Comments on: “Is This Helpful?”

By: Patrich Shaw

Patrich Shaw — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 19:58:26 +0000

Mike – Love to know more when you are ready about self-segregating. I ditched my social media accounts last month for many of the same reasons you mention. And have been starting a list of indicators that is might be time to pick up and leave. Not necessarily because I think they will come true, but because I want to know the difference, in advance of “the sky is falling!” and something more clinical. My list is started over here: https://patrickcshaw.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/leaving-the-land/

I’ve been reading your stuff since the days of flash based text replacement!

Cheers,

Patrick

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 17:51:33 +0000

Devon: Yep. While that Obamacare/ACA FB thread was entertaining, my first thought was to refrain from forwarding it because it seemed potentially fake. I think you’re definitely right about the staking out of positions as quickly and aggressively as possible being a huge culprit in what we see today. Some of the ideas I’ve been marinating on go directly towards eliminating this phenomenon. In other words, moving from a tug-of-war to more of a three-legged race.

Steven: Thanks! I just read it. Really really good.

By: Steven Garrity

Steven Garrity — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 23:04:16 +0000

Mike, I hereby *demand* (ok, politely suggest) that you also read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit) where he writes that “[t]he great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Also, it’s great to see writing on an independent blog like this.

By: Devon Shaw

Devon Shaw — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 20:30:13 +0000

It’s an important distinction that shortform content like tweets, Facebook posts and screencaps of random postings/sayings are highly susceptible to troll behavior, falsehood, photoshopping/doctoring and out-of-context discussion. The viral post about the guy on Facebook not knowing that the ACA and Obamacare were the same thing was, in fact, a troll and has been locked/removed from various subreddits because of the lack of authenticity. When you traverse the land of shortform, you need the tallest boots possible to wade through the muck of incomplete and/or incomprehensible drivel, because the very format itself is wholly incapable of sustaining articulate discussion. This was never more apparent than when Eric Garland went on his mammoth 127-tweet tirade back in December. People were praising it as a “Federalist Papers of our time” (whatever that means), but if you actually laid out the tweets end-to-end in full longform paragraphs, it became immediately apparent how poorly-written and considered it really was.

It doesn’t help that the modern trend of discourse moves at the speed of Twitter, because it’s driven by people staking out positions to control the agenda of the discussion rather than actual investigative journalism. It’s *all* fake news, in a sense. Perpetually incomplete; lacking context. We used to have a chance to marinate in editorials and consider our positions. Now you’re only heard if you shout loudly and abrasively enough on the internet. Technology has created such a severe regression in communication and articulation, I wonder if we’ll ever truly gain it back. We were promised an enlightenment — if we could keep it.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 14:20:47 +0000

I, and my RSS reader, appreciate the longer pieces and look forward to more.