As IF Times

Source: Facebook, Google Crack the Whip on Fake News

Back in the day, if it was on TV or in the newspapers, it must be true.  The modern iteration of this flawed wisdom now is that a story has validity because it was posted on Facebook.

There’s no denying that Facebook has morphed from a quaint social platform where friends posted their activities and kept in touch with distant relatives to become a commercial behemoth generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and becoming the de facto village bulletin board for all types of spam.

For many, Facebook has become a compulsion as people out-do each other with envy invoking pictures of recent vacations or thrilling adventures.  Voyeurs and narcissists alike find reasons to be participants.  Naturally, the sheer size of the worldwide audience begged for commercial capitalization and so ads were introduced into the application and next thing you know, your neighbor’s vacation in Thailand is sponsored by Viagra.

People can post only so many interesting things since, well, most lives are dull punctuated by the occasional vacation episode or rock concert, or baby birth.  Enter the introduction of sponsored links and likes.  Now, users can further embellish their profiles by passing on stories, articles and opinions that they ‘like’, causing their contacts to also ‘like’, much like clapping when someone else starts it.

From liking videos of rescued dolphins,  puppies and cats to passing on interesting recipes for kale, the site became more and more a commercial billboard than personal scrapbook. Running out of original content, people lazily forwarded videos and clever quotes instead.  It became a natural place to distribute faux news under the cover of blessing from the social network.

A recent study revealed that more and more people were getting their news from either Facebook or Twitter, fully 67%, up from only 50% two years ago.  What this may mean is that opinion shapers may not be the mainstream media outlets of years gone by. Stories and opinions may now have to go through the gatekeepers on social media with the largest number of followers.

This is only alarming when you find out that among the people with the largest followers are, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, Rhianna, Eminem, Shakira and believe it or not, Michael Jackson.

The Facebook company has denied the distribution of fake news even as they promise to eradicate this practice going forward.  A particularly ironic nugget of science offered recently was a story that claimed that accepting Facebook requests would allow you to live longer. I suspect the global warming crowd are moonlighting in their storytelling.  Next thing you know, décolletage images will get un-likes on user pages.

It’s unlikely that Facebook’s influence on shaping social perceptions will diminish in the foreseeable future since the trend is towards short headlines and soundbites rather than in depth personal analysis.  My guess is that intellectual laziness and the pressure of social conformity will contribute more and more to the naïve population we see today.  The echo chamber of opinions is much like inbreeding.  Convenient at first, but eventually leading to undesirable consequences.

Source: Google’s Driverless Car Rear-Ended, Brin Says, Defending Effort – Bloomberg Business

Is this really a good idea? This driverless car idea is an invention looking for a need much like for example, a gas powered toothpick.  Self flushing toilets or light switches that turn on and off automatically may have their uses, but have we become so lazy that we need self driving cars? It’s like sex without having to undress and clean up afterwards: is there a market for this?

These kinds of pursuits are contributing to the dweebing of the population; a process that has been on going for most of the last generation.  If you think about it, the gradual transition from a society that communicates with others by the richness of language and voice to one in which interaction is mainly done by text is right at the leading edge of this dweebing.  Instead of being inclusive, texting actually isolates people from one another.  It increasingly dehumanizes the most elementary of human experiences to that of abstract interaction.  Nuance and subtlety are eliminated to be replaced by the canned LOL or OMG.

Driverless cars would contribute even more to this sense of isolation.  Besides, given the universal experience of software failures, long reboots and arcane glitches with ubiquitous computers, why would anyone place their welfare in the hands of the software geeks that are in charge of driverless cars?  You don’t have to be paranoid to imagine that once you cede control of a vehicle to some monitoring facility, you are then at the mercy of whomever is programming that car.  Imagine getting into one of these cars; the doors lock and the next thing you know, you’re at your mother in law’s place. There are already numerous options for people who feel that driving is just too much of an inconvenience.  They’re called cabs.