Ask A Genius 483 – Everything Falls Into the Paradox Vortex
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/24
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When we are talking about the media and the proliferation of media in different forms connecting to social media, there is also a breaking apart of, not entirely, the state propaganda. That is not just Trump. It can be Xi Jinping. It can be Putin. It can be others. Paradoxically, it is changing the discourse of the public.
In that before, they would probably more readily take in state propaganda.
Rick Rosner: I am going to be slightly more pessimistic than you in the short term, but not in the long term. Was it Archimedes who said to give him a level and a place to stand and he could move the world? Everyone has a lever or a megaphone. Nobody really knows what kind of leverage they have.
The proliferation and weaponization of social media have created issues in conjunction with the amplification of horrible movements and horrible people. Nobody knows what is happening and nobody knows who is winning. If you go through the sheer number of people who think he is a jackass and a monster, there are at least 4 billion across the Earth who would rate him negatively.
So, it is easy on Twitter, almost everybody I follow is anti-Trump and anti the rest of his ridiculous family. Although, Don, Jr., usually tweets stupid tweets. But he came to the defense of Chelsea Clinton who was under attack on the streets of New York for saying that Ilham Omar is antisemitic.
It is a little blip in the first thousand points of light for the first George Bush has turned into the Trump thousand crazy shits happening in a single day. Nobody knows who is going to prevail. Really, it is an inability to contextualize the social media technology. It is as if. You are too young to remember how cell phones were when they came out and only 1% of the population had them.
We just celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the smartphone. Imagine if instead of a gradual thing from the 80s to the 90s with the gradual penetration of the cell phones and smartphones into the population, everyone went from cell phones to everyone has a smartphone.
It would be chaos. Nobody would know how to deal with them. It is a little bit like chaos now. Because we have not been able to judge and incorporate social media and technology into our lives and our worldviews. The added accelerant is Trump adding a fire every 42 seconds.
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