Gawker Argues Because of the Internet, 'We Are All Cranks Now' (gawker.com) 76
"We are all cranks now...." argues a new article on Gawker (relaunched last July). That is, we're all just like yester-year's "obsessive writers of letters to the editor, the meticulous hoarders of correspondence, the avid collectors of fine and rare grudges...."
"I have not, since my father brought home a Compaq Presario in 1995 and plugged it into our phone line, encountered one pocket of space in all of the World Wide Web that does not, to some degree or another, crankify all who inhabit it...." [N]owadays, saying something deeply unwell about an article you don't like to thousands of people is as trivial as ordering a coffee. And if the internet in general has lowered these barriers, social media has gone a step further. People who never set out to be cranks in the first place are actively incentivized to do so. This isn't just because whenever you post you get a thrilling little tally of all the people who agree with you, it's because of how these platforms are designed to maximize engagement. The ideal poster for social media companies is one who posts often, who posts stridently, and who responds to as much stuff as possible.
So, to be on Twitter or Facebook is to sit in a room while someone holds up random pieces of stimulus and demands your appraisal of each. What do we reckon of this? Okay, how about this? And this? What's your view here? Were you to design a machine to turn otherwise normal, healthy people into cranks — a kind of crankification engine, if you like — you would probably arrive at something like these platforms.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook don't crankify their users out of malice, they do it to turn a profit, which may actually be worse. When the cranks of yore would write a tirade spanning several faxes to their local member of parliament about a hedge that was bothering them, they did this for no-one but themselves. This is not the case for the Neo-crank. When we use our finite capacity for wonder to publicly opine about fictional teens using drugs on a television show, or people reading in bars, or one American girl leaving her fake-sounding college to attend a different fake-sounding college, a company is making bank off it. To put it another way, the Silicon Valley robber-barons are getting rich off the uncompensated labor of yeoman cranks, who till the posting fields in the sweltering heat of the discourse until their brains give out.... [T]his kind of relentless churn of opinion, this unceasing urge to prosecute our case on things we hadn't even heard about an hour before, this gamification of being right — which is all the life of a crank really boils down to — is a deeply unhealthy way of interacting with the world around us.
For one thing, it robs us of our genuine curiosity. The paradox of the crank is that while they hold opinions on everything, they aren't particularly curious about anything.
"I have not, since my father brought home a Compaq Presario in 1995 and plugged it into our phone line, encountered one pocket of space in all of the World Wide Web that does not, to some degree or another, crankify all who inhabit it...." [N]owadays, saying something deeply unwell about an article you don't like to thousands of people is as trivial as ordering a coffee. And if the internet in general has lowered these barriers, social media has gone a step further. People who never set out to be cranks in the first place are actively incentivized to do so. This isn't just because whenever you post you get a thrilling little tally of all the people who agree with you, it's because of how these platforms are designed to maximize engagement. The ideal poster for social media companies is one who posts often, who posts stridently, and who responds to as much stuff as possible.
So, to be on Twitter or Facebook is to sit in a room while someone holds up random pieces of stimulus and demands your appraisal of each. What do we reckon of this? Okay, how about this? And this? What's your view here? Were you to design a machine to turn otherwise normal, healthy people into cranks — a kind of crankification engine, if you like — you would probably arrive at something like these platforms.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook don't crankify their users out of malice, they do it to turn a profit, which may actually be worse. When the cranks of yore would write a tirade spanning several faxes to their local member of parliament about a hedge that was bothering them, they did this for no-one but themselves. This is not the case for the Neo-crank. When we use our finite capacity for wonder to publicly opine about fictional teens using drugs on a television show, or people reading in bars, or one American girl leaving her fake-sounding college to attend a different fake-sounding college, a company is making bank off it. To put it another way, the Silicon Valley robber-barons are getting rich off the uncompensated labor of yeoman cranks, who till the posting fields in the sweltering heat of the discourse until their brains give out.... [T]his kind of relentless churn of opinion, this unceasing urge to prosecute our case on things we hadn't even heard about an hour before, this gamification of being right — which is all the life of a crank really boils down to — is a deeply unhealthy way of interacting with the world around us.
For one thing, it robs us of our genuine curiosity. The paradox of the crank is that while they hold opinions on everything, they aren't particularly curious about anything.
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What a masterful piece of projection this article is. "I am this way, my coworkers are this way, therefore everyone must be this way..."
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Typical capitalists, you mean. These guys are in no way leftists. They are doing this for money, not to help people. Posting to undo the positive moderation I gave you because I noticed who you really are, OMBad. Good job though, you almost got me. If you'd left out that "typical leftists" bit, you might have farmed some positive karma. Too bad your obsession with outdated political labels has left you intellectually damaged.
Thanks (Score:5, Funny)
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Gawker, eh? (Score:3)
Oh Gawker - nobody cares what you think (Score:1, Troll)
Gawkwer always was a refuge for no-talent nobodies whose lack of marketable skills means they'd never find a job doing something useful.
