What Do We Do When the Internet Mob Is Wrong? 361
New submitter cornicefire writes "By now most people have heard the news and seen the picture of the boy who was killed over the new Nike sneakers. There are Facebook pages devoted to fist-shaking protests about materialism and greed. Yada yada yada. But while the scuffles over the shoes were real, the death was not. The photo was just a stock photo of some kid in a lab. We know this because of some old school reporters — Steve Earley and Justin Fentin of the Baltimore Sun. In the rush to celebrate crowdsourcing, many of us pooh-pooh the old media as 'gatekeepers,' but there are times when keeping that gate locked is a good idea. After all, if one of the crowd discovered the error, the signal would barely rise above the noise. There are people claiming that anyone questioning the facts is being disrespectful. Is there something we can do about the mobocracy? How can we support the best traditions of journalism while fixing the worst? How can we nurture accuracy?"
Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, there used to be this thing call "journalism". See, first you make up a story that Advances The Narrative, then you create evidence for it (in a font that wasn't invented at the time it was supposed to happen), and then you're Dan Rather. Truthiness rules!
Snark aside, the rules of the Old Journalism worked moderately well when they were followed. I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation. Which will make them powerful, and interesting targets for corruption... Big wheel keeps on turnin'.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
Developing such a reputation only matters if people want accurate information.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
I have been hoping for this outcome, but there is a lot of reason to believe it is unlikely. One reason is that, when it comes to mass social media-developed stories, the brokers are everyone, and honest news sources can be overwhelmed and lost in the noise. To prevent this, every person has to regard him- or herself as a journalist with an obligation to check things before posting them, tweeting them, or otherwise passing them along. Given how well this has worked with all of the incredibly unbelievable urban legends that continue to be propagated via email despite easy fact checking, I have a feeling a lot more people find it easier to click "share" than to take time to look something up carefully.
The other reason I worry about this is that reputations themselves hold value and therefore are regularly sold off just like any other assets. How many companies are there that have developed a reputation for high quality, over many years, and then someone realized that if they put the same brand name on a lesser product, they could sell more of it at lesser cost. Sure, it diminishes the brand, but that takes time, and the profits are immediate. Furthermore, our culture (at least in the U.S.) has gradually devalued actual honesty (the foundation of a reputation) in favor of branding (the imagery of a reputation). Most troubling, personal honesty itself is not considered important. What is a paid endorsement, really? It is putting up your reputation for sale. Yet this is accepted without question as the best way to cash in on one's status as a trusted person. To see this in action out in the masses, how many bloggers, after building up a following, begin accepting "sponsored posts"? Vast numbers of them, and many have probably never even realized there is a moral dimension to this at all, it's just a way to earn money. If they have thought about it, they probably have never taken it seriously enough to actually refuse to do it, because looking at it as a form of dishonesty would be a "fringe" view in our present culture, and therefore easily dismissed regardless of its accuracy. So what I worry about is that, unless we somehow foster an actual cultural change, we'll wind up with just a continued bombardment of unchecked "facts" mixed with an endless succession of people and institutions that build up a trusted reputation and then cash out.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not hard to find examples of Fox News dishonesty - for example, take this graph that's been carefully distorted to make it look like unemployment increased when it actually decreased as a way of attacking Obama [moveon.org] - but the individual examples are beside the point. The problem is the pattern of behaviour they show.
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No, but it is evidence of shoddiness.
As for conspiracy
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's true and not only of the "internet mob." Traditional media, with a few exceptions, have also gone this route of going with sensational hot news without fact checking and then burying corrections later. The only difference is that the masses read the internet (or at least the channels through which news reaches them such as Facebook) and that news spreads instantaneously instead of over a couple of days.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Interesting)
The modern media is He Said, She Said. Instead of investigative journalism and getting to the bottom of the story, all they do is tell you what people (such as politicians) are saying.
Name the media outlet that managed to inform us that in 2000, when credit default swaps were being deregulated, that the House vote for deregulation went 292 to 60:
133 to 51 on the Republican side.
157 to 9 on the Democrat side.
