What I am reading

What I am reading.
I just finshed Jonathan Haidt's article in The Atlantic., "After Babel: How socil media dissolved the mortar of society and made America stupid"

What I am reading.
I just finshed Jonathan Haidt's article in The Atlantic., "After Babel: How socil media dissolved the mortar of society and made America stupid"

 

This is a long article and worth reading, but let me summarize some:

The premise of this article is that starting in 2009 social media "innovations" of "likes" and " shares" together with the algoritms to supercharge the distribution of emotionally engaging content (especially anger and outrage) exacerbated political division. It gave outsized power to extreme points of view and encouraged misinformation and other forms of manipulation, by these extreme groups (left and right) and state actors with malignant intent.

Haidt suggests three recovery strategies

Harden Democratic Institutions to make them operationally less partisan and more open to compromise.

Reform social media to slow down shares and make them less anonymous. Not taking away the right to post with a pseudonym, but having that registered.

Educate the next generation - including not just social media etiquette, but unsupervised free play to allow the real--time development of social skills.

I get the irony of posting this on social media🙃