Criticism of problematic media is part of the discourse surrounding the GG/free will/causality/etc. ideological demarcation:
The belief that
people who play violent videogames will go do violence is internally
consistent, and you can pick out examples that seem to support it. The
belief that people who are predisposed to violent behavior are drawn to
violent videogames (potentially reducing their IRL violent behavior) can
also explain most of the same examples. But if we can accept that
religious texts dramatically alter behavior, it’s hard to see how more
immersive media can’t do the same. The primary difference seems to come
down to the responsibility of the user/consumer to distinguish between
fiction and reality. Obviously some people have trouble with this, so
it’s sort of victim blaming to ask sane people to limit their media
consumption based on the needs of the insane (especially if some of the
sane people claim that the same videogame or religious text helps them
remain sane). To what extent should global limits be imposed to
accommodate dangerous subgroups?
This also applies to affirmative consent, banned books, pornography,
profiling, immigration, internet privacy, satire exemptions, hate
speech, death threats, gun control, etc.
But, of course, everyone with a loud opinion on the matter clusters
at one of the poles. Ideological consistency seems to fuel zeal (maybe
people mistake it for correctness?) even if the internally inconsistent
middle ground is probably the most globally consistent position in this
case, given the limited evidence on both sides.
I’m starting to think maybe individual people just dramatically differ in degree and organization of neuroplasticity. Analogous to how only a few people make it to age 95, and a surprising fraction of them haven’t made particularly healthy life choices. Also seems analogous to alcoholism and other addictions. Or, well, not analogous. Probably closely physically related.
So then the question is how do you optimally distribute choice (freedom?) when people differ substantially in their proclivities and fail states?
I think it comes back to industrializing customizability and classical media:
Mass/few-to-many mediums (e.g. magazines, movies, religious codices,
not private letters, not home movies, etc.) seem to start out as mostly
homogenizing forces that end up becoming maximally customizable (e.g.
pre-industrial writing limited to scribe output –> movable type),
probably just because industry specializes in cheap clones and it’s
easier to sell new technologies when there is a large population that
can afford them (and industrializing customizability is hard). The
internet is a maximally-customizable amalgam of a lot of the preceding
mass media forms (movable type, radio, TV, movies, magazines, etc.).
Rather than catering to a mostly static collection of demographic groups
(e.g. Nielson qualifications were probably chosen to focus network
competition on optimizing the idealized American family unit, as opposed to…)
the internet uses link trees (and, nowadays, complex creepy profiles)
to sort people by preferences. So all this shrieking and tweeting and
recording and whining seem to mostly just reflect the ways presently
popular media shape the zeitgeist. Indie videogame culture seems to have
gestated the spark of a major critique about how virtual worlds are
critiqued (yes, a critique of critiquery) that has since been shown to
apply to many other trusted simulation media (e.g. symbols attempting to
accurately and honestly portray the real) that society has come to rely
on – including the newsmedia.
Assuming in-person communication involves nonclassical information that is robust against decoherence
(I know I’m alone in thinking this, but I have a soccer ball with a
bloody handprint to keep me company, so it’s cool), it’s at least
possible that mass media has been giving us a very lopsided view of the
observable world. A quantum internet might finally reverse the trend,
starting with Seth Lloyd’s secure search algorithm (a properly entangled
database can be searched with complete security in a way that is only
classically available if you custom encrypt the entire index for each
new query) and continuing on to some sort of “one observation per
transmission” snapchat/DRM thing for analoggish media (audio, video, not
text, etc.). I also expect smellovision to finally become a thing
because of the aforelinked vibrational theory of olfaction. Also-also, quantum voting.
Seriously tho, proliferation of classical limited mass media is partly implicated in multiple genocides:
Television slightly sort of ‘sobered us up,’ because the radio society was the worst society we ever invented, and the most dangerous one. That was Adolf Hitler in Germany the nineteen thirties and that was Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties and it was Yugoslavia in the nineteen-eighties…Radio societies - where a dictator [is] speaking on the radio and you can’t even see how evil he is - can really make you go out and kill your neighbor…Radio was a really dangerous thing.
Ignoring basic human variation also gets innocent people killed. It may even turn out to be as costly as assuming human variation is absolute and immutable. Classical media obfuscates subtle cues that are present IRL (vocal stuff, facial topology, probably also rest mass stuff like pheromones or microbiota, etc.). We’ll see if things shape up when we start communicating via quantum secure channels. Quantum voting should finally fix the douche vs. turd sandwich problem.