Instead of reporting that (simple to find facts), they cut to a sound-bites of either (a) Democrats blaming the Republicans or (b) Republicans defending themselves from the accusation.
Stop listening to them. Start watching them. You can't watch with the television on, because thats just listening to what they are saying rather than watching what they are doing.
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Traditional media, with a few exceptions, have also gone this route of going with sensational hot news without fact checking and then burying corrections later.
There's more fact-checking than you think - most media won't report on a story unless another trusted agency reports it first or it's confirmed by the agency directly (via first-hand reporting or official confirmation). Yes. there's a rush to be "first", but often the info that needs correcting actually comes from the "official" sources (government,
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What amuses me is people thinking that this is somewhat a "new media" problem. Go check newspapers from a century ago, and you'll see that the problem was far far worse back then, and that we have access not only to the new
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>Traditional media, with a few exceptions, have also gone this route of going with sensational hot news without fact checking and then burying corrections later.
^^Absolutely^^.
The point completely renders irrelevant the uninformed front page story.
Thread/discussion over.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:4, Insightful)
With few exceptions, yes. And I think it's telling that the most prominent of those few exceptions is one of the only 24hr News channels that you can't get in the US: Al-Jazeera.
Not believing everything your read (Score:5, Insightful)
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
Perhaps it is more important to teach not believing everything that you read. Especially on the internet where there is little barrier to being published.
To instill some sort of ability to judge credibility. For example, two people make conflicting medical claims. One is an unknown but licensed medical doctor who trained at a well regarded university and the other is a famous and popular actress. That the actress' lack of relative credibility would require extraordinary evidence of her claims.
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Once the people that grow up creating such false histories (or knowing who created them) gets into the majority, people will trust a little less what they read on the net.
Re:Not believing everything your read (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it is more important to teach not believing everything that you read.
Critical thinking is the most important thing school can teach a person.
Unfortunately it seems to get pretty short shrift in much of the curriculum.
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Critical thinking is the most important thing school can teach a person.
But to what extent can one teach critical thinking? Is critical thinking a skill? Or is it a habit of mind that must be cultivated?
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But to what extent can one teach critical thinking? Is critical thinking a skill? Or is it a habit of mind that must be cultivated?
In practice, I don't think there is much difference between your two choices.
However, a big problem with applying critical thinking skills is that it also requires good domain knowledge to be particularly useful. However, I'd be happy if most people had enough critical thinking skills to simply realize when they don't have enough domain knowledge to come to a useful conclusion. Better to hold no opinion at all than one built on a poor foundation.
Re:Not believing everything your read (Score:4, Interesting)
How do we get them to do this?
First you need to get them to shut up. Seriously. As long as they are talking, they have every incentive to not figure out that what they are saying is wrong.
The thing about humans is that they rationalize, even wrongly. Point out that the facts dont jive with what they just said (even with full citations and so on), and they will still just say something else or repeat the very idea that you just invalidated.
They will rationalize that even though they were wrong about the facts, that they are still right about the conclusion. That even though they dont know enough to defend their beliefs, that someone else must. The idea that someone else must is invalid because the entire chorus is just rationalizing.
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Remember "Memo Gate"?
Maybe the "crowd" is better at keeping things accurate than reporting them accurately?
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What incentive do people have to be accurate when accepting bribes to skew the facts is so much more profitable?
Face it, the truth twisters have an edge and aren't afraid to use it to further their advantage.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot itself is guilty of promoting unfounded blog posts/rumors as news, practically every day. For profit. Journalism is on life support.
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That's what makes the irony of this story so funny.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
But interestingly enough, when that happens, some of the highest rated comments are "no that's wrong and here's why..."
Anytime I see an sensationalist /. article, I always check the comments to find out how accurate it is. But I suppose not everyone does that, and most Internet sites don't have as good a commenting system as /.
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>>Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
As long as by "accuracy" you mean "people agreeing with us", sure.
Here's a link to what actually happened at the infamous UC Davis pepper spraying:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhPdH3wE0_Y#t=8m [youtube.com]
An agitprop guy tells the campus police that "If you let [the prisoners] go, we will let you leave". This false imprisonment bit is the crucial part of the story that got edited out of the YouTube video that went viral and became the face
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
What about people who value what they consider to be integrity over accuracy, such as those who consider maintaining their beliefs to be more important those beliefs actually being correct?
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Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:5, Informative)
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Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity
We're not the ones that need the semantics lesson. And it's not going to stick to the ones that do.
Re:Nurturing accuracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity; it's simply stubbornness. Integrity includes being able to admit you were wrong before, which is seems to be looked down on in our society; consider how many politicians have been accused of "flip-flopping" on a controversial subject.
The problem with this simplification is that it is rarely obvious that one's belief is incorrect.
Certainly, we may encounter a piece of data or an anecdote that appears to contradict our belief... but the new bit of information is rarely the whole story, especially these days when we are only ever told half the story. (The whole story is rarely sensational, whereas half the story makes the subject's decisions seem unwise or "it's just crazy".) When I hear that someone clings to their belief even in the face of a new piece of data, I consider it as likely as not that the believer is simply being appropriately cynical, living as he does in a world of venal liars.
As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.
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the way to deal with this is to not place belief on a pedestal which is something that our culture teaches starting around age 5. The other is to get into the habit of questioning assumptions we make. the enoch-post is dead on. this needs to be taught in kindergarten through college.
The problem is that the long term outcomes can be wrong too, but the believer has an emotional reason for believing as he does and doesn't want to let go. it can also be that the believer sees the short term 'proof' while fai
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As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.
?
The Iraq war was sold to the American people on the basis that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the US. They
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But it usually is the case that it is ibvious that one's belief is either unsupported or capable of falsification.
I don't buy that myself. Sky god beliefs, superstitions, and such only make up a small portion of beliefs. When you get to the more numerous arguments about morality and ethics, what we should and shouldn't do, even those with supernatural beliefs tend to try to come up with natural explanations for why things should be done certain ways.
Then there's beliefs about how things work and happen. While there actually was a school of belief that birds flew and water boiled solely through the will of Allah, in
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We can't cure stupidity (Score:3)
Until or unless gene therapy goes a lot further than it has...
"You can't cure stupid."
I think what's going to happen first is sex-, service- and menial-robotics and other game-changing vehicles for technological plenty and comfort will come along and (further) pacify the crowd; they'll be no less hungry for gossip, but they'll be even less willing to disturb the status quo that is serving them up said comforts than they are today. We won't see superstition go away until or unless it becomes a form of child
How un American of you (Score:5, Funny)
You should be out selling them hot dogs. That's what mobs are for.
Re:How un American of you (Score:5, Funny)
What do you sell an angry unthinking Internet mob? (Score:2)
Righteousness.
Set up a paypal account with the title "Parents against Nike violence against small children."
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How un American of YOU (Score:3)
Not much to be done (Score:5, Interesting)
We had a similar event earlier this year near where I live. A kid, in that case, did die. Everyone thought the lad had over-dosed and died and the followed two weeks were a blur of cries for tougher drug control, better drug programs, editorials on how irresponsible youth are, etc etc etc. But a few of us, having read the report, noted the cause of death probably wasn't really drug related and the autopsy confirmed this. However no one wanted to hear it. Any comment about what really happened was shouted down in the anti-drug fervor.
There isn't much you can do against a mob, even one which is obviously wrong. Just wait it out and quietly try to educate people one at a time I suppose.
Re:Not much to be done (Score:4)
Equally, the MMR-causes-autism outcry a few years ago - the report had long been discredited, but for some reason it suddenly became a huge thing for many groups, causing massive public anger.
Same goes for the recent UEA climategate - nothing the scientists did was wrong, everything in the emails was almost deliberately taken out of context and much hilarity ensued.
Re:Not much to be done (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't allowing your emotions to control you great? You should do it all the time (especially when thinking about the children)!
Why bother. (Score:5, Interesting)
There isn't much you can do against a mob, even one which is obviously wrong. Just wait it out and quietly try to educate people one at a time I suppose.
