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Rob Sheldon on the end of the internet Golden Age

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The questions raised by a recent Analysis feature at Mind Matters News, by a long-time tech maven, affect everyone who gets most of their information from the internet:

Blogging, certainly “citizen blogging,” is dead—haven’t you noticed? So too a host of other enthusiasms and ideas that once seemed poised to transform culture. In 2006, Wired editor Chris Anderson predicted a coming new economy in niche markets, the so-called long tail of online consumerism. Turns out, the long tail of indy bookstores, out-of-the-mainstream music choices, and other products mostly ended up on Amazon, the behemoth sometimes accused of strong-arming smaller companies into contracts favorable to its bottom line. The grassroots, 2005-ish internet, full of opportunity—the sweet smell of revolution and change in the air—well, disappeared. Slowly at first, then seemingly all at once (like falling in love), we now have the Big Five: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft.

What happened? Remembering the prophecies for the web in the halcyon days of ten or (better) fifteen years ago is strangely painful and disorienting, like a hangover, largely because we so silently abandoned its ideals. Following endless feelgood clickstreams, we marched happily into big advertising and data monopolies. What happened to the collaborative culture, decentralized markets, and wisdom of crowds that bestsellers prophesied fifteen years ago?

Remembering the prophecies for the web in the halcyon days of ten or (better) fifteen years ago is strangely painful and disorienting, like a hangover, largely because we so silently abandoned its ideals.

More.

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon, author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, responds:


If you are a millennial, or a parent/friend to a millennial, this article captures the depression/frustration of millennials perfectly. The quote from “The Great Gatsby” at the end is pitch perfect.

Because what our culture faces has been seen before, has happened before in the Roaring Twenties. I never understood Fitzgerald until now, and then, only through the eyes of my millennial children. There is a deep despair running like an ice-covered river through the heart of our culture, as cause after cause is revealed to be just another windmill, another machination of men. Our hope is that this despair can lead to identifying the real causes of human achievement, the real design of a marvellous cosmos, the real purposes of a human life. This is not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

Response from O’Leary for News: Monopoly control is bound to have a dramatic effect on newsgathering and dissemination, just as it did in the days of the “one-paper town.” We thought we had gotten past that but here we all are again.

Many people will believe what they wanna believe. It was ever thus. The critical question is, assuming you want to know as much as possible about what is really happening, how easy is it? Russ White has some useful ideas about how not to live in a news bubble anyway, at least for now: How to know if you are trapped in a news bubble and how to escape it.

Three running men carrying papers with the labels "Humbug News", "Fake News", and "Cheap Sensation".
It may surprise some that the concept isn’t new/Frederick Burr Opper (1894)

Hyper claims about “fake news” miss the point of the problem created by monopoly social media. All news that harms a political candidate’s chances is “fake,” so far as the candidate is concerned. The critical question for the rest of us is, how many independent streams of information does the voter genuinely have access to?


See also: Part I: What is fake news? Do we believe it?

Part II: Does fake news make a difference in politics?

Part III: What can we do about fake news that would not diminish real news?

Extra! Extra! A handy guide to the normal fake news

Comments
News, in an age that lauds Alinsky, news fakery, show trials, falsity in name of education and worse are to be expected. Of particular interest, as I am in the midst of an election "like no other" that will turn on blowing willfully false narratives and their deceitful proponents out of the water. KFkairosfocus
October 22, 2019
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Well, gee, for those of us who read enough books to believe Revisionist History, the lame-stream media were written off more than a decade ago, maybe TWO decades. I used to like watching "Washington Week in Review", but they got increasingly biased (i.e., Liberal). Haven't seen 'em in lo! these many years. I get ALL my news by reading websites. If a website starts to smell fishy, I abandon it, and try another one. The problem of course is that almost everybody else still watches The News on TV, and so we have nothing to discuss, except the weather and my grandchildren. It is of course worthless to watch (or read) The News if you don't know enough about the topics being presented to tell, um, "dog do-do" from Shinola. And so, for example, the idiots who are excitedly talking about "cancelling" student loans don't seem to understand that those loans are backed by the US Government, which is to say by TAXES. And there ain't enough tax money ANYWHERE to pay off the loans. So there would be a general collapse of the US economy and the "Federal Reserve", a PRIVATE company despite its name, would wind up owning the whole country, including the Federal Government. And of course any student or parent who had struggled to pay off THEIR loans would be shown to be fools.vmahuna
October 20, 2019
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