The masses and the internet

Robin Hanson writes,

But in fact ordinary people don’t care as much about privacy and corporate concentration, they don’t as much mind self-promotion and status tracking, they are more interested in gossip and tabloid news than high status news, they care more about loyalty than neutrality, and they care more about gaining status via personal connections than via grand-topic debate sparring. They like wrestling-like bravado and conflict, are less interested in accurate vetting of news sources, like to see frequent personal affirmations of their value and connection to specific others, and fear being seen as lower status if such things do not continue at a sufficient rate.

Read the whole post. I had some similar thoughts in this essay.

The masses came to the Internet. Many of the new arrivals were less technically savvy, were more interested in passively consuming entertainment than in contributing creatively, and were less able to handle uncensored content in a mature way. They have been willing to give up autonomy in exchange for convenience.

6 thoughts on “The masses and the internet

  1. This is a curious topic as there does not appear to be any hard data on what types of sites the average user typically uses in a day. Searching google scholar I don’t find much research at all on how many low-traffic web sites a typical person visits. Traffic counters show how popular social media sites like facebook and twitter are but that does not mean that a typical normal people does not also consume low-traffic blogs or other higher status websites as well.

    The sheer number of websites suggests that traffic volume is not at all a good indicator of the diversity of sites a typical consumer might visit. People have many different hobbies and interests and likely visit specialty sites related to those hobbies and interests rather than mass audience sites.

    Even within a relatively small community of interest, there are higher traffic sites and lower traffic sites. Agweb for example draws a wide range of ordinary people but beefanddairynetwork serves people generally outside the normal agricultural community.

    Blogging is still very popular even thoughindividual site traffic numbers may not be big.

    I hope that you and Robin Hanson will not be surprised to know that there are indeed ordinary people who visit and enjoy your web sites.

  2. Eternal September is even worse than that. Much worse. It’s just impossible to prevent regression and preserve consistent quality when anything is open and public. Some kind of good selective filter is indispensable.

    There are several types of fallout from an influx of masses of ordinary people, and I think this only gets at one of them – “mere dilution”. The distribution of talents and preferences changing only because of the overwhelming influx of a different population, but with the original population staying the same, saying and reading the same things, mostly only to each other.

    But the unfiltered influx also decreases the signal to noise ratio, and increases search costs. High quality interactions are interrupted by low quality interference, which makes participation not worth the trouble, and chases high quality types away into retreat and self-imposed exile. And losing the smart fraction is highly consequential.

    We also see the “prole drift” which Paul Fussell described in a chapter of Class. That is, we also see people with the potential to behave well and produce consistent high quality output automatically converge to the new social averages and lower the quality of their own output. This also happens on a more conscious and cynical basis, as smart people start producing low-brow stuff for mass appeal, but it’s even more tragic and harder to reverse when it comes about by an unconscious process of bad social influence.

    Sticking to certain subject matters or modes of expression that mass audiences find uninteresting or too difficult or technical, but which still attract high quality folks, is one approach. But this creates subtler problems, for example, the walking on eggshells issue with “Discourse in the Shadow of the Guillotine.” Also, you get “cargo cult” participants who want to affiliate themselves with and gain status in some narrow community, and who learn to parrot the jargon and buzzwords, and produce an illusion of familiarity and competence, but who can’t actually follow logical arguments, hold themselves to any rigorous standard, or produce any new ideas, extensions, or insights on their own. Just a few of the obsessive types of these people can ruin a community of discourse, and we are now living in the scorched-Earth wastelands and ruins of the war they won.

    That relates to another problem, best told with the joke (I can’t recall from where at the moment) about “the kind of people for whom time is not money.” A normal and successful person with family obligations and pursuing lucrative professional opportunities will find it difficult to not be drowned out by the output of just a few prolific specimens of that type.

    But while there is no good alternative to standards and filters, the Social Failure Mode of having filtering mechanisms and institutions is that they get hijacked to serve other, ulterior purposes under the cover story of this necessity.

  3. Big data miners at Google have probably analyzed the data to corroborate or refute this hypothesis. An academician could do s using GoogleTrends. I find the hypothesis plausible, but it is an empirical question the end.

  4. I wonder whether it would be accurate to say that podcasts have not turned bad as described in your essay. My sense is personal podcasting rivals that of the big entities both in market share and in influence. I wonder too about the extent to which internet facilitated meet-ups are providing opportunities for people’s ideas, as Matt Ridley I believe described “have sex.”

  5. I posted this over at the other site, just putting it here as well: When it comes to online discourse, twenty years ago isn’t nearly far enough. Neither is Arnold Kling’s twenty five years, although at least he’s going to back to the birth of the world wide web. The Internet, on the other hand, is closer to 50 years old, with the DNS system about 45. And online discourse has been part of it for all that time.

