Down the Rabbit Hole

What in the world is going on?
Post Reply
User avatar
stilltrucking
Posts: 20605
Joined: October 24th, 2004, 12:29 pm
Location: Oz or somepLace like Kansas

Down the Rabbit Hole

Post by stilltrucking » June 9th, 2019, 9:24 am

Cut and Paste
MARTINSBURG, W.VA. — Caleb Cain pulled a Glock pistol from his waistband, took out the magazine and casually tossed both onto the kitchen counter.

“I bought it the day after I got death threats,” he said.

The threats, Mr. Cain explained, came from right-wing trolls in response to a video he had posted on YouTube a few days earlier. In the video, he told the story of how, as a liberal college dropout struggling to find his place in the world, he had gotten sucked into a vortex of far-right politics on YouTube.

Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out. Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry. . .

The common thread in many of these stories is YouTube and its recommendation algorithm, the software that determines which videos appear on users’ home pages and inside the “Up Next” sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... tion=click

User avatar
stilltrucking
Posts: 20605
Joined: October 24th, 2004, 12:29 pm
Location: Oz or somepLace like Kansas

Re: We have met the enemy and they are . . .

Post by stilltrucking » June 9th, 2019, 9:30 am

How A.I. Could Be Weaponized to Spread Disinformation
By CADE METZ and SCOTT BLUMENTHAL JUNE 7, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... e=Homepage

User avatar
mnaz
Posts: 7672
Joined: August 15th, 2004, 10:02 pm
Location: north of south

Re: Down the Rabbit Hole

Post by mnaz » June 10th, 2019, 1:27 pm

I absolutely do not understand how some folks can so easily believe "the media" is(are) 100 per cent "fake news," while at the same time taking all manner of extremist propaganda peddled on youtube and such as "truth"... Truly mind-bogging.

User avatar
jackofnightmares
Posts: 603
Joined: June 21st, 2009, 6:13 pm
Location: Still trucking's Vanity

Re: Down the Rabbit Hole

Post by jackofnightmares » June 12th, 2019, 3:55 am

hyper-reality
Post by sweetwater » February 4th, 2010, 4:11 pm

Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterise the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existent world of the pornography, and even though pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of "sex" becomes something non-existent. Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.[1]

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.
"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect" Santayana The Idea of Christ in the Gospels

User avatar
mnaz
Posts: 7672
Joined: August 15th, 2004, 10:02 pm
Location: north of south

Re: Down the Rabbit Hole

Post by mnaz » June 17th, 2019, 4:05 pm

That's basically it. In a "psychological" sense. As to the bolts and nuts (no pun intended) of how "extremism" grows, to me it would be something more along the line of "hyperactive hypo-reality"-- grasping onto isolated shreds of the Information Explosion, based on latent or preconceived notions stirred to the surface, in the process ignoring the power (potential, at least), ironically, of said Information Explosion.

Post Reply

Return to “Culture, Politics, Philosophy”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests