Ask HN: Is our society equipped to deal with modern social networks and tech?

2 points by throwawaylala1 2 years ago | 1 comment

It feels like our social constructs are not designed to deal with modern technology.

Consider how real world communities are organized. In most of the world we have residential districts and commercial districts. Residential districts are meant to be a quiet place of rest/reflection and commercial districts are where people gather to advance our society forward.

Big cities are a special mix of commercial/residential but with their own constraints and culture.

When a human being walks down the street, visits a restaurant, or goes shopping they aren't inundated with political view points, bad news from everywhere in the world, memes, etc. We as a society have specially allocated spaces for things like this. Maybe it's the city center where people stand around with megaphones preaching something. Or maybe it's a conference where people gather and exchange viewpoints. Or a university where the focus is learning and information exchange.

These "social constructs", for lack of a better term (?), took thousands of years to build and optimize. And most of them were built in an age where information took a long time to travel.

But today information travels fast. We are all connected more than ever before. Humanity consists of large hive minds that can feed information to each other instantly at any time of day.

What I'm wondering is...

- What are the long term side effects of an unfiltered, unlimited, and rapid transfer of information from arbitrary sources?

- Is the human mind even capable of operating in a global information system. Put another way, hasn't most of human evolution occurred within smaller local ("tribal"?) communities; a scale we can deal with mentally?

Every year it feels like more and more of our humanity is being transferred into a virtual space that is no more real than a video game. The connection with close friends and relatives is still there but I feel the connection loosening despite my best efforts. I see this happening to everyone around me, not just myself.

It feels like local communities are dying or completely non-existent. We aren't "forced" to deal with each other and so we... don't.

Something crucial is missing and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. And I'm worried.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

bombcar 2 years ago |

> It feels like local communities are dying or completely non-existent. We aren't "forced" to deal with each other and so we... don't.

This is somewhat true, but you can escape it if you want to. It just takes some effort and dealing with people that you normally wouldn't.

However, just like advertising has worked out how to maximize our "spend" so also other forces have worked out how to maximize other things they want us to do.

As the screeching gets louder and louder you just have to ignore it more and more.

I found that absolutely refusing to vote in elections did it for me; my vote is mathematically insignificant and since I won't use it, all the various howling attempts to get me to do so are easily ignored. Probably not for everyone.