Always good to remember to get out and talk with real people on a regular basis. Cory Doctorow had some interesting thoughts on this as well in his book Eastern Standard Tribe, where people identify more with those they are online with than those they interact with in person. To the point of shifting their sleep schedules to align with the time zone of the bulk of their online tribe. That caught my attention because I definitely did that to some extent in college, staying up a little later than was wise to get in some game time with friends on the west coast. The 50/50 Problem: How the Internet Is Distorting Our Reality According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, roughly eight in ten Americans go online at least daily. Almost three in ten American adults say they are “almost constantly” online. According to a 2019 Digital Information World report, internet users in the United States spend an average of 6 hours and 31 minutes online every day. Over the course of a single year, the average U.S. internet user spends about 100 days online. Please note that these numbers were all collected before the extreme effect of the COVID pandemic on internet use nationwide. All indicators of internet use are likely to have risen by at least 10 to 20 percent in 2020. Put these and corroborating numbers together and it is clear that we have passed the 50/50 tipping point: more than half of Americans spend more than half their waking lives in virtual internet worlds. These virtual internet worlds are artificial not only in terms of their dependence on man-made technology, but in much more extreme and thoroughgoing ways as well. The content of our internet worlds is determined by each of us individually: we go where we want when we want, see only what we want to see, interact only with people we want to interact with, and so on. This is often explained in terms of the “echo chamber” effect. And then there is the immense, quiet power of the innumerable algorithms that learn from our behavior in order to automatically feed us what we want and manipulate our behavior in ways that are tailored to our own individual psychology. ... It might seem strange to claim that I in Arizona would be more connected with a fellow citizen in New York if we didn’t connect over social media, preferring instead to focus on our embodied lives in the real world and in our local communities. But that is precisely what I’m arguing. The natural and social world with which my human mind-body compound interacts in Arizona is much more similar to the natural and social world with which a fellow citizen’s human mind-body compound interacts in New York than my virtual internet world is to theirs.
Much good about the net, sadly the ease of isolation and not having true face to face interactions with others has huge negative impacts. The more “connected” people think they are the more alone they really are. I see it with some of my kids age friends. Covid made it much much worse for all.
Meh, there are some real shitty things about the net but it’s made life far better in many ways. Banking, online retail, traveling, just being able to search about any topic in a moment is a huge plus IMHO.
The internet is almost like an adult beverage in that kids... maybe they should wait till they're older to consume it. It appears to be far more harmful to young minds than to the older population. But even for adults, it should never be a full-time occupation to surf the web endlessly, unless it's your job.
On a different political subforum on a gator message board years ago - somebody posted a thread about a woman who cops stopped, for what she called “walking while black”. Why this is relevant is that the events in question happened about 1/2 mile from our house here in north Texas in the same subdivision, and I learned of it from a completely unrelated news source. I probably would have never heard of it from local media which I typically never consume.
I disagree with this. I know some older folks who were perfectly rational and easygoing (and polite) in person, but once on-line (after they retired), they needed a cause to rally to, and for a few of them, that cause became the republican party. And they would re-post everything negative and nasty about democrats on Facebook dozens of times a day, with no other posts about themselves or their lives. They did not filter out the obvious lies, either. If they came across it, they re-posted it. As a republican, I didn't see the need to post lies about the democrats. It is one thing if it was something funny, then that would be understandable. But malicious lies with nothing funny about them? No need to re-post that. I had to de-friend some of them. I think that older people and younger people (who did not develop a social life before becoming addicted to the internet) are most likely to have this problem.
Yeah but you have to admit hand writing brilliant responses to disagree with BigCypressGator to the wing of a carrier pigeon was a pain in the butt.
Lol... if I ever met you in a sports Pub, you would never know I'm a Pub voter... and you would never suspect it. Not because I'm hiding it or even ashamed of it... I'm actually very proud to be a Pub voter, but because I don't have to defend myself in the real world like I do here. And the friends I have in the real world do care about my political views, even though they know what I believe in. Many of them re liberals, and we get along just fine out there. I get long with everyone public that understands the concept of equal respect. But with regard to kids... there is nothing scientific or logical about your post... purely anecdotal and not really believable. Idiot adults on-line come in all flavors. And they usually do not hide in who they are in public. And to think that children are less susceptible to peer pressure to be like their friends, and following the crowd versus adults, is not science based. Kids are more likely to fall to the conformity of others, like their friends on-line. They have far more pressure to conform that any adult I know. This is regardless of political beliefs. Maybe lay off the Republican hate and try to understand how to relate to friends outdside of the political realm.
Couldn't you say this about any mediated experience? TV? Movies? Writing/Books? There are probably people that say reading books distorts your reality, but they definitely don't have the credibility of people making essentially the same argument about the internet.
What'll really bake your noodle is when you realize just how many interactions on social media are driven by bots. Even before "AI" (which isn't really artificial intelligence as we think about in science fiction), the "dead internet theory" was gaining traction and you can see it at work in any popular post on Facebook or X/Twitter. Many of the accounts pushing certain narratives are fake and/or operated by people in far off lands who do not share your values and interests.
Agree. Those people I just silence. Sometimes I’ll ask for a link to verify their claims but rarely do they give one. Just my way of trying to point them to the truth.
It’s made certain aspects of life easier and more convenient. I disagree wholeheartedly that it’s made life better for the average American like myself.
