I think the issue here is human socialization and not twitter or technology. People love to play the "did you see what so-and-so said?" game in all its variants, and as far as I can tell this has been true for millenia. It has nothing to do with a trending topics feature
I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time
Yes, and. Twitter being a nationally unified space of gossipy people, with journalists who actually write the narrative being addicted to the gossip as well...
There were multiple actual news stories about this stupid Alien tweet! Sure, they weren't front page at the NYT but this stuff is melting the brains of all the journalists, who then go on to melt the normies brains with it.
Journalists using it for a source of news was strange to me until I happened upon a journalism job posting for Post Media, a major news chain up here in Canada.
The job required 5 stories a day. So you basically need at least one piece that takes a half hour to write and Twitter is good for that.
I think technology is changing which kinds of gossip get spread. It used to be either things you heard directly from the people in your circle, or on tv / newspapers / magazines. Now it's algorithmically determined to be the stuff that's most likely to be shared out of a giant planet of random gossip. Algorithms reinforcing these kinds of vices make it far more extreme.
There are people who wake up and say "I'm gonna get involved in some gossip today". I'm not sure how much the algorithms create this behavior, or just facilitate them doing what they already wanted to do
Algorithms don't choose stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator. People do that. The algorithms just reflect what people are already talking about
To some extent, yes, it's people choosing to do that. Just like people choose to eat sweets. If you keep people in an environment where there are always sights and smells of sweets, they'll probably end up eating more. Obviously you could blame the people for having poor impulse control, but certainly the environment has an effect. Going back to social networking, the algorithms end up reinforcing the bad habits, leading to a bad overall outcome.
The environment is omnipotent compared to us. It's also superficial, reactionary and lacking introspection. Humans have potential to overcome some of it.
I either completely agree or completely disagree, not quite sure. On one hand, yes, it is not exposing things that don't already exist in human nature. On the other hand, I've seen lots of things said on Twitter (and other social networks) that I've just never seen people say in in-person interactions, because the normal rules of social interaction would make people feel an intense shame/embarrassment to say it face-to-face without the benefit of pseudo-anonymity.
I think this "context collapse" explanation is really accurate, because it explains that it's not just "human nature", but it's actually taking advantage of how humans have really only evolved to have back-and-forth conversations with other people who have the same conversational context.
I think you are absolutely right, but that unfortunately means it's Twitter that has to change. We certainly aren't going to alter the design of humans within the time span of one generation.
So we should build communications platforms that account for human nature.
I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time