Episode 61 - Cognizant & Screen Anxiety - Part 1
Are human minds capable of coping with social media? Political polarization, teen bullying, rising depression...no wonder our ability to ‘social network’ responsibly has come under question.
The internet is a wonderful place, full of knowledge, resources, and funny cats. But it can also be a cesspool full of violent videos, nudity, racist propaganda, and bullying. Someone, somewhere has to clean up all that hateful garbage we don’t want to see. Which is where Cognizant - a group of underpaid contractors for Facebook - come in. On The Re-Engineered You, we’ll talk about a series of TheVerge articles by reporter Casey Newton. And we’ll ask the question: if contractors with access to proper training, experience, and cautionary seminars can’t handle the anxieties of the internet, what chance do the rest of us have?
In Part 1 of this two-parter, we’ll also look at the mechanisms and dopamine tricks that Facebook uses to keep us clicking and scrolling. We’ll investigate which ideas, precisely, rise to the top of the social media pile. And why lies seem to spread faster than the truth...because they do, according to science.
History Links:
Science Links:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/online-reviews-shoppers-believe-pretty-face
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop#:~:text=The%20Gish%20gallop%20is%20a,or%20strength%20of%20those%20arguments.
https://qz.com/905252/donald-trumps-lies-are-all-part-of-a-debate-tactic-called-the-gish-gallop/ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/