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The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, If Not Unravelling
- mikece 6y agoCould it possibly be aggravated by the media telling us things that are obviously and immediately contradicted from what we see of raw, first person video accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube?
- verdverm 6y agoIt might be their narrative based journalism and their beliefs for what will happen if they tell their tall tales.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoNarrative based journalism is just a cop out these days. "Oh this report is not in line with my beliefs? must be an agenda."
- verdverm 6y agoIt's not a cop out, there is obvious and heavy bias, fact selection and omission, across all major news outlets
- dragonwriter 6y agoThere always has been, what's different these days is the lack of homogeneity in all those factors across major news outlets.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoThere is just as much bias in the reader - now they just dismiss everything because it's "an agenda."
- harimau777 6y agoDo you think that's true of both sides? As a progressive, a lot of my frustration with "the other side" is that they seem to ignore what I'm seeing in the first person video accounts. However, I'm wondering if people on the other side feel the same way about me.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoMaybe those who identify as a truth seeker instead of as a progressive or a conservative find it easier to see what is happening in the world. Where do your first person video accounts come from? Are the edited? Are the missing content at the start or at the end that other first person video accounts include? Would your sources ever admit this or would you have to go to "the other side" to find the video in its entirety? Would you even know that the other side has a video with a more complete view of what happened? There are many ways to lie with video, lies of omission being quite common these days.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoThis is exactly the problem - no one has time to do this, nor do they want to.
- Digory 6y agoHow does “truth seeker” help, say, with Teacher Unions supporting guillotines for Jeff Bezos?[0] I think our epistemic agreements are gone, yes, but it feels like we’d be polarized today even with epistemic agreement. It is true that Amazon has caused some bad things in the world, which has some factual basis, and we all might agree. But our ethics of eradication of obstacles to personal happiness has turned toxic. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ctulocal1/status/1299101069163859968 https://mobile.twitter.com/ctulocal1/status/1299101069163859...
- mikece 6y agoOne of the sources for "raw info" that I follow is the No Agenda Podcast (co-hosted by former MTV VJ and co-inventor or podcasting Adam Curry and former tech columnist John C. Dvorak). They position their podcast as "media deconstruction" and contrasting what the media say versus what is actually going on, and they slam Fox News every bit as much -- if not more -- as anyone else. I'll tell you what gives me hope though: podcasts like the Joe Rogan Show where Joe, who is very progressive, will talk with ANYONE in order to discuss and understand differences. And this is one of the biggest weakness of mass media these days: if it cannot be condensed to a sound bite it's ignored. A thriving democracy is supposed to be a place where differing points of view are debated vigorously but with mutual respect between the parties debating. Unfortunately, these days it seems to be a race to get to the point where you can dehumanize your opponent, and this is a fault of both the left and right. You ask who people on the other side think about you: I'm not a progressive but I don't think it's black and white either. I think we could probably agree on 80%+ of RELEVANT political issues... assuming we don't let a polarized media exaggerate what is actually relevant. We all want to be happy, we all want to be loved, we all want the next generation to prosper... I think that's universal.
- Galaxity 6y agoI see no reason to believe that. What is an example where videos on social media contradict the news reporters? It does seem likely though that these videos on social media are showing media are showing one perspective that easily misleads people who then don't receive the context of the situation or view sfrom other angles that news media provides far better.
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- StephenAmar 6y agoI'm sorry but I need an example. This is not my daily experience.
- stephenbez 6y agoHere is an example where different sides end up with a completely different conclusions based on the same information: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1298923653896130560?s=21 https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/129892365389613056... It’s probably not worthwhile discussing this particular case in HN, but it’s not rare for me to scroll my Facebook feed and see completely different interpretations of the same event.
- burfog 6y agoIt got submitted, but only got 4 points and 3 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24282729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24282729
- StephenAmar 6y agoSo you disagree with the root comment. Raw footage is not enough. You need investigative work by journalists and to trust them even if you disagree. This twitter thread proves that there is no such thing as an unbiased interpretation of raw footage of that kind.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoBack then 'the media' was a thing. Walter Cronkite would come on TV and tell everybody what was going on, and you'd see some footage of some guys in Vietnam looking miserable and that was it. That level of political simplification isn't an option anymore. We're no longer hidden from the complexities festering beneath the surface of everything happening around us.
- sjg007 6y agoI am pretty sure things back then were both similarly complex even though they appeared simple. Today, your FB feed is simple since it is auto-tuned to your beliefs.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoOn the contrary, that level of political simplification is needed now more than ever. It didn't get more complex. It simply got noisier. The signal is lost, and people are flooded with information constantly - there is simply no way to verify truth. No one has the time to fact check the 100 tweets they saw today, or the 20 posts they saw on reddit, or the 30 pictures they saw on instagram. My grandfather would watch italian news on RAI TV. The news there had an anchor. The show started with the anchor reading headlines. Then they went into each headline with more detail. Very limited ads. Straight, to the point. We need more of that.
