Arnon Grunberg

Distort

Scale

On our brain – Thomas B. Edsall in NYT:

‘The human brain, Van Bavel [member of the psychology department at N.Y.U.] noted, did not evolve for online interactions but instead for the real world dynamics of interpersonal interactions. We are skilled at reading body language, understanding the social context and cooperating with others. The online environment can take some of our social instincts and exploit or distort them. This can lead to online public shaming or ineffective collective action, rather than to the type of third-party punishment that is often necessary for fostering cooperation.
Where does that leave us? When the massive scale of the internet interacts with people’s instinct to feel compassion for victims of moral transgressions, it can result in compassion fatigue.
The processes Robertson and Van Bavel described have entered our politics. How else to explain the habituation of millions of voters, perhaps even a majority, to the ever-growing list of Trump’s transgressions? “Nearly five billion people are on social media,” Van Bavel wrote: The average user is online for three hours a day and scrolls through roughly 300 feet of news content — the height of the Statue of Liberty.
We are just starting to understand how this impacts our relationships and sense of identity, let alone society and democracy. Although the effects might be small on a daily or weekly basis, there is reason to think it might matter a great deal on the scale of years or decades due to the large user base.’

Read the article here.

I hate to tendency to blame new technologies for our shortcomings, but maybe sociale media is let’s say smoking.

Once it was hip and cool, nowadays in many places it’s something for the pariahs and the junkies that are not yet ready for heroine.

Sell your stocks on time, or count on humans and their invincible addictions. The latter is needless to say the best investment strategy.

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