Why on earth would anyone working for Gawker be respected enough to be taken seriously?
Why on earth would Slashdot bother taking notice?
Oh yeah. I forgot. Slashdot's clueless corporate overlords.
Nothing to see here folks. Move along.
Re:Oh Gawker - nobody cares what you think (Score:5, Funny)
- said the crank.
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Spoken like someone who reads Slashdot for the articles. And replies to people who only read the summary.
I like how they snuck that link in there... (Score:4, Insightful)
Could it be there's more going on in TFA than meets the eye? Or was that just an accident arising from a complete lack of self awareness?
Gotta go. My dog's whistling for me. Reptilians are cavorting on the lawn again.
Re:I like how they snuck that link in there... (Score:5, Insightful)
A man realizes he is a crank.
This man also thinks he is better than most people.
Therefore, this man concludes that everyone is a crank now.
This is how projection works. This guy was always a crank through and through, and what has changed isnt his behavior, its his growing troubles keeping the lie of superiority alive. Everyone else being a crank is, at best, just this cunt trying to keep that lie alive that he is better than them.
He isnt. He never was. He projected it all. The last thing cranks land on is the truth.
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The claim that everyone is a crank is as well founded as the claim that there is no such scientific thing as gender
So you're saying it is not well founded?
The claim that everyone is a crank is as well founded as the claim .... that gender and sex are not intimately related.
So I guess, yes, You're saying its not well founded since nobody has ever argued that gender and sex are not related.
Honestly, if you're going to bother posting could you not make it coherent - or at least understandable as to what your overall argument is? You're obviously trying to make a point, so I assume you are either strongly pro-trans-rights or strongly anti-trans-rights. Its just very unclear as to which it is and that's just a complete waste of everyone's time.
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The claim that everyone is a crank is as well founded as the claim that there is no such scientific thing as gender, or that gender and sex are not intimately related.
Gender is from Latin and just means "type". Up until the 60s/70s if was used that way and didn't have anything to do with sex. Then it started to be used in the social sciences to talk about social aspects of sex. So I suppose you can say that there's a scientific thing as gender, but it's _social_ sciences, not hard science. Plus the very concept of it always allowed for gender to exist independently of biological sex. So, while gender and sex are related, traditional gender is not inexorably tied to biolo
Re:I like how they snuck that link in there... (Score:5, Insightful)
See.. You don't know the guy, but you have a preformed opinion about them and you can't wait to share it with the world. Kind of what their point was.
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I used to like Jalopnik but that site is so terrible now. They hired writers who know nothing about cars and the rest of the site filler is asking readers a question and posting the results as a slideshow.
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Unfortunately... (Score:3, Interesting)
They are exampling behavior that has always go on. At least now you people do not have to travel to a community to experience them So we now have the global web community of apathy and intolerance. It is as if they have their own political party...
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tl;dr - fuck Z
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We need to just give up our privacy and allow advertisers have our eye-tracking data. In exchange, comments are only allowed on articles for people who read them.
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People don't know how to communicate respectfully? That problem existed WAY before the internet gave everyone "a voice". It is just more visible now.
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That's a very good quote! Why does anonymity tend to turn people into assholes?
Penny Arcade wasn't quite as pithy with G.I.F.T. [knowyourmeme.com]
It's a trap! (Score:2)
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If you think you are while not actually saying anything to the like? Then logically you may always have or always not have been the like....The internet has nothing to do with it.
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Only if you say you disagree with it.
You, of course, are the crank (Score:2, Insightful)
You, of course, are the crank.
I, on the other hand, just believe what all reasonable people believe, lol. Which is why the social media companies need to censor harder. Censor things that I don't like harder, that is.
Anyway, this stuff's been around forever ... Cliff Claven, anyone? Only now it's "on the internet" (tm).
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but was USENET worse as it lacked moderation so anyone's vile thoughts were equally contributed with the actual useful data? It relied on knowing who's data to look for while ignoring everyone else's. definitely not web-like.
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In the early days of certain groups or technologies, those people would often amass in a group for something related. They'd purposefully not create their own group too early, as doing so would put a small number of people at risk of being told their posts were off topic in the larger, older group. The Perl language, for one, got a good deal of its early following by people posting solutions in Perl to questions in the shell programming groups. It wasn't a flame war with one side shouting down the other, bu
Re:Mistaking "the internet" for "the web", too. (Score:4, Informative)
Most newsreader clients in the day of USENET had kind of elaborate controls for muting unwanted trolls/cranks, giving you the flexibility to block specific posters or even entire subthreads spawned by them. Web based forums tend to have weak to non-existent threading controls, some don't even really have ways to block specific users.
There was also a selection bias back then, more of the people involved in USENET tended to be better educated, in higher paid professional type positions and so on, simply due to the nature of Internet access. Of course USENET changed a lot from the 1990s onward as places like AOL got in on it and dialup access got more common.
And due to USENETs batch/distributed system, there were always some news server operators who put effort into blocking spammier/troll type origin systems completely, preventing their newgroup messages or posts from propegating.
