From The guardian -Not quite religion, not quite self-assistance: welcome at the age of Jordan Peterson of nonsense.
But to live on social networks, to see the world through its objective is to return to a prior age. First of all, because everything is common. The recordings of previous discussions fade quickly – miss a day and it is almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as for oral history cycles, memories of the past are collective and mutable.
While history fades, the truth itself too. If the information is to extract the noise signal, social media is to increase noise. Among the flow of questionable facts, it can be difficult to determine what to hang on. Meanwhile, the mentality of the crowd increases the risk of expressing themselves against the beliefs of a large group.
It is in such environments that meaning becomes tribal. Your beliefs do not really concern external facts, but on the group with which you identify. People are counting 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 come. –Martha Gill, 2025-11-24
It reminds me of some of the Marshall McLuhan observationsDone about 50 years ago and before the web. It is the Tetrade of McLuhan, based on its media laws.
Each medium –
extends a human property,
Obsolence the previous environment (and in fact often a good luxury),
recovers a much older support, &
Conversely its properties when they are pushed to its limits.
THE reversal – When the properties of technology are pushed to its limits – is a potential involuntary consequence. Technology can have more than one. When developing a new technology or the decision to regulate one in our society, it would be paying to have deep conversations on these effects.
It is not because these consequences does not mean that they are unknown.
Company in the electric era
All quotes from Marshall McLuhan
Tetrad of McLuhan Media: Each medium:
- extends a human property,
- Obsolence the previous environment (and in fact often a good luxury),
- recovers a much older support, &
- inverse its properties when they are pushed to its limits
Digital networks
- Extend our voices in the present – “News, much more than art, is an artifact.”
- Obsolete reading of long shape – “The future of the book is the presentation text.”
- Recover tribal loyalty – “Policy offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.”
- Reverse in a monoculture – “Ignorance of how to use new knowledge stocks exponentially.”
