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Enough with the election. Let's talk about memes, sort of, in relation to message discipline, consensus building, and partisanship... for elections. Sort of.
I've been meaning to tap the motte-trust on this topic. Spurred by this comment by @Goodguy below. The following ramblings make me feel a great deal of shame. Forgive me, senseis.
I've been having similar thoughts as Mr. GoodGuy. Not just because it's campaign season, although this is part of it, but it's a general noooticing. I have always assumed astroturfing has had an impact on what people say online, but post-2020 it became more visible, or perhaps less bearable personally. 2016 set the stage, and probably perfected some systems, and now it does sometimes feel like Dead Internet Theory is real. But, instead of bots, these are performers.
Since most of you are credentialed internetters familiar with web surfing the following few paragraphs may not be necessary:
A recent case study that has spurred my curiosity is /r/npr/. I have been subscribed to the NPR subreddit for a long time. I don't engage there, but I would visit it a few times a year. Historically, it has been a relatively low comment activity link aggregate for NPR stories and podcasts. The most common type of post that received comments would be an NPR story and a few dozen comments. A specific program was good or bad and a few users would come talk about it. Between the years of 2018-2022 there was also a recurring "what has happened to NPR?" themed post.
Until around last Fall. I started checking it more frequently, because news was hot, I was weak, and the reddit-fication can be interesting in a guilty pleasure way. First October 7th, the the college protest stuff, then January 1st rolled around (it became an election year), Claudine gay was fired, more college protest stuff, then finally Uri Berliner's story came out in Spring.
Which is a rough, anecdotally polluted, timeline-- a relatively quiet link aggregate transformed into /r/politics blob with /r/politics type of consensus. My recollection of the sub as a light user could be wrong. Maybe it was part of the /r/politics blob already and I just missed the switch. It saw a ton of growth during the happening years, but a couple examples follow my concept of the subreddit:
Despite its astronomical growth following 2020 I didn't notice a full on reddit political consensus until this year. And, if I were visiting between then and now, I'm fairly sure I would have noticed. I am no n00b nor naive traveler. I know what to expect from Popular Reddit Sub, but the comments in those places are still rather unbelievable.*
The sub now experiences an insane amount of increased activity in comments in the vein of /r/politics. Seriously, just go read the comment section. Almost like a flip was switched as it was decided this place was an important canvas to paint.
"Well, duh, @wemptronics, of course reddit is astroturfed," you say. But, my curiosity isn't limited to reddit-leftist types of blob. I see this many places in any popular English speaking onlineville. That's the basis for some general follow up questions and thoughts-- poorly formatted and ill-considered.
Is the social-media-net made up of a bunch of actors with too much spare time playing roles manipulated by a just a little bit of astroturf and narrative controls? How much weight do astroturf campaigns and organizations carry on social media? How much of what people say on large social media platforms is authentic types of group think and reinforcement?
Has anyone begun studying this stuff yet? Has the internet sociology and history been ideologically captured yet? It's too much for my small brain to systematize, nor do I want to spend time doing so for free.
Besides getting out of the screen, here are some ways I reason myself out of "wtf these people can't exist" Kookville:
Was this all just a roundabout way for me to scream, "Wake Up Sheeple" as I tip my fedora violently? Perhaps. Eternal September is not a new topic to this forum. But, geez, when I venture a little too far out into genpop, when I dive into a Twitter chain I shouldn't, when I click the "comments" section at WaPo, NYT, NYpost I am reminded just exactly what never was or will be.
I'm more familiar with the online left spaces but many people really have imbibed a certain mindset. They sound like CNN anchors or press secretaries that are deeply anxious about the discourse and how giving voice to certain narratives or allowing the opposition to set the frame will lead to defeat. Kind of understandable if you have an audience of millions and a bit silly and sad if you're on reddit.
But these are the sorts of people that'd self-astroturf.
I’ve noticed the same. It’s memes all the way down. I think a lot of it is down to a couple of things: decline in literacy and numeracy (because our schools no longer care if students can read or do math at grade level), shrinking attention spans, and the always online nature of the post 1990s generations.