Doesn't work.
I shut up. Let folks stay ignorant - they won't believe you otherwise. And use their ignorance to manipulate them.
I'm not alone. Just look at what's happening in the Republican primaries. Here you have relatively well educated people spewing non-sense, lies and misinformation to pander to the ignorant masses. Does anyone really think Newt Gingrich is as stupid as he appears? Or Bachman? Cain? Perry (- Ok, maybe Perry is that stupid.)
I don't.
I see them as manipulating the public , using the public's own ignorance and contempt of facts and rational thinking and praying on their emotions.
That's what it has come to: emotional indulgence and the inability or lack of desire to gather the facts and look at an issue rationally. Careful study and self-education is out of the question. People want to be told what to believe. They don't want ugly truth - truth that's always a shade of gray and never black and white - right or wrong - good or evil - or any other childish binary thought.
Emotion and ego are like a drug. "I'm right - you're wrong and there's no two ways about it!" has become our society's mantra and it's leading us to a downfall. And some, Rupert Murdoch for one, have become quite rich and powerful taking advantage of this.
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Emotion and ego are like a drug. "I'm right - you're wrong and there's no two ways about it!" has become our society's mantra and it's leading us to a downfall.
Just like it was at the beginning of the US? This has always been with us and has always been a problem, yet we still managed to build a society on rational principles. It's interesting that you complain about Republican presidential candidates and then segue into this rant. I find that people who can't get others to agree with them seem susceptible to this belief.
My view on politicians is very simple. I'm only interested in what they will do, not their beliefs, not whether they believe they're pulling s
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Re:Not much to be done (Score:4, Funny)
Another American who somehow manages to say with a straight face that they have something to teach the world about decency and reason.
Or we could be like you and just run our mouth. I bet that works great.
type of human who uses and believes social media (Score:5, Insightful)
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That level of dumbfuckery is normal. Too bad for the rest of us.
Subscribe to regulated integrity (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Subscribe to regulated integrity (Score:5, Interesting)
You should read "Flat Earth News" [amazon.co.uk], it offers a wonderful glimpse into the world of reporting and news agencies like Reuters and what passes for fact checking there.
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Is it regulated by law to check its use of apostrophes? I would guess not, as the (US) Constitution does the same thing. And what law is this?
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How so?
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By what law?
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Your local newspaper is regulated by law to check it's sources and it's facts before printing.
Even if it were true, they dont actually put facts in anymore. Its all He Said, She Said.
It doesnt matter that the people saying the stuff are lying. They said it and thats what is being reported.
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What country is that, exactly? Since I have mod points, I'm tempted to mod you 'funny'.... but I can't tell if you are clueless or just trolling.
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Citation needed. Which country?
Public relations stunt? (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks very much like a PR stunt from Nike to me, to get out the message "our shoes are so good that people are fighting and killing each other to get them".
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The kind of people who worship sports stars are thuggish enough to respond to such PR.
Oh God, Max Barry called it. (Score:2)
I seriously, seriously hope that someone out there isn't taking Jennifer Government [maxbarry.com] for an instruction manual.
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Beat me to it.
Was Nike behind this? (Score:5, Interesting)
The real issue is whether Nike was behind the hype. Nike isn't that cool any more, and Michael Jordan is a has-been jock. They're the parties that would benefit from this. Follow the money.
Re:Was Nike behind this? (Score:5, Funny)
I've got a batch of torches and pitchforks here I'll sell you all real cheap.
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Jordan a has-been? Maybe.....Jordan an Icon? Certainly. This is 'merica and we celebrate our sports heroes damnit! You dont have to be an avid sports fan to know names like Babe Ruth, Larry Bird, Wayne Gretzky or Joe Frazier and what they've done in their respective sports to become household names.
the answer is clear (Score:5, Funny)
Rustle up an internet mob to punish this despicable lack of accuracy!
Reputation and meta-moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.
Having an internet-wide identity, such as Open ID (and specifically not FaceBook or a government supplied ID), allowing people to gain reputation, and override other peoples' posts, or at least be placed higher, is really the only way to do this everywhere.
