Yes, writing things down in permanently recordable form (whatever form is considered “permanent” given the era: stone tablets, books, microfiche, bytes etc) as they happen is indeed an excellent practice. Good point.
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You’re the one bagging on historians…
You are free to not read or like the work of historians, as a class. Maybe you should know that most of the time when someone says something is “historically unparalleled”, it usually just means the person saying it doesn’t know that much history. Maybe it doesn’t matter what you know.
Historians don’t just “write down stuff as it happens”. The easy way you’re dismissing a whole field of academic work feels a little Dunning-Kruger to me, but again, that’s between you and your arguments.
Your personal conception of “What can happen to FaceBook” does rely on the arguments made by countless historians about how things shook out in the past, about how other empires failed, about how other forms of media were adopted and abused and controlled.
I’m not saying their arguments were always right, but you shouldn’t disdain them completely if you’re going to rely on their work.
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Well yeah but historians don’t even agree on interpretations. Not to mention the whole “the winners write the history books” problem. And when it comes to the future, I do not find historians to be reliable futurists.
I’m saying both Clay Shirky and I are industry experts in this particular area. Look me up on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. Go ahead. And I’m telling you in my professional opinion as an expert, as someone who has spent most of his life working in this specific area, what we have now with Facebook is absolutely unprecedented. This amplifies my despair, not that it needed amplification. 
Now, maybe both Clay and I are totally wrong and we’re both complete dumbasses. I’m not ruling that out. But I also don’t think it is likely.
Does that mean Historians Suck? No, and that’s not what I’m saying. Can the “history” of the internet even be written at this point? That is kinda what I am saying. Yes, you can predict human trends, cultural trends, but the specific intersection of what happens between people and technology isn’t always… predictable. And remember too that the rate of change is speeding up.
Look at the slope of these lines from left to right. Normally cultures and societies have some time to adapt, but if you compare TV to internet, that time is narrower and narrower.
(No, I don’t believe in “the singularity” and nobody else should either.)
We are literal garbage humans after all… Not like any of us have every done anything for humanity, after all. /s
Because we mostly read stuff that people wrote down as it happens, and then try to get some sort of sense out of it… Nothing worth defending, really! 
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Whatever grief you might want to give to all historians as futurists can pretty much be given in equal amounts to “experts in the field”.
I see a lot of nearly vertical lines as far back as the 20s. That’s a lot of “Most of society adopting a game-changing technology” in the space of a few years.
There are a lot more examples in the recent part of that chart, and a lot of technological game-changers missing from the early part of the century. That’s not showing that societies didn’t change fast in the past. For instance, it’s comparing one old technology like “air travel” against every three like “MP3 Player” “Digital Camera” and “Smartphone”.
Where’s paperbacks, jet engines, antibiotics, chemotherapy, ballpoint pens, typewriters, word processors, photocopiers, etc.?
According to this chart that has you shook, society didn’t have a lot of mass adoptions of brand-new technology between 1930 and 1960. Does that seem right to you?
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Gaming = Competition
Competition + Community + Online Anonymity = Potential Toxicity
I really don’t think so. I don’t think competition is inherently toxic in any way. And being toxic is a detriment to being a good competitor, and should be weeded out if somehow winning actually provided survival or a louder voice in the community.
We’ve also seen that experiments in removing anonymity on youtube made the comments more toxic. Because people who don’t want to be identified with their political opinions include people who are private, people with careers that make that a bad idea (most professionals), people who are worried they may be targeted by bigots if they are outed as female, black, etc. It reduces diversity of opinion and concentrates it on young men who don’t know enough to keep their mouths shut. Loudmouth assholes are disproportionately people who don’t think a lot about the consequences of their actions. People who post toxic stuff are less than 1% machiavellian schemers and 80%+ people with bad impulse control.
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I agree 100% (as my formula indicates). In my mathematical opinion (notwithstanding ‘experiments’) 
the biggest factor is anonymity.
PS: When I say “anonymity”, I mean the absence of actual physical face-to-face interactions.
So your opinion is that the rate of adoption of the telephone is roughly the same as the rate of adoption of the internet? The data doesn’t support this (pdf).
Consider the telephone. It took 56 years for Alexander Graham Bell’s invention to reach half of U.S. households. By comparison, smartphones took just seven years to hit the same adoption rate.
Furthermore, would you consider “the telephone” functionally the same in terms of societal impact as “the smartphone”? Or broadcast-only mediums like Radio, TV? It’s a bit of a double triple whammy because the smartphone + internet combo is both radically peer-to-peer and radically broadcast (hey let me film this killing / suicide!) and has been adopted en masse in under a decade.