I suspect the always present nature of the internet has flattened culture by quite a lot because of the nature of culture and idea generation. Ideas are always thought up in isolation, by either a single individual or a small group of people. The small group has an idea — a technology, a new take on art, a new concept, a solution to a social problem, etc. — and then develops this new idea in mostly private until it reaches a point where it can be shown to the world. But because the internet is always on and in everyone’s pockets, the idea is never completed before it’s shouted to the world. In politics, these are hot takes and memes. It’s pretty easy to see once you start paying attention to it, but almost none of the political discourse is about politics it’s about appearances. Kamala is stiff on stage. Trump sounds angry a lot. Or sometimes it’s about the horse race aspect— how a certain person is doing in the polls, whether or not a certain turn of phrase helps or hurts at the polls. These things are easy to talk about with little information. They don’t even really require thought. Just start posting image macros and hot takes. And because the internet moves fast, it’s probably better not to waste time developing a viewpoint because by the time you’re done, the moment will be over.
Second, attention spans are pretty much at goldfish level. Nobody wants to read the articles, and if they do, those articles need to be short and quick reads. A five page article or half hour podcast seems to be about the limit for most people, and it helps if the article is funny and the podcast host has a jokey style. A book or long form article on a single topic especially, if done in a serious way, will be dead on arrival. Nobody wants a tome on political topics, make it short and snappy. And it’s actually impossible to have a real discussion about politics because any take longer that “boo other team” is too long. And because a real understanding of an issue in politics requires a lot of time to learn, most people can’t or won’t do that. So all that’s left is trying to win voters by having spicy memes and clever phrasing in their one-liners.
Third is the schools. We’ve had problems for decades in teaching science and math. Schools are glorified daycares with disruptive behavior being the norm rather than the exception. Teachers are often blamed for not being able to handle disruptive students, while the administrators basically refuse to punish students who disrupt classes. Kids know this so why should they bother sitting around learning boring math when they can talk in class, or play games on their phones? The end result is a population that can barely function in life. You simply cannot understand anything in science and technology without a firm grasp of mathematics. And most people don’t. You can’t understand anything else if you can’t read at high levels. And most people function at a sixth grade level in reading. At such low levels of education, understanding even the simplest political issues (not personalities, issues) becomes almost impossible. If you want to understand a topic like the war in Ukraine, reading headlines about the war isn’t going to give you much insight. The region has a long history that includes the pre-Soviet era, the USSR, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, expansion of NATO (despite promises not to), the color revolution, etc. it’s not something you can understand by performative renaming of Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv, or by referring to Russians as orcs. If you want to understand abortion then you not only need to know biology, but the statistics of who is having abortions, when and why. This requires statistics and basic scientific knowledge.
Love paragraph one on the development and proliferation of ideas. There's probably a deep vein on memetics and ideas in the internet age to be mined from Culture War threads. Sure wish there was a search feature on The Vault and it actually had all the AAQC's.
Paragraph two/three reminds me to post a recent chat I had with a highschool teacher. He had mentioned he was headed to graduation, so I asked him a question.
Me: "How are the highschoolers? Kids I'm around are younger. Seem mostly fine but there's lots of doomer stuff from places like the reddit teacher place, [teacher friend X] quitting the profession, etc"
Me: "[I basically say, well, teenagers have always been jerks.] Definitely a concern there with just how easily and cheaply social media can manipulate educated adults, let alone kids that are accustomed to sucking up 80 second clips as an informative source."
Only tangentially related, but this paragraph made it occur to me the sad irony of the situation with respect to how much teachers are believed to be able to influence kids. This attitude of blaming the teachers for students' poor performance caused by students' poor decisions obviously stems from the belief that teachers have the responsibility to influence students to make better decisions, and implicit in that is the belief that teachers have the ability to significantly influence students into making better decisions. It seems to me that the people who both buy into and push forward this belief also tend to be the ones who are most supportive of teachers, the biggest proponents of rearranging society such that more money and resources flow to teachers. This makes some sense, since if teacher quality matters a great deal for student performance, then incentivizing the best and brightest to go into teaching by giving them more money is likely to pay dividends in the form of better students. And yet it's the prominence of this very same belief that's responsible for this phenomenon of teachers being blamed for their students' poor performance and eventually deciding to leave this "soul-sucking" profession.
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