"The explosion of narrativity depends upon a technology that is unlike print and unlike the electronic media of the first age: it is cheap, flexible, readily available, and quick." (p.449)
I decided to use this quote from the Poster chapter to highlight an essential aspect of this technological and cultural web that we created. The speed at which information is transmitted across the globe has its positives and negatives. I want to talk specifically about the negatives. Putting out content and having an audience see the content instantly is a gift and a curse. If a user wants to spread a narrative good or bad it has the ability to spark up like wildfire. The more people view or like the content the fast it spreads. The number of people who see this content grows exponentially until everyone has heard about it. Let's say you are the Russian or Chinese Government and your goal is to cause unrest and slowly divide the U.S. populous. The perfect place to do that is social media. It can be anonymous and you can create a whole community of fake accounts if you wanted to. And until recently the censorship and fact-checking aspects of social media hadn't been implemented, so chances are you don't have to worry about an account or page being taken down. Even now the system that judges facts and tracks violations throughout the media space isn't very effective, content that violates terms and conditions passes through all the time. What I'm saying is if you are a foreign body and want to spread misinformation, you aren't going to have a hard time. Our geriatric leaders barely know how to send a text on their own phones, what are they going to do about a threat on social media? Obviously, they are going to higher young people to take care of it like everything else. We can also talk about free speech and how spreading misinformation is pretty legal. You actually can't have free speech without misinformation. What is the government to do?
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