Girard argues that the more that social differences and hierarchies are broken down and the more people become equal and closely connected to each other, the more at risk a society is of dangerous mimetic contagion.
.. What both Girard and Friedman highlight is the extreme importance of the factors that arrest or prevent the movement of impulses and emotions from one person to another, those structures, traits, and practices that enable us to create boundaries and distance between ourselves and others, to resist the pull of empathy, and to establish a well-defined—‘differentiated’—sense of ourselves and our own ‘response-able’ agency (as opposed to reactivity).
.. In its very structure, the Internet tends to bring us too close together in a number of ways that invite dysfunctionality.
.. How exactly does the contemporary Internet decrease differentiation? Here are a few ways. The Internet is fast, diminishing the differentiating factor of time. When everything moves at such a pace, we tend to react rather than taking the necessary pause for reflection necessary in order to respond.
.. The early forum and blogging communities that I participated in had relatively similar demographics to those described by the research above and enjoyed the vigorous yet collegial culture of discourse that tends to come with that. These communities worked so well in large part because they weren’t very fraught by gender differences in cultures of discourse or by racial or class tensions, and because almost every participant had some socialization into the standards of argumentation and discourse that one expects of those with higher education. The demographics of contexts and communities are very significant in determining the sorts of discourses that they can sustain and the demographics of the early Internet were demographics that encouraged the ‘broad engagement and diversity of ideas’ that Pao mentions.
.. In contrast to ‘crowdpounders’, trolls tend to be far more independent personalities, with a deep antipathy for groupthink, who love to antagonize people and exploit the dynamics of groupthink, people’s emotional reactivity, and lack of differentiation to get a rise from them. Trolls disrupt communities, and especiallycommunities that are dysfunctionally reactive or non-differentiated.
.. Trolls are more often than not highly dysfunctional—though often extremely intelligent—people themselves (other forms of trolling are shrewd uses of communities’ reactivity for a somewhat worthier purpose, such as the Apostle Paul’s trolling of the Jewish council in Acts 23).
.. Nonetheless, they can—generally inadvertently—perform positive social good in the course of their trolling. By exposing dysfunctions and making non-differentiated communities and reactive persons look ridiculous, they can save us all the trouble of taking these persons and groups as seriously as they would like to be taken, even if the troll themself appals us.
.. This is why trolls prey upon communities that tend to operate with herd dynamics, rather than upon self-aware communities. Their wry appreciation of triggering herd dynamics is often a coping mechanism for or a means of venting their deep frustration with the prevalence of such dynamics more generally and the ways that these dynamics impinge upon their lives.
.. To put it crudely, trolls can sometimes be the a**holes that societies need to expel the s**t that they otherwise can become full of.
.. Trolls can take many different forms and some trolls are decidedly unpleasant personalities. However, at their best, trolls can greatly enrich our online world, ensuring that the Internet never fully succumbs to the state of the sleepy settlement or to corporate colonization, but always retains something of the strangeness and unpredictability of the frontier, where people need to keep their wits about them, where they must develop thicker skins and take responsibility for themselves, and where startling and illuminating discovery can still occur. At their very best, trolls, like Socratic gadflies or biblical prophets, can serve to unsettle societies’ and individuals’ groupthink and their complacent relation to the truth. Such irritants can be some of the most important members of society.
.. They often exemplify the value of a thick skin for substantial discussion; they are wonderfully non-reactive, so one can speak forthrightly with them, without tiptoeing around sensitivities.
Freed From Iranian Jail: The Web We Have to Save
The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of thehypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web — a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
.. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
.. Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing at as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
.. At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages.
.. Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever.
.. The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
.. Perhaps I am worried about the wrong thing. Maybe it’s not the death of the hyperlink, or the centralization, exactly.
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
.. The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
The Next Internet Is TV
The only thing that keeps people coming back to apps in great enough numbers over time to make real money is the presence of other people. So the only apps that people use in the way publications want their readers to behave—with growing loyalty that can be turned into money—are communications services.
.. They begin to see their websites as Just One More App, and realize that fewer people are using them, proportionally, than before. Eventually they might even symbolically close their websites, finishing the job they started when they all stopped paying attention to what their front pages looked like.
.. They will be given new metrics that are both more shallow and more urgent than ever before; they will adapt to them, all the while avoiding, as is tradition, honest discussions about the relationship between success and quality and self-respect. They will learn to cater to the structures within which they are working and come up with some new forms. Some of what worked in print didn’t work on the web; some of what worked on the web didn’t work on social media; some of what worked on social media won’t work in these apps. (If you think Facebook had a distorting effect on news as a merereferrer, just wait until it’s a host.)
.. In this future, what publications will have done individually is adapt to survive; what they will have helped do together is take the grand weird promises of writing and reporting and film and art on the internet and consolidated them into a set of business interests that most closely resemble the TV industry.
.. If in five years I’m just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app, and Vice is just an age-skewed Viacom with better audience data, and I’m looking up the same trivia on Genius instead of Wikipedia, and “publications” are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?
A New Word on the Internet: parbunkells
She had wanted to find a word that did not appear in the results of a search engine, a word that was essentially absent from the World Wide Web.
.. “They have become very interested in my project, because it actually is an accurate measurement of viewership, and then translating into engagement,”