrug and ignore it? Do you figure it must not be true? Do you try to hunt down additional sources to corroborate it one way or the other?

Let's put aside people who'd just accept it as true, off the bat. How do you get to be the kind of person who does that? Shrugging it off and ignoring it can really be a step in that direction. Next time you see a similar story, you remember the last one you saw, and how you didn't think much of it. And then you see another one. And another one. You start making these connections. By this point, are you going around looking for debunking material? Most people don't have the time or motivation for that. They're just skimming what pops up in their Facebook feed. Eventually, maybe you aren't a virulent conspiracist, but you happen to have absorbed a lot of stuff that's just nutty, and it begins to inform your worldview and decisionmaking more generally. I suspect this is exactly how people end up with a weird mishmash of nonsensical beliefs. They don't actually try to build up a coherent worldview. They don't know how, or maybe they don't have the time/energy, or maybe they think such introspection is an activity for ivory tower elites, and not regular people.

Fascinating topic and I doubt there is any one right answer. There are people to whom a fringe viewpoint will always be appealing. Probably the best you can do is marginalize that and try to keep it out of mainstream discourse, and away from the levers of power. But I don't support draconian means of enforcement, either.