It seems, based on energy invested in passionate discourses in forums by
otherwise intelligent people, that there is little understanding of
cellularity of machine-mediated communications.
The amount of cross-talk, which is essential for spreading ideas to
wider audiences, is near-zero. The perfection with which machines carve
out the communication cells has no parallel in the history. One is
always talking to known audience in a hermetic echo chamber, a gated
community.
Subscribers. Followers. Supporters. Members. Goers. Forums. Invites.
First you must identify yourself and join as the set member, then you
can 'participate'. All set memberships are known to anyone that cares to
find out, neatly recorded, logged and archived. The decision to join is
set-based, not idea-based. Even if there was an idea used to market the
set, the set is what remains. Such set is a death trap for an idea,
which is probably why there is so much investment in enabling sets. Just
think of it ... when you are interested in something, first you look for
the set to lock yourself in.
Of course, there were groups before, but there was always cross talk.
Information traveling through the air (light, sound) is broadcast by
nature, not targeted. Ideas permeate environment accidentally or
intentionally.
The notion that variety of 'groups' somehow represents choice and
improvement is utter bs. There are estimates of over 600 million FB
groups, and possibly hundreds thousands of GOOG groups (it's interesting
that these numbers are never published. Platforms boast about numbers -
users, visits, etc., but they will never reveal number of sets.) It
looks much more like a fine-grained Venus flytrap.
Can you even imagine Christianity of Bolsheviks succeeding if they had
FB pages?
The war on indiscriminate idea broadcast in the machine mediums began
with the demise of web sites. Being DNS-addressable and reachable by
everyone, they mimicked the pre-machine communication world. This was
effected by suppression of URLs: instead of using the actual name, the
hapless user was trained to 'say' what he wants, and then the authority
would point to approved places that dealt with the topic. This training
was incredibly successful: look around you - how many cretins begin web
browsing by typing into GOOG search bar? Even if they know the f*cking
URL, they will still type it into GOOG search bar. Some browsers even
hide the address field.
The point is that the shit we're in is effected by some rather
pedestrian means at the infrastructure level, which then have been made
invisible by propaganda, and the way out is not some grand scheme, but
rather simple de-programming. Or are we no better than elephants? (see
"baby elephant syndrome" ... I wonder what elephants philosophize about
in later years to explain their condition?)
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