It’s also strange to consider the “ballpoint pen” remotely in the same league as TV, telephone, radio, etc. Maybe you’re conflating “random invention” with “fundamental advances in human communication”. Should we also be considering the rate of ShamWow adoption and its effect on society? 
It would be interesting to consider & contrast primarily female online communities of competition. Can anyone think of any examples? I’m sure they’re saner than the all-dude versions without a doubt due to the built in statistical aggro that comes with testosterone.
I have been more or less convinced by the above discussion that what we’re seeing with videogames is
With the very important addition of
- Rapidly adopting the diverging social norms of an “always connected 24/7” online life, radically faster than other groups
Relevant: Why Have We Soured on the ‘Devil’s Advocate’? - The New York Times
And one more difference between the Godwin’s-law internet and today’s is that there is now a much greater supply of that sort of person — all sorts of persons — sharing the same enormous communications platforms. Everything is both more crowded and more interconnected. Toss a thought into the digital ether, and strangers can drive by from any direction, doling out hypothetical challenges, probing your convictions at their leisure, demanding you justify yourself. And sometimes this is less like an undergraduate seminar and more like a man in a bus-station crowd grabbing you by the collar and slurring, “Just for the sake of argument. … ”
So other than
- videogames making an effort to become more overtly cooperative and less overtly competitive
- videogames adopting even rudimentary levels of in-game enforcement for clearly toxic behavior, as a global industry baseline
Based on the above discussion I will now agree that videogames themselves aren’t the cause … but they are bellwethers which predict the future. Videogame communities sit at the confluence of what we’re going to see everywhere, in every community, in the next 20 years.
And that… ain’t good.
Exactly this. This is how it came to pass that the online trollies MRA, PUA’s, gamergaters, etc. got Ellen Pao fired from Reddit.
And she was their biggest advocate for their right to be on Reddit, uncensored!
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I’m not sure she was, I am pretty sure she was an advocate for the kinds of deplatforming crackdowns that Reddit eventually was forced to make – and should have made a decade ago.
No. My opinion is what I said. You’re ignoring my main point.
That is a cherry-picked promotional chart from an investment company trying to convince people that investing in tech will be easy and profitable, because the line goes up, up, up! and more often.
This chart isn’t a list of all tech adoptions, and it compares some umbrella categories of the past, like “air travel”, with more detailed specific tech in the recent past. Are you the one saying that “the tablet”, at 50% adoption, is as significant as any tech from the 20c. in terms of “societal impact”?
You’re understating how quickly, how widely, and how significantly older tech changed societies. And you are cherry-picking “the telephone” and ignoring my question: Do you really think there were almost no mass adoptions of technology between 1930 and the 1960s?
Do I think the radio has functionally the magnitude of “societal impact” as the smart phone? Of course I do. If you don’t think radio impacted societies (and the mass of individual lives) on an atomic level, you have no perspective on history at all. Technologies like paperback books and radios changed the make-up of every job, every philosophy, every daily life, every nation.
You don’t seem to understand what radio did to societies (all over the world) and that’s why you’re so ready to dismiss it in favour of smart phones, I think.
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I’m not. I’m saying the rate of change is speeding up.
Of course, radio changed the world of its day – albeit in a very incremental, broadcast-only way, like a newspaper that doesn’t have to be printed, but can be delivered through the airwaves in audio format.
If you don’t like those graphs, here are two different ones (citation in the above article), one from the New York Times…
the other from MIT’s Technology Review…
These figures show that smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.
As I said, the smartphone is a triple whammy, and not an incremental change because
- it’s happening incredibly quickly
- it’s a radical peer-to-peer communication tool
- it’s a radical broadcasting one-to-many communication tool
I mean, per the above:
And one more difference between the Godwin’s-law internet and today’s is that there is now a much greater supply of that sort of person — all sorts of persons — sharing the same enormous communications platforms. Everything is both more crowded and more interconnected. Toss a thought into the digital ether, and strangers can drive by from any direction, doling out hypothetical challenges, probing your convictions at their leisure, demanding you justify yourself. And sometimes this is less like an undergraduate seminar and more like a man in a bus-station crowd grabbing you by the collar and slurring, “Just for the sake of argument. … ”
Humans were never meant to be this connected to each other. We’ve had almost no time to adapt. That’s a big part of the turmoil we’re seeing in society right now.