- throw149102 6y agoI think the problem denoted in the article is far larger than losing a trust in news media because of what people are seeing on a video. Thinking that CNN is full of crap doesn't make young and healthy people want to kill themselves, and that's where we are. Like the article said, we have a generation of people who are so lonely and depressed that 25% of them have thought seriously about suicide in the past 30 days. We're living in a death cult. That's not to say that the loss of faith in institutions, especially the news, isn't a big deal, but personally I think this problem is 10 to 100 times bigger than that. It's an economic collapse, a pandemic, growing income inequality, climate change, the effect of technology on our minds, what we put into our bodies, and a thousand other things I can't even begin to name. The more I read and think about the world today, the more I think that mental health is the problem of the 21st century, and that the previous list of issues is actually all secondary to the problem of mental health. There are enough resources and enough intelligence to solve all of those problems and more if we had the will.
- CapricornNoble 6y ago>>>Like the article said, we have a generation of people who are so lonely and depressed that 25% of them have thought seriously about suicide in the past 30 days. We're living in a death cult. Is that surprising when educators are pushing a deconstructionist approach to so many topics? Young people are just ending up confused and rudderless, and with the rise in single-parent households, kids aren't necessarily getting a comprehensive and emotionally-balanced upbringing either. I'd argue that a lot of this stuff will manifest as mental health issues, but those will be the symptoms, not the cause. The causes are failures to adequately train and mentor our youth, and that begins with how we are failing to train young adults to be parents.... partly because we're failing to hold them accountable for even basic "be an adult" responsibilities and an understanding of consequences to their actions.
- throw149102 6y agoTo be honest, I'm not particularly familiar with how a deconstructionist approach to education works, so I won't vouch for or against it. I do see the rise in single-parent households being an issue, but there's something confusing about that. I would expect kids to "act out" more if there was more psychological pressure on them, but the rates of things like teenage pregnancy and underage drinking is down over the past decade. This is in contrast to rates of depression increasing dramatically, even by 50% (around 8% to 13% in about a decade) in that exact age group (12-17). Finally, as a young person myself, my (relatively recent) experience of highschool and being a teenager was quite the opposite - it's not that adults aren't holding them accountable, it's that they are holding themselves hyper-accountable. Both in the fact that they are comparing themselves to world-class performers on social media, and that there is now a permanent record of their social interactions online which can lead to politically correct woke mobs going after them. Being young in the US feels like walking on a tightrope while there's an earthquake going on.
- reducesuffering 6y agoWhile very resonating and personal, I wish he had included data in comparison with the rest of the world. Data on where the US falls short, relatively, could give better insight into identifying the problems and getting to the solutions.
- makomk 6y agoMy general assumption these days is that, if an article portraying something as a uniquely American ill or failing hasn't bothered to put the stats it's using in context by comparing them with other countries, it's because those comparisons would get in the way of the article's thesis. Though maybe I'm getting cynical from having followed your media's coverage of Covid-19 over the past few months.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoRobert Putnum has studied this extensively and was considered the domain expert until his results didn't match the ever changing requirements of adherence to political correctness. His work is still out there but even the linked article didn't bother to reference it. His data concluded the wrong thing so now it is to be shoved to the side so everyone can shrug their shoulders and pretend not to see what's at the heart of society's unravelling.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoCan you please provide context? Which results? Which rules of political correctness?
- c06n 6y agoNot OP, but I think they refer to Putnam's work on the negative effects of diversity on social cohesion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and_trust_within_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...
- sjg007 6y agoRussia is winning.
- aaron695 6y ago>Many people fortunate enough to have survived this pandemic with their physical health intact It's just the flu for 90% of people. So this constant you are a 'survivor' for everything that happens to you can't be helping. We now take pride in anti-stoicism.
- duckMuppet 6y agoYes but if you're a progressive that's an anti science statement, an alternative fact... And making statements will have progressives screaming science denial at you while you're eating at a restaurant. Scientism is generally the method of repentance for religious atheists or atheism in general. For them, the science is settled.. Climate change is catastrophic and we only have a few years to live. But that's if you don't die from the Rona long before because the other side is fighting against a vaccine and there's a large majority of them who might not take the vaccine... Which in turn would kill a mass majority of the people left dealing with climate change. But actually, there may not be anyone left to combat climate change or the virus in the U.S. anyhow, because everyone is dying from white supremacists on shooting sprees due to lack of gun control. They. Are. Literally. Dying.... The irony is that you see such contempt for individuals with an alternative non mainstream belief structures such as Judaism or Christianity now while they hang their mask from their Subaru mirror with their "believe in science" or "trust the experts" bumper stickers.
- anm89 6y ago>Why, in the world’s richest country, is every metric of mental health pathology rapidly worsening? Simple. A lot of people are not having their needs met by "the system" while simultaneously feeling the resources are there to have their needs met. People in third world countries seemingly deal much better in many ways in my experience. Although their needs aren't being met, they see no path to their needs being met, that just feels like reality to them. People in the US who's needs aren't met have the thing they want thrown in their face to the point of absurdity constantly.
- mbrodersen 6y agoThe US stopped being "government of the people, by the people, for the people" a long time ago. And the population is slowly waking up to that fact. I fear that the long term consequences will be seriously bad. As in "You ain't seen nothing yet."
- vanusa 6y agoHas been, for generations now. This is news?