Just as with slashdot moderation, it will be possible to game the system, if you respond rationally everywhere except one issue where you feel strongly about. And it would be nice if your reputation could be classified so that you can have a good reputation on some subjects, but automatically junkpiled on other topics.
As it stands, fact checkers who don't have an axe to grind are the only voices of reason, and you basically have to educate people about the fact checker being cited, but not so much that it looks like you are unquestioning of their lack of bias.
Making the internet personal again, so you are talking with actual people (virtually, not their real identities necessarily). Not arguing with text on a page. [penny-arcade.com]
Re:Reputation and meta-moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as with slashdot moderation, it will be possible to game the system, if you respond rationally everywhere except one issue where you feel strongly about. And it would be nice if your reputation could be classified so that you can have a good reputation on some subjects, but automatically junkpiled on other topics.
The problem with that, which is also the main problem with slashdots moderation system, is that it largely depends on the group of people taking part in the moderation, and it completely depends on their opinions. You can be completely rational on topics, backed with facts, and still be modded to oblivion because other people simply don't like your view, it isn't what they want to hear.
Many topics on slashdot suffer from such, including copyright issues, negative views on android etc.
Just because you have a good or bad reputation with one group doesn't mean that reputation is automatically of value to anyone else.
Re:Reputation and meta-moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.
Snopes indeed has a very good, and well deserved reputation. But yet I still hear people relatively intelligent people repeating the Cruise Control in a Winnebago lawsuit myth, or the Stella McDonald's spilled hot coffee half-truth. Both of those claims are more than a decade old, and very easily shown to be completely wrong. Yet people STILL tell these stories as if they were true.
The problem isn't one of lack of accurate authorities, or the social proof of the accurate authority. The problem is that people are far too willing to accept a story, passed down umpteen times that generally came from their friend, family member or acquaintance. The friend offers the social proof, because the friend believes the story and you trust the friend. Scepticism, or asking for evidence doesn't come into it, since that would involve doubting the friend.
The truth about the myths travels much more slowly, primarily because there's little punch to be gained from telling a story about how something turned out to be wrong. The mythos stories have great explanatory, validation, or "gee whiz cool" embedded within them. I.e. "blame it on those damn lawyers!", or the egg standing up during the equinox myth. One of my favourites, (that many very well educated people will argue with me about openly) is that silica glass is actually a liquid that flows at room temperature, and that's why old windows are thicker at the bottom. In case you didn't know, window glass used to be made through a process that made it thicker at one end, which was usually installed thick end down. I've also read through umpteen scientific evidence about glass, and silica glass is defined as an amorphous solid, that doesn't observably flow at room temperature.
Credibility and Individual Responsibility (Score:2)
Journal organizations need to practice credibility. Credibility is built over time with trustworthy news reporting. The problem is most organizations have fallen to the dark side of profit and tabloidism and can never come back. Their credibility is lost for good.
Individuals need to practice skepticism and critical thought. Then they can identify credible news sources by paying attention. Alternatively, by recognizing logical fallacies an individual can read between the lines and extract newsworthy data emb
It's OK. someone in the hood will be killed for em (Score:2)
Even if this story is false, the sheer amount of violence over Air Jordan's over the years has been staggering. I remember as a kid living in a rust belted inner city and there were people shot and robbed of their Shoes.
Follower Count Matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Astroturfers are easy to spot... they have a high follow count but a low follower count. Nike needs to get better advertising staff... just jamming twitter/facebook updates with their ad may lose more customers than it gains.
"Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948 (Score:5, Informative)
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For the Chicago Tribune, they wanted to beat publishing deadline. So they made two articles in advance and were just waiting to hit the button. Wrong button was hit. As I recall, CNN also has pre-made obituaries of celebrities and head of states so all they have to do is tweak the date of death and hit publish in 10 minutes.
What's different in this Nike-murder story is that it borrows from facts and the rest is fabricated. It's like saying "Truman defeats Dewey but is Abducted by Aliens."
