Teens on TikTok speak the exact same tone of voice, the same smug tone. Millennials on Twitter use the same acronym. man! There is a normal! Even if you meet them in the sun-drenched real world, even as British, they’ll say “valid” or “based”, or “y’all”…
Everything you say online is subject to an instant reward system. Each platform has a set of metrics; you can precisely quantify how popular your idea is by the number of likes, shares, or retweets it receives. For almost everyone, the game is irresistible: they end up trying to say what the machine will like . The situation is more damaging than the panic-inducing online censorship. You don’t have freedom of speech – not because someone might block your account, but because there’s a huge incentive structure that constantly steers your speech in certain directions. Unlike overt censorship, this is not a policy that can be changed, but a pure function of the internet connection itself. That’s probably why so many articles from the internet are so dull, bouncing back and forth between anger and ridicule, begging for a click, like a machine babbling…
The Internet is not a communication system. Instead of passing information between people, it simulates the experience between people, which is not what books or shopping lists or even phone calls do. And there’s always something that the simulation can’t capture. In Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy, your moral responsibility to others appears on the face, an experience of directly confronting another living subject. “Face is what stops us from killing…” But Facebook is a faceless world. Only facial images, selfies, avatars: all dead things. Or a moving image in a FaceTime chat: a puppet that looks like a haunted figure. There is always something in your way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.
As social life takes place more and more online, you are training yourself to believe that other people are not real people and that you have no responsibility for them. Even if you take your eyes off the screen, the impact doesn’t go away… Many of the major conflicts within major institutions over the past few years seem to have stemmed from the expectation that the world should work like the Internet. If you don’t like someone, you should be able to “block” them: just push a button and make them disappear forever.
This article is reprinted from: https://www.solidot.org/story?sid=71605
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