Personally I think the Internet is extremely good, and it is television that is bad. The Internet only got bad when people from The Television moved in and started using it.
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@mcc It's like when railroads were first invented and suddenly regular people could go to other countries and share ideas with eachother, they could move around in their own cities quickly, and this became such a serious threat that they forced everyone into cars.
@mcc "the Internet is bad" only for a rather specific and quite small (in comparison to the great masses of good useful information) subset of the Internet
@mcc the Internet is good ... I don't think it's only the tv people. I think it was the monetization part. Accessibility brought in a lot of people that wanted to use the internet as an appliance which drastically shifted the culture. There's plenty of room on the Internet for that, but where they landed is important. Being beholden to FB now meta for content that was feeding them what drove engagement to serve more ads and hoover up more data. Ads and data brokers are the real evil imo.
@mcc I would have felt horrible typing this but I’ve always felt it lol
@mcc That certainly resonates with how YouTube brought us a lot of bad. I wonder if it's because in-person communication, or at least better simulations of it (voice, visual expression) is much more persuasive*.
So... forum flame wars > siloed, video fuelled radicalisation?
* For me, anyway. Arguing with text feels like arguing with an idea, whereas disagreeing in person feels dangerous and bad and wrong so on balance what they're saying feels more likely to be right.
@mcc I'm also stuck on my hobby horse that floating IPs and home routers fucked up the internet.
It's like we had a telephone system, then lots of people wanted to join and bought a dodgy plan where their number kept changing, so they all got used to making calls and never receiving them. To talk to a friend you have to both call the same exchange, and running an exchange costs money so value has to be extracted.
Only making calls meant we could go ham with multiplexing, locking it in.
@mcc *tightens chin strap on tinfoil hat*
*gestures at IPv6 adoption timeline*
*glares at IPv6 addresses still being dynamically allocated even though they really don't need to be*
*raises an eyebrow at Google for nerfing the shit out of P2P browser communication by changing their WebRTC data channel implementation to ask the user for microphone permissions?!?!*
@Farbs Farbs I am SO angry about the WebRTC thing. I have been so angry for years.
@mcc Hmmm, I would argue that capitalism ruined the internet. (however I am currently in highschool so I never truly experienced the internet) So yeah, TV did ruin the internet because TV is very capitalist.
@mcc I'm willing to consider this viewpoint.
@mcc there's a well documented feedback loop between right-wing social media and fox news. fox news picks emerging talking points from niche corners of social media, amplifies them, and then those are the ones that diffuse out to most right-wing media consumers. there's no equivalent for liberals or the left (or there wasn't ten years ago when the analysis I'm thinking of was done)
@bob i think the more interesting thing on the right would be to draw a line all the way back to the "direct mail" networks in the 70s that helped build the Reagan revolution. If you look at early radio, direct mail, 90s talk radio, blogs, email forwards, social media, the far right is typically extremely good at adapting to new media and the left almost always plays catchup. TikTok is the only emerging form I can think of where the left was on an equal footing, and Biden/Ellison ended that.
@bob One thing that does interest me is Fox was trying to put a finger on the scales with both the blogosphere and the email forwards eras of right-wing Internet communication, but it didn't really "move onto" the Internet wholesale until Twitter, and the right didn't really own the Internet until around that same period. I can't tell if it's a coincidence that's the same time as the harassment campaigns.
@mcc the left and the libertarians did compete on equal footing in the late 90s, but the left didn't have any ability to organize outside of the internet and liberals always wished the internet would go away. liberals are just really attached to existing institutions and aren't willing to lean into the disruptive new thing like the right is.
@mcc A part of me wants to say that the Internet is good but social media is bad...but then I remembered Penny Arcade described this problem in 2004. Things only got a lot worse since then.
@mcc I definitely miss the days when going online and communicating with people I'd never met meant regular people called me a weirdo.
People with the same kind of attitude might now think I'm weird now for not posting up my opinions on facebook.
I mean, you *are* posting up your opinions on a website. Not the same website as them, but still.
@argv_minus_one @chrisradonc If this is a "website" then why can't I use HTML and why is there a 500 character limit
@argv_minus_one @chrisradonc Now, Cohost… that was a website.
@mcc @argv_minus_one just been reading it's wikipedia page. I'm sorry I missed it,
@mcc I'm reminded of Rick Mercer's opening monologue for Made in Canada.
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All my life I wanted to make movies. A good movie can change lives. A great movie can change the world. But television, it's different. It's not about making a difference. Television's about making one thing only. Money. I work in television; I can get behind anything.
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