It’s worth remembering that Rupert Murdoch built the core of his empire by being born the son of an Australian news magnate.
16 Likes
I wonder how much of it is how, while there were certainly early and late adopters, everyone has largely been learning how this series of tubes works in our lives at the same time. I’m sure I’m not the only person who spent the oughts getting excited about participating in interesting political discussions with more immediacy and feedback than a letter-to-the-editor, spending the teens getting more and more frustrated by all the yelling and juvenile driving trollies, until by the late-teens to now everyone collectively realizing that it’s largely a waste of time and energy just blowing hot air and getting into the stupidest arguments possible, no one is going to change their minds because everyone is discussing from different priors and/or values using different commuication styles, an extremely small sliver knows any nuance around the intersection of politics, ideology and economics, and an even smaller sliver has the capability to outshout and ruin things for everyone. Everyone I know is at least trying, with varying degrees of success, to spend less time on the internet and especially politics.
9 Likes
10 Likes
Aren’t most assholes radiant?
3 Likes
Not all of us are radiant, Keith. Some of us, like fredtal, are radial. 
11 Likes
Except this very statistic from the OP shows that was all distortion created by the suggestion algorithm and bots. The engagement was driven by the political bias of the suggestion algorithm, not the other way around.
15 Likes
Yeah, Youtube is pretty infamous for this as well - driving people into ever-more radically right-wing (and incel, etc.) content.
But it’s not that people are being fed content that they hate, but hate (and anger, even more) is being used as the motivator to drive people to content. Which by its nature is right-wing.
11 Likes
7 Likes
In 1974, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who had previously worked for Nazi newspapers, published the theory of the ‘Spiral of Silence’. This is the syndrome whereby opinions expressed by a loud minority ultimately take over and give the impression that they themselves are, in fact, the norm.
8 Likes
Probably why, though I am technically a Boomer (1962), I have never felt like a Boomer. As for my leftist outlook, it has become stronger over the years. I look at the awfulness of the conservatives (nowadays mostly hate filled reactionaries) and the pain they have inflicted here in the US and across the world I find it hard to believe that many people eat that up. I’m not naive, I know they do, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around their mindsets.
13 Likes
I’ve said this before, but Linda Rondstadt had his number back in 1983. “Australia gave us Rupert Murdoch. Thanks a lot you guys. Take him back. We don’t need him here.”
Previous BoingBoing post:
8 Likes
Now, if we can just stop putting AM radios in cars, their fall will be complete.
9 Likes
(1964, sitting on the border between Boomer and Gen X. Definitely not sharing a Boomer mentality.)
9 Likes
“I turned up to party wearing only an old car tyre. It turned out my invitation was a misprint and it should have read “Cos-Play”.”
2 Likes
It’s just a lazy marketing category.
10 Likes
Me (1962) three, skibidi…
I actually think humans can broadly be divided into three age groups:
- Children up to the age of the early teens. They don’t have enough life experience or education to have made up their minds about anything.
- Tweenagers from 13+ who are gaining confidence in their abilities and the power of their youth, but they aren’t old enough to have learnt that everyone goes through that phase.
- Adults from mid-20s onwards, who have had to deal with responsibilities like netting a job, paying the rent, looking after their own children or maybe their parents and so on.
3 Likes
OK, so to establish my credentials as an “old,” I had to go look up “skibidi.” Meaning: It has none. Let the brain rot commence…
7 Likes
… when Douglas Coupland wrote the novel “Generation X,” which defined the concept at the time, he meant to include you in the demographic he was trying to describe
It was only years later that Pew decided to move the boundaries and the media went along
9 Likes