That’s like dismissing the internet as “like a series of Post-note messages, but you don’t need to go to the store to get more because they’re not paper.” Radio was a cultural revolution, it toppled governments, it changed the course of every social order of its time. The internet isn’t “The radio, but faster.”; it’s “The radio, but less focused.”
I understand your overall argument, but other technologies had mainstream adoption within a decade. Comparing the slowest of old tech and the fastest of new tech is pretty pointless, but it is an approach often favored by anyone wanting to hype the investment potential of future tech products.
If you want to say, consumers get their products delivered faster, sure.
If you want to compare the qualities of the individual tech, I’ll agree with you that a washing machine is a horrible way to watch Netflix. (Radio and TV still destabilized society as quickly and as widely as smartphones, even if those effects are taken for granted from over-familiarity today.)
But if you want to say, societies have never changed this quickly or absorbed game-changing tech within a decade, then nah. Cherry-picked examples notwithstanding; VCRs were adopted faster than tablets. Again what these charts leave out are many mainstream technologies that were adopted quickly, and they don’t include all of the tech that doesn’t support their arguments (electric cars, etc.).
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While I’m generally leaning more towards your side of this discussion, I feel that this is a particularly weak point. The personal VCR was a break through piece of technology, which changed television on a basic level. It changed an ephemeral experience to a repeatable one and opened a wholly new way to duplicate and propagate video.
The tablet, while an useful gadget, replicates functionality that’s already in peoples’ hands in the form of smartphones and personal computers. It’s the cordless handset to the corded landline, a convenient improvement, but playing entirely within already established rules.
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You’re completely right about the impacts involved. I was using it as an example of the weakness of the quality of comparisons in the “tech adoption rate” charts.
Those charts are based on consumer product saturation, and have nothing to do with the different societal impacts of the technologies involved. They shouldn’t be used to support “Everything’s out-of-control fast” since they just include a relative handful of mainstream consumer products, and come to a conclusion based on comparing the slowest-adopted olds to the fastest-adopted nows.
You’re right that it’s a weak point to compare only apples to oranges, and I can only agree, since that’s my point too.
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Those mainstream communication technologies (radio, TV, etc) didn’t reveal how many of your neighbors were racist, nor did they bring you in regular one-to-one contact with hundreds, even potentially thousands of other individual people per day. This amount of direct exposure to other people, every single day, is unprecedented in human history.
As a result, things are… changing.
(very tall image, click to expand ↑)
You know how everyone dreads yearly thanksgiving dinners because you’re exposed to the entirety of your family, your bigoted aunt Midge, uncle Dave who had a really bad divorce and now hates women as a result, and all the inevitable political & religious arguments that break out between generations?
That’s every day now on the modern, smartphone in everyone’s pocket with everyone constantly checking Facebook and Insta … internet.
And no, the adoption of fax machines didn’t have a similar effect. Sorry.
The good news is that, at this moment, every human being is far more connected to their fellow humans than any human has ever been in the entirety of recorded history. Spoiler alert: that’s also the bad news.
But of course, I should have said “juul pods”.
None of this had to do with your earlier comments that society was adopting different tech at a “faster rate” than before.
You’re just worried about people networking over smartphones. Got it.
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Correct, the rate of change is speeding up, as greater access to older communication tech begets even more rapid adoption of future communication tech, with much more radical peer to peer and broadcast capabilities. That’s what the three graphs, from three different sources (NY Times, MIT, and another you didn’t care for), all showed.
These figures show that smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.
I’m sorry if you don’t like this data.
So, largely thanks to the smartphone and facebook, we have a historically unprecedented degree of connection and peer-to-peer interaction between people.
What isn’t speeding up, however, is the ability of people to sanely interact with dozens, hundreds, thousands of other (basically random) people per day. That doesn’t scale… at all? And in fact even trying do do this will kinda break you as a human being?
Here’s two examples, just from today
Oh look we are suddenly connected with our neighbors and fellow humans 24/7 in a new way! Thanks smartphones! Yay… er… wait… uh… oops?
So what you get in the near term is manifestations of societal trauma, things like Trump and toxic videogame communities on the leading edge of this digital hyperconnected lifestyle. If we had a few decades or more for a slow ramp of adoption of this new always-on hyper-connectedness, we’d have more time to adapt, evolve defenses (both technical and otherwise) and absorb the consequences.
Heck forget interacting with dozens or hundreds of strangers per day … just regularly interacting with your extended family can break you as a human being. Eternal September, more like Eternal Thanksgiving Dinner.
Thanks, Facebook and Smartphones! You da real MVP.
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