These were inspired by Vex's recent post on the reasons why we're fucked. Reason 1, in particular.
Initial Post:"Our right to free speech is under attack. Not by our government, or by some other government pulling strings. Our free speech isn't in danger by the hands of "Commie" liberals or "Fascist" right-wingers. It's under attack by YOU.
Every single one of you have been contributing to the production and development of a communications network that is based on the expression of smaller and smaller pieces of information, which are incapable of encapsulating the true, complex nature of society's problems. Social media has become a "holier than thou" pissing contest, and the language is limited to memetics and one-liners. As you avoid production, expression, and transmission of complex ideas, the attention-span of the average social media user shrinks. Eventually, we'll be summing up ALL of our interpersonal problems and ideas with vines and memes, because they're more easily rewarded in the short-term and easy to blow off when faced with criticism. As our communications simplify themselves to nothing but partial-sentence reactions, our communications infrastructure will change to support only simpler and simpler ideas.
Eventually, we won't be able to communicate about our problems - and therefore, solve them - because we won't have access to large and complex enough mediums for communication to do so.
Wanna do something about it? Come up with an idea that involves multiple layers of complexity and criticize it. Express it in many words on social media for the world to see. Let it be analyzed, picked apart, and rebuilt again. Come back with a new idea if that one doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Respond to others' simple ideas with complex, and idealistic criticisms that force people to think for more than a few seconds. As people become used to dealing with complex language again, our ideas will be more complex. Eventually, they may even be complex enough to solve some of society's issues through idealistic compromise.
But until then, we're doing nothing but poisoning the future of our language, and limiting it to the point of simplistic semantic imprisonment. You're digging your right to free speech's grave, and further generations will be dumber and less free for it."
Part of a response to someone labeling it a "typical good old days fallacy.":Note: This is also a general summary of the concepts I was throwing around in my head at the time, and I gave it some vocabulary to make the concept more palatable. Although, you guys will likely see most of this as old news with new words.
" We have two kinds of length limits when it comes to social media, or communications in general:
Hard Limits - These are limitations on characters set by the application or communication medium's administrative department. An example would be Twitter's 140 character limit (Yes, I know it just recently increased, but we haven't reached the threshold for semantic imprisonment I'm proposing yet).
Soft Limits - These are word count limitations set by societal pressures that include average attention span. Soft limits are statistically derived by marketing firms in order to determine the point at which readers move on to the next post/message.
Currently, hard limits are barely relevant for most forms of Social Media. The hard limit is mainly a factor for Twitter at the moment, but the theory behind my post implies that this will likely change in the future as the Soft Limit gets smaller and smaller.
Soft limits have been investigated thoroughly across social media and are expressed in detail, here, with different vocabulary:
https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-length-social-mediaThe main idea behind my post is that there is a relationship between an idea's complexity, and the number of words used to describe it. When the Hard Limit decreases, relative to the Soft limit, society's dictionary (Or common vocabulary) must get larger, so that any given idea's complexity can stay the same. This is usually caused by an increased need for efficiency in communication. This rarely happens except for in low-population communication mediums which are based on increasing Productivity. An example would be like the Skype/Lync Chat used in companies around the world by internal employees.
When the soft limit decreases, relative to the hard limit, we actually start to see a reduction in size of the common vocabulary, as society (Or the population of a specific communication medium) is craving simpler and more generalized ideas that require simpler words.
Our language determines how we describe and understand our world. If this process continues, eventually academics and intellectuals won't be able to fully understand the problems society has and solve them because they aren't being expressed in their entirety and complexity by the general population. Where people get their news, and the number of people discussing the news doesn't matter if all of the discussions consist of only memes and fleeting reactionism. In fact, more people expressing less complex ideas makes it even harder to understand any given situation because it's more useless data to sift through to find the meaningful snippets. And while it's damn-near impossible to find actual Facebook stats on post length, etc, due to monetization of that information for marketing wanks, the overall preference for shorter and shorter posts/messages has been confirmed and described by private organizations (The ones who bought those Facebook Stats) as a real trend. And they have no reason to lie about such information, since they actually benefit from the concepts described.
But I suspect, shortly before it gets to that point, our Hard Limits will start to decrease with the Soft Limits, which will limit our ability, as individuals, to speak on sociopolitical topics in the most populated areas of Social Media, which is a de facto reduction of free speech."
Response to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlL2Jj-kCNU ~ Noam Chomsky on Concision in US Media:" I think he hit on something I was mostly reluctant to talk about because it seems conspiratorial to the degree that most would find extreme (Noam Chomsky kinda has that tendency, regardless of how correct he is a lot of the time). I've often thought that the brevity of speaking time for a given topic in the US media was intentional for the exact reasoning he provided: It gives you no time to provide evidence. Or, it requires that your evidence be simple and generalized enough that any attempts at refuting it would take more time than is allowed in whatever media segment it was brought up in. It makes specially crafted, fallacious arguments tough to combat in social media networks as well, especially as our Soft limit for word count decreases. And social media networks like Twitter, which have low bars for hard limits, make it even easier to use such tactics. I mean, this is literally the basis of Donald Trump's Twitter account. It has no other purpose.
I would even argue that this is one of the characteristics of social media that a large portion of the rich have used to their advantage to put Trump's administration in power. Most of the Alt-right is a collection of edgy twenty and thirty-somethings who have been gaining experience in the politics of the internet over the last decade or two. If they know anything, it's how to shut down debate with charlatanry and emphasis on brevity/concision/memetics.
I don't necessarily think that there is no place for memetics. With today's communication systems, the small, simple snippets of information are faster and further reaching than ever. Sometimes pictures or other forms of art are excellent communication methods for complicated concepts. But like any other linguistic tool, it is capable of being misused and abused. This is why I always make it a point to rip fallacious memes and snippets a new asshole every time I see them. The disadvantage of abusing memetics on social media that has very high hard limits on word count (Like Facebook, and their several thousand character limit) is that when a few people put in the time to destroy the arguments you post, it requires you to put more energy in to defend an argument you already know isn't worth the time. But the advantage is that you can easily share a new, nearly thoughtless and careless meme in minutes and force the attacker to have to put in more energy than it's worth. The key, as an attacker, is to have a far enough reach that your response can go viral, or you have to be able to output more frequent and effective arguments than the page you're attacking. Low soft limits make this whole thing even harder on the attacker, since they allow the meme abuser to increase their information output and reach with little effort. It's disguised victory by verbosity, on a large scale. Larger than most thought possible. And that's how we got to today."
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I wanted to bring this stuff up here because I figured you guys would have things to add and remove, since many of you have much more knowledge on the subject of memetics, etc. than I do.
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) Discordian intervention to prevent anything from getting boring (Also, feel free to suggest alternative direction/steps - I want this to be a Group Project):