Also, newspapers pu
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In 1948, a newspaper getting a headline wrong was literally an historic, once-in-a-decade happenstance that people still joke about. Social media getting its headline wrong isn't usually funny, because it happens daily.
Speaking of old newspaper men, people who believe in social media should really read some H. L. Menken, who would probably call the whole project "news-by-boob-boisie" and could point to examples of social media (also known as "gossip") as a major dissemination medium for racial hatred, propa
What do we do? Think for yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)
What do we do about this? Wrong idea. Each one of us does something about it individually. You think for yourself; you vet things yourself; you don't worry about the rest of the "crowd" and how they might be deceived. Evolution only has you socially rigged up to truly affect about 150 people, max, anyway.
But, if everyone carries out that solemn responsibility, things will be fine. Problem is, because of a lingering reliance on big media, most people don't. And it was a serious problem back in the days before crowdsourcing too, because the "gatekeepers" have told some whoppers over the last century or so. This was especially true around the time of Goebbels and WW II, and it has never recovered since, despite all the best intentions of journalistic integrity. The journalists did their best to hold the lie machines at bay, but that time has long since passed. A few decades ago, by my reckoning.
So, the horse has been out of the barn for at least that long, and we are talking about shutting the gate? Now? What the hell, folks? Mass media is a lie machine, and it functions because it is a lie machine, and all we've done is given the keys to the lie machine to everyone, instead of only the "gatekeepers." That, by my yardstick, is a profoundly good thing, although it will take a period of adjustment to become used to it.
Personal responsibility and a ready supply of grains of salt is all we have left. Don't believe everything you read. Since CGI advances, don't believe everything you see either. Welcome to the Brave New World. IMHO, it's a "good thing," but you have to be careful what you choose to believe these days.
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Flip side... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sensationalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mob rule, groupthink (Score:5, Informative)
Welcome to sociopolitical science 101. This behavior is called tyranny of the majority, and it so worried Thomas Jefferson and others who founded the United States that they crafted a new variant of democracy intended to discourage it. At least in politics....
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Sadly, all they wound up with was a new form of tyranny of the minority.
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Nah, it's the same one we always had wearing new outfits.
Gatekeepers? WMD in Iraq ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Traditional media still gets it wrong, on purpose! (Score:2)
The problem lies not with the "internet mob", nor traditional media reporting, but with the viewership. People are been conditioned to guzzle up any oversensationalized content. It's like when you're used to beating off to increasingly shameful porn, regular old T&A doesn't do it anymore. Well the average "news" consumer has been flooded with the equivalent of japanese torture scat, and barely notices when something perfectly reasonable occurs, or in this case: when a loaded prank gets shoved down th
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Turning information into entertainment is a genius move for crowd monitoring/control. Further exacerbation of the situation occurs when profit motives encourage and contribute to the misinformations.
Bad information is worse than no information at all, IMO.
I say we take off... (Score:2)
Disinformation & Sophists (Score:2)
That seems to be the new export of the US. The question is, after clearing the obfuscations and outright lies what do we have left to offer? Whatever it is, wear high boots and don't count on it boosting the GDP long after the hot air escapes. Tech IPOs, Real Estate Bubbles, rigged markets and shiny baubles built on 40 year old sweat equity. The future's so bright, I gotta wear blinders.
Is there a story here? (Score:5, Interesting)
And for the old media sources that do real news reporting, such as the Washington Post, BBC, etc, we also have people in the internet mob doing their own fact checking as well.
For example, Slashdot does a fair job of real time fact-checking. If you're depending on You Tube (and You Tube comments!) for your news, then there is something very wrong with you.
We do nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
It's just something that comes with freedom of information. I don't want other people deciding what I get to know about, so if I have to endure some falsities so be it.
Bad information will also correct itself on the Internet. (like, umm, now) because anyone can refute that too and not everyone subscribes to the mob mentality.
I never want to go back to gatekeepers like Rupert Fucking Murdoch controlling information, thank you.
