Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.

On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    In large part, the stupidity that I’m talking about is not something innate, a lack of mental ableness. It’s a bunch of shitty habits, related to how we’ve been trained. Traditional social media trained us to engage in those habits, and in the same form I think that healthy social environment should train us to avoid them.

    Just like people would look at you and say “eeeew, can you not do that?” if you pick your nose in public, we should be doing the same towards people oversimplifying matters, or ignoring the context.

    (The people that you’re talking about - the ones with learning disabilities - are the least concern here. They usually know that they don’t know.)