unintended but not unknown

From The Guardian — Not quite religion, not quite self-help: welcome to the Jordan Peterson age of nonsense.

But living on social media, seeing the world through its lens, is like returning to a pre-information age. First, because everything is current. Records of previous discussions fade quickly – miss a day and it is almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as with cycles of oral history, memories of the past are collective and mutable.

As history fades, so does truth itself. If information is about extracting signal from noise, social media is about turning up the noise. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. Meanwhile, mob mentality ramps up the risk of speaking up against the beliefs of a large group.

It is in such environments that meaning becomes tribal. Your beliefs are not really about the external facts, but about which group you identify with. People rely less on their own capacity for reason and more on each other. This is the petri dish from which systems of faith have always tended to arise. —Martha Gill, 2024-11-24

This reminds me of some of the observations of Marshall McLuhan, made about 50 years ago, and before the Web. This is McLuhan’s tetrad, based on his Laws of Media.

Every medium —
extends a human property,
obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good),
retrieves a much older medium, &
reverses its properties when pushed to its limits.

The reversal — when a technology’s properties are pushed to its limits — is a potential unintended consequence. A technology can have more than one. When developing a new technology, or deciding whether to regulate one in our society, it would pay to have some deep conversations about these effects.

Just because these consequences are unintended does not mean they are unknown.

Society in the electric era

All quotes by Marshall McLuhan

Digital Networks

EXTEND our voices in the present — “News, far more than art, is artifact.”

OBSOLESCE long-form reading — “The future of the book is the blurb.”

RETRIEVE tribal loyalties — “Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”

REVERSE into a monoculture — “The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.”