In today's era, social media has broken through its role as a tool for people to communicate and maintain their feelings. On the one hand, people's lives are more convenient. For example, they can come with a finger car and go anywhere they want. On the other hand, some very dangerous shortcomings have gradually been exposed:
1. Make people's opinions extreme . Dispersed people tend to have a milder attitude towards events than in groups. In groups with the same opinion on the Internet, emotional people's attitudes towards events are directly pulled to the extreme due to their sense of belonging and confirmation. Even the position is greater than rational, the contradiction is bigger, the small is the online tearing, and the big is the social unrest.
2. Tools such as recommendation algorithms use group homogeneity to enhance the speed of fake news dissemination and increase the number of dissemination groups. Research has shown that fake news spreads six times faster than the truth, and recommendation algorithms are designed to nudge users what they might be interested in. Artificial intelligence, especially recommender systems, can recommend to you what you are interested in, but it can never tell you whether the information is true or false. While pushing the good things that users may be interested in, it also inadvertently pushes false conspiracy theories that are more likely to be of interest to groups who are likely to believe in fake news. If these public opinions and false news are excessive, they will not be able to arouse emotions. The behavior of some groups that destroy society has a great promotion effect.
3. The Internet accelerates the speed of crowd gathering. On the good side, people in need in society raise funds quickly, etc. On the bad side, from the influence of the general election, to the massacre in Myanmar, to the unrest of extremists around the world, the crowd gathers faster.
4. Manipulating them through social media is definitely more effective than other tools for people who tend to take information without thinking . The violent and coercive indoctrination of "1984" is extremely easy to cause resistance, while everyone in "Brave New World" has been brainwashed by public opinion since birth, accepting class solidification, accepting that everyone is born unequal, refusing to think, The kind of utopia in which everyone is comfortable and does not think is the grave of human civilization. And the truth is, in today’s world, it only takes an influential person to say a word three times for a lot of people to believe it. One thing to let everyone forget, just don't mention it again, and rush other entertainment gossip to the hot search to divert attention. In "Return to Brave New World", Huxley also proposed that public opinion tools are one of the most effective ways of brainwashing . Especially for cognitively incomplete adolescents, it is especially obvious and effective.
Even in non-referendum countries where fb/tweet does not exist, most people cannot escape the control of social media/recommendation algorithms: consumerism is rampant on apps such as Xiaohongshu, luxury cars and flowers are expressions of love for you, and material desires are flooded The single value of 's is accepted by many girls without thinking. When did vanity and material desire become synonymous with true love? Short videos of more than ten seconds instantly satisfy people's anxiety and emptiness, and the stimulated dopamine is satisfying, but dopamine is a With a withdrawal effect, the exhaustion of the disappearance of dopamine is even more uncomfortable, so we can't help but start the next video again and continue to stimulate for instant gratification . Immediate gratification is not terrible, but in the long run, when people get used to this speed of gratification, they can no longer tolerate delayed gratification, read books patiently, think carefully, and cannot settle down to do anything that requires accumulation. Delayed gratification is precisely an important way for a person to learn to think, learn to accumulate and precipitate, and learn to get along with himself and the world.
We live in an age where entertainment is paramount, but please, throw away the phone, what other entertainment do we have?
Our lives are full of instant gratifications, do we remember the last time we were patient with something uninteresting?
We are in the era of information explosion, but the more fragmented reading, can we fully describe the general framework of even a field or even the fragmented knowledge we have seen?
If we don't think about it and believe what social networks tell us, throw away that, throw away the hearsay, can we really tell what's right and what's wrong?
If we stand on a stand, think irrationally, tolerate and understand opposites, treat those with different opinions as enemies instead of collaborators, and resolutely do not give in, will this society really not make this society more turbulent? Isn't social stability achieved through the common recognition/understanding/concession of different interest groups?
If we throw away all electronic devices, all addictive apps, all substances that give us vanity/satisfaction, do we still know who we are?
Artificial intelligence will only get smarter and more convenient for people. Convenience means easy acceptance and overcoming resistance, which is very effective for the convenience of life; the opposite of it is that it will lead everyone to succumb to the parts that are easier to evoke, such as human desires and emotions, because desires are The most easily aroused part of human nature, and thinking and judgment is a slightly painful process that is unwilling to be easily aroused by most people. But as a human being, restraining desire and maintaining rationality is an important characteristic that distinguishes humans from animals. If we don’t think, don’t limit ourselves, we gradually become a rabble manipulated by our own inventions, who don’t understand, don’t identify with, don’t tolerate groups whose opinions and positions differ from ours, never give in, fall into attacking the opposite, or even support our own positions Whatever you do, you will not get a better tomorrow, but the rise of extremist forces, social disintegration and turmoil , and these examples are the massacre of Islamic believers in Myanmar. The protests, in which the group controls public opinion behind the scenes, are the terrorism of various underground organizations. They really exist and are always happening in this world.
Maybe it's time to get rid of the rhetoric that others have imposed on you about how you should be, to give up your readiness to accept everything without hesitation, to truly understand yourself, to learn to truly distinguish right from wrong and to analyze things. The real freedom is not just the right to speak, but the words and decisions made carefully after learning to think independently and no longer being manipulated and brainwashed by any public opinion or anyone.
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