Alexis de Tocqueville Tyranny of the Majority (Score:3)
Are traditional media any better? (Score:2)
crowd behavior and crowd thinking (Score:3, Informative)
The original post asked, "What can we do when the internet mob is wrong?" Forget it; most people don't care. Thi8s discussion about the kid who got killed over new Nike shoes came up at work last night. some of the talkers were so outraged that they ranted for over half an hour. When I tell them today that it was a hoax, they will just go, "oops" and continue on as if they didn't waste their time and emotional energy for nothing. Five years from now they will be saying, "Do your remember that time the kid got killed...?" and will have forgotten that it wasn't true.
In the long term it will mean nothing. What matters is when there are consequences in the short term. Crowds have beaten and killed people when they mistakenly thought a person ran over a little kid, or was a molester, or robbed someplace etc., etc,.. Some sociologists are claiming that Obama go elected on the basis of crowd think and internet mob-ism. (This is not scientific, but I've asked lots of people over the years why they voted for Obama, and NOT ONE of them could tell me anything about his voting record in Illinois or Washington.) Cultural biases are affecting our lives. Friends tell me it was very uncomfortable being a middle eastern person in the USA after 9/11. This type of bias may fade, but when? And how much harm does it do in the meantime?
Bryan Caplan, and Economist, wrote a book called, "The Myth of the Rational Voter" http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691129428 [amazon.com] , in which he points out that cultural biases against free markets and foreigners, and toward make-work and pessimism are exploited by politicians everywhere.
I doubt that there is anything we can do to offset the influence of sensationalism and propaganda except expose the facts as well as we can. (Ooops! Pessimism, right?)
Re: (Score:3)
Some sociologists are claiming that Obama go elected on the basis of crowd think and internet mob-ism. (This is not scientific, but I've asked lots of people over the years why they voted for Obama, and NOT ONE of them could tell me anything about his voting record in Illinois or Washington.)
I suspect that after eight years of Bush II, Americans would have voted for Satan over the Republicans.
Not sure I agree (Score:2)
Parenthetically, I'm a little surprised that this didn't solve itself, and I suspect it would have eventually.
Nothing. Look at Wikipedia (Score:2)
Wikipedia is a mobocracy, but if even its own members fail to live up to their own policies, what hope is there for any other mobocracy? They are good at gathering information, but have yet to discover a basic mechanism with which to achieve accuracy by automatically weeding out errors...
Easy (Score:2)
Migrate all major news and news aggregation sites to slashcode.
If you need me for anything else, I'll be playing Edgeworld.
OMG!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Its Christmas Eve and I am really busy, so I only had time to skim the summary, but thats horrible that some kid got killed for his Nikes!!! Especially during this season its important we honor those killed so needlessly - even tho I am very busy, I am taking the time out to tweet in his honor, and post on Facebook my outrage at this kind of senseless violence! You all should do it too.
Whatever happened to invitation-only discussions? (Score:2)
In the book "Ender's Game", Orson Scott Card envisioned Internet forums that are invitation-only. One gets to belong to the more respected forums only by being invited, and that only happens if one proves one's worthiness by contributing quality ideas and information.
Things sure have not turned out that way. Indeed, today we have a kind of mobocracy. Things are too flat. It is good that the old gatekeepers can be sidestepped, but it is not good that there is so much noise that it is hard to decide what to t
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Traditional media is about on-par with the new media, in terms of accuracy-> "Locking the gate" serves no purpose, about as useful as pushing the 'close door' button on an elevator.
And if you consider the current traditional media's accuracy, which in my humble opinion, is producing lies so transparent even their staff have trouble stomaching it, you realize just how bad things are.
For some odd reason, people look back to the past as the golden era of journalism, when they reported 'the truth.' History reminds us otherwise: "yellow journalism" is a well-known term from a former era, worth reading about if you have the time. People are just nostalgic about their childhood, when they were brainless, spineless automatons who believed anything they were told; they're having trouble coming to grips with reality -> people lie, often and for no discernible reason; and even the good reasons are pretty terrible, but tradition outweighs common sense, and the people who employ lying the most tend to be the people with the least qualms about murdering people that disagree with them.