    When you go back that far, it becomes clear that blogs, which Arnold captures as the “old vision” of the Internet, were in fact a relatively new creation, going back the 20 years or so that you tag as the beginning of history. Blogs were a way for individuals to become journalists, critics, experts. However, blogs are an online instantiation of broadcasting, so in that sense they are older.

    The better comparison, first captured (at least from what I saw) by Clay Shirky is Broadcast vs. Participatory. Blogs are newer, and broadcast. Owned by a single individual or group, they control what is published, control how others can participate.

    Participatory discourse is newer, but have no obvious real-life analogy. But in technology form they go back much further than blogs–discussion boards, bulletin boards, chat sites–all the way back to the 70s. That’s because participatory discourse is really what online technology created. Online forums have moderators, but aren’t “owned” in the same way. The owner can’t control what is published and have only a binary control over who can participate.

    When the WWW (*not* the Internet, and I do wish people would get that straight) was created, it was bulletin boards that were the original discourse model. Magazines didn’t first provide “comment space” but rather “online communities” and “Forums”. The New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, Slate, and many more had these back in the 90s. One by one they all went away for the same reason: they cost a hell of a lot of money, required moderation, made NO money, and grew out of control. Many of the users used the forum without even reading the owning media site.

    Participatory discourse is what the “nerds” started and arguably invented–not blogs. Blogs grew out of a different space entirely. The earliest blogs were diaries, and started in the 90s. They were the creation of individual people who wanted to push their ideas out into the world. The best known early blogs: Mickey Kaus, Jonah Goldberg, The Daily Howler. Blogs are broadcast, not participatory, and the media preferred them to the wide world of forums almost immediately. Blogs are very much self-promotion, and another odd glitch in your post is this notion that social media is self-promotion as some sort of new thing.

    If you go back to the last 90s/early 2000s, you see a lot of talk about governance. Everyone recognized the passion of participatory methods, but also learned quickly that people just wanted a place to talk. So how to channel that passion without creating a huge expense in management and moderation? Answer: you couldn’t.

    Another huge problem still here is how do you make money from all this communication. That’s really been there from the beginning, of course, and has been much written about.

    What you describe as the “rise” of social media is what I would describe as centralized models of broadcast and participatory discourse trying to make money from communication. Social media has done nothing to change these basic models.

    Twitter is classic participatory model. Youtube is literally broadcast. Facebook was an attempt to have it both ways but primarily broadcast. Typically, Twitter is having much more fuss about the governance issue (typical participatory), Youtube and Facebook much more with censorship charges (typical broadcast).

    And of course, we still don’t know if they can make money off communication. In the early days, they made money off of the belief that they must be profitable, eventually. A lot of the money they made off of ads appears now to have been because they lied about it.

    When you say it “used to be run by young nerds”: Public discourse of all sorts is still pretty overwhelmingly male, from letters to the editor to today. Participatory online discourse is *very* male, at best broadcast gets to 50-50. So, for example, Twitter (participatory) is about 2:1 male, while Facebook (broadcast) is closer to 50-50.

    But online sharing is more female–this seems to be what you refer to as “lowbrow”. Pinterest and Snapchat are heavily female. The less talking, the more pictures and sharing, the more women. When women talk, it’s more commonly around brands and feedback or reviews. But even there, men tend slightly more towards Yelp, to give *all* people feedback, whereas women prefer Facebook, to give their friends their opinion.

    I don’t know that things will go anywhere until we get past the “use social media to economically and socially destroy people”, but happily Trump might have a lot to do with ending that, or at least reducing it.

    Meanwhile, online discourse will continue to kill paid media jobs–the want ads, newspaper ads are long since decimated. But book/food/movie/TV critics are increasingly rare as a paid occupation. The ones making money do so not because their opinions are valued so much as their writing and thoughts are. Online discourse is killing a lot of the traditional ads market as well, of course.

    I usually advise people not to confuse new technology with new patterns. There’s nothing new about social media save scale. Twitter in particular killed a lot of the usual costs associated with many to many discourse–but did so by giving up a lot of control, which is why so many journalists are whining about how meeean Twitter is.

    Businesses will continue to try and channel the huge interest in online discourse in a way that allows them to profit from it. That’s the constant. At this point in time, I see no new model of discourse arising.

  6. Good post & link to both Hanson and Arnold’s earlier 25 year analysis of internet.

    But I think the following concept is backwards.
    “The winner-take-all mentality took over.” The internet amplifies network effects, which include fewer but bigger winners. The internet, like any network, itself pushes a winner-take-all competitive environment.

    I’m sad about Facebook, but it’s clearly a win for most normal, non-politics obsessed folk, for having most of their friends and colleagues easily available for mass updates of “what’s up”. Tho other apps, like WhatsApp might be cooler for new folk, for awhile.

    I actually do think there should be more taxes on advertising — I consider it mind pollution. And I like text the best, especially thoughts & ideas, but understand how many prefer the simple videos and the comedy, and the cat stuff.

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