Know-It-All Society
Martin Patrick Lynch. 2019. Know-It-All
Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, Liveright Publishing
Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton & Company, New York - London.
An interesting new book from
a Board of Trustees Distinguished Philosophy Professor at the University of
Connecticut, Martin Patrick Lynch. The author of The Internet of Us Knowing
More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.
This is a complex book that
requires a careful and attentive reading. It is not to be skimmed, the
principal sources referenced are: Michel de Montaigne, Socrates, David Hume,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedric Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and John
Rawls, among others. Unfortunately the people who need it most probably would
not be able to understand it.
"Current research estimates that at least 60 percent of news stories
shared online have not even been read by the person sharing them." ... per
research at Columbia University -- Study conclusion: "People are more willing to share an
article than read it. (p 41-42)*
*[Dewey, Catlin 2016.
"6 in 10 of You Will Share This Article without Reading It, a Depressing
New Study Says." Washington Post, June 16, 2016] The research used
such tools as Google analytics to discover that the hits on the sites were a
fraction of the number of social postings. With only the raw numbers used it
might be worse that 6 in 10.
"We think we are sharing news stories in order to transfer knowledge,
but much of the time we aren't really trying to do that at all -- whatever we
may consciously think. If we were, we would presumably have read the piece that
we are sharing. But most of us don't. So, what are we doing?
"A plausible hypothesis is that the primary function of our practice
of sharing content online is to express our emotional attitude....As Crockett
has noted, expression of attitudes like moral outrage is one way that tribes
are built...Social media is an outrage machine." [Emphasis
added] (p 43- 44)
Lynch adds:
"And it may go even further than that, as I once heard a senior
Facebook representative (off the record) acknowledge that the company's own
data showed that the problem was actually much greater: as much as 90 percent of
the stories shared on that platform may not be clicked through by those sharing
them."
(Author's footnote #
13 on Chapter 2)
At 174 pages, this is a
brief book that is densely reasoned, but decidedly worth the trouble that the
reader may invest.
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