Consider, for your pleasure, the current holiday: Christmas. Parents lie to their kids about a guy in a big red jumpsuit, climbing down a chimney, riding around on a flying sleight with magical reindeer, and dispensing presents on the basis of a metric ("Naughty / Nice") which appears to conform with cultural norms of morality: people celebrate lies, and bury the truth. They love the lies their parents taught them so much, that many of them go on to teach them to their children. Just try telling someone else's kids that Santa is a lie; see if you aren't vilified.
That's not even touching on the holiday's origins itself. It's turtles all the way down!
Re: (Score:2)
It's the government's job to give everyone a ladder of success.
It's the person's own job to actually climb it.
Re:It's important in other cases too (Score:5, Insightful)
What better quality of life is that? Our poor people have cell phones, cars, cable television, and too much food (poor americans are fat!) for christ sakes. You really cant get an 'enormously better quality of life' yet. Our poor are rich by any standards but the warped bullshit ones.
They're not fat because they have too much food, they're fat because the cheap food is all terrible for you.
A family of four can go to McDonald's and eat dinner for $15. They're consuming 2,000 empty calories in a single sitting. A 2-liter of Coke is $1.29. A gallon of orange juice is $6. See the problem?
Anyone that's actually made a conscious effort to eat better and lose weight quickly realizes how ridiculously fucking expensive it is to do so, and that ignores the time element involved. It takes far more time to prepare a proper meal than it does to hit the drive-through. When you're a wage slave you're not working 9-5, you're working two jobs just to live in the manner we call "first world". That means when you get done your 12-16 hour day at work, the last fucking thing you want to do is spend an hour in front of the stove. So what do you do? Break out the Hot Pockets. Two minutes and here's your dinner, kids.
It's easy to point fingers when you're on the other side of the fence. I grew up poor. I had Peanut Butter and Jelly for dinner more often than I can count, and believe me, it wasn't because my mother wasn't working hard. She worked 14 hours a fucking day and was so tired a lot of the time she would sometimes literally fall asleep standing in front of the stove making us Macaroni and Cheese. But hard work doesn't equal success. And success, in this world, definitely does not equal hard work.
As for the rest of the things you take objection to, let's see. Cell phones? How many people have a land line these days? Better yet, if you don't have good credit (as most poor people don't, how can you have good credit if you can't even get credit?) how the hell do you pay the phone company their $300 deposit to get the service turned on in the first place? You don't, so cell phone it is. Could you live without a phone? Could you function in today's world? But somehow, poor people are supposed to be able to? Please.
Cars? How the fuck else are they gonna get to work? Take the bus? What if the bus doesn't go where they work? I mean, the whole country isn't New York City. Most of us don't even have access to that kind of infrastructure. Shit, a lot of cash strapped cities are cutting back on their public transportation systems. So it's either get a car (usually a fucking beater that gets 3 miles a gallon when you're lucky enough to get it running) or not work. Believe me, I wish I lived in one of those places where I could realistically take public transportation. It would take me over an hour, one way, to get to work by bus, with all the transfer points. One hour by bus, less than 15 minutes by car. Not even exaggerating. Maybe you have the time to spare but I'm not lucky enough for that.
And cable, frankly, I call bullshit all over that one. I know hardly anyone that has cable anymore, and of those people that do, almost all of them have it because it's bundled with their internet service. Internet connectivity is almost as necessary to getting by in this world as having a telephone is. My bank, for instance, doesn't even do paper statements anymore. What few things are not primarily online-based are moving that way. I know people that pay their damn rent online now.
But, ignoring all that, if we're going to start holding up the poor of third-world countries and say "Shut up and be grateful for what you have!" than I say it's time to do the same thing for the rich. How many multi-billionaires do you think Somalia has produced? How about Indonesia? Why can't the wealthy here be happy with what the wealthy over there have?
Oh, I see. It's okay to be entitled if you're wealthy. Poor people should just be glad they're not forced to catch stray dogs and cats to eat.
Re: (Score:2)
The reason the rich should be taxed is that they can best afford it.
Also, the filthy rich tend to be powerful enough to push others around. Lopping the canopy off of the social ladder might not be such a bad idea after all.