Hate or Love

Episode 578

February29, 2020

Computers have become the nexus of hate and of love.

 

We are empowered by the knowledge base of mankind. Google can answer any question we ask. The answers are both true and false.

We have embraced technology so throughly that we tend to trust whatever we read on the Internet.

In conversation, your interlocutor might question a statement that you make. You looked it up on the Internet last week. It was stated (with references) on Wikipedia.

What i know is true and “who are you to question my knowledge?”

Wikipedia is opinion. It is a crowd sourced encyclopedia which tends to be factual because it is crowd sourced. If someone posts a statement that someone else believes to be false, Wikipedia gets updated with the new information. The 6 million articles in Wikipedia are updated 2 times every second. There have been a trillion edits since Wikipedia began.
If you happen to land on an article just after a vandal or ill informed editor you might be reading a falsehood.

“Who are you to question my knowledge?” It is yourself that should be questioning your knowledge.

Critical thinking demands multiple sources in order to form an opinion.

Social media is rife with falsehood.
Nothing you read on Facebook is vetted.
Russian hacker bots try to spam my bLog comments 2-3 times a day. They were able to skew opinion in social media enough to change the results of the 2016 election.  It is happening again in 2020.

It is not strictly the computer that misinforms. The computer is just the vehicle. The content is the culprit. Content is created by people.

This megaphone for human opinion has exasperated the human condition.

Humans are tribal. They mistrust others who are different from themselves.

Humans are isolationists. You don’t have to be a hermit to wrap yourself in your house, family and tribe.

Humans are gullible.  If a lie is repeated enough, people will think it is true. Even when people know a fact to be true, if a falsehood about that thing is repeated multiple times they will believe it. Computers are really good at repetition. Copy and paste, forward and share are designed for repetition.

Computers proliferate memes. A meme is an idea that is repeated by imitation and spread rapidly via the Internet. Memes influence opinion. Memes can be classic, dank, normie, wholesome or surreal. Repetition makes them real.

Classic: Such as a baby farting powder. This may have been the first meme.

Dank: Comically ironic meme that become trite or cliché, such as Rick Roll videos. Also ironic is that “dank” means “really cool.”

Normie: Opposite of dank — funny to the “normal” masses.

Wholesome: Normie memes that take a negative symbol and make it nice, like a gun that shoots hearts.

Surreal: Bizarre or unusual visual memes that require intellectual effort or knowledge to understand.

What is popular is not necessarily right.
Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is doing it.

What you do with knowledge is more important than what you know.

Joy, Excitement, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Fear, Shame and Guilt are emotions.

Emotions are often evoked by the computer.

Whether they manifest as Hate or Love is up to the human.

2 Comments

  1. Vic Spindler February 26, 2020
  2. Terry February 26, 2020

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