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PLONKs were an excellent way of self-policing.
Thank you (Score:1)
Thank you for your opinion on this subject. It is an interesting view and whether I agree or not doesn't really matter as I have my own opinion as well.
I hope you all have a great day
-Me
It's not the internet, it's the people (Score:2)
People are awful. If you want to do something productive, avoid people. Focus on the task before you.
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People can be awful or great, sometimes both at the same time in different communities.
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Sometimes, you can't avoid people. Other times you go out of your way not to avoid them [nytimes.com].
I thought Hogan & Thiel killed them to death (Score:2)
did someone buy the ashes?
They're not wrong either! (Score:1)
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Good thing you complained about it
Opinions are like Assholes. (Score:2)
-Would you say that to someone's face (in person)?
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No one likes to have them constantly shoved in their face.
We are all a little snobby. (Score:5, Interesting)
We have Car Snobs, Some ridicule a person for not getting the most affordable car, other for not getting the best value of the car, other for not getting the nicest car, and other for getting a car that is too nice, If you car is Electric or Hybrid then you are greeny hippy, if your car uses more gas then you are a redneck conspiracy nut.
In the olden days you wanted an opinion about a car, you would ask your friends and perhaps your local mechanic, depending on your area in Rural areas they may say to get a big truck or a car that has utility, in the Suburbs, they may encourage a more luxury car as their long commute to work should be comfy, in the city a small practical car where they can park and weave around in traffic. And they may be a GM town, or a Ford town, perhaps they Preferred BMW over Mercedes, or Honda over Toyota. But for the most part when you got a new car, you mostly got the approval of your peers.
On the internet we mix the Rural, Urban, Suburban people together in all one room, and their opinions based on what is best is all on display so, what ever opinion someone has there is going to be 2/3 of them probably going to disagree with them, because something else is better for them.
Plus there is a general way of thinking, if you like something, then you must be stupid, while if you are negative towards it then you must be smart.
Relatively quiet here so far (Score:3)
Maybe the people here are actually self-aware?
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> comments quickly fill up with how person/company in article is stupid and dumb and everything would be just perfect if only they did things their way.
In Microsoft's case, it's worth a try. The damned company needs real competition.
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I'm not sure what your point is. But MS sucks. They make obvious UI design fopas and sit on bugs, and they know they can slack because they have no real competition.
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Gawker doesn't really exist anymore (Score:2)
This whole article reeks of cancel culture b.s. and the idea of that you can't prosize people because doing so would be cancel culture. As an added bonus there's a little bit of toxic positivity mixed in there
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Even while they did that they served mostly clickbait. The whole Gawker network spewed mostly bullshit, and what's left of it still does. I shit on Gawker.
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Mark it on your calendar Drinkypoo for once we're both completely on the same side. Gawker's living proof of just how much evil a dedicated set of shitty people can do using the name of the fourth estate.
Internet? have you seen mainstream "news" (Score:1)
CNN going apeshit over use of the n-word though out of context, worse than the Holocaust and 9/11 it was!
and Fox News, ho boy.
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There was only really a brief window, if ever, that TV news is really mainstream. It certainly might be where some people get most of their news - but they were never going to read anyway. Those who read print news moved to online and still can't watch TV news.
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Both CNN and Fox have a large audience who only reads their articles online. However with in-article videos that play automatically, I guess there's not a lot of difference between watching and reading those.
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But online newspapers in decline too.
https://www.pewresearch.org/jo... [pewresearch.org]
Broadcast TV was hot 1960s-2000, cable TV news rose until 2010, decline of newspapers was mid 90s onward.
A nearly constant medium is radio, reaching 90% the population decade after decade... but hard to find stats on how much of that is news.
We are too pragmatic (Score:1)
cause or symptom? (Score:2)
I'd believe this is a symptom of who we have become, and I'd track the beginning of the transition to the 80s - more of a generational change that just happened to start graduating college around '91. I specifically noticed a marked change around that year in that the people who were coming out of college into engineering at that time suddenly needed to be told everything to do to enough level of detail that it was easier to just do it yourself. If you didn't pander to that, than their failure was your faul
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That's amazing. Must have been a really peaceful time.
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Bryn Mawr (Score:2)
Huh, some people consider Bryn Mawr a fake sounding college?
Still not taking comments I see (Score:1)
I’m not a goddam crank! (Score:2)
What does crank even mean? (Score:2)
The term "crank" is used in the article and summary dozens of times and yet it is never defined. How in the world could we possibly be expected to understand what point the author is driving at if we're not even in on what appears to be his private little joke?
I recommend that we collectively boycott this publication until the author writes a personal apology to each of us for having wasted our time reading it.
Can't fault the overarching idea (Score:2)
There's truth in there somewhere (Score:2)
The more worrisome aspect of anonymous internet crank posting is how they're being weaponized by the politicians. Who needs computer viruses to cause problems when you have millions of willing dummies who are happy to keep the food fight going.
Not the Internet, Social Media (Score:1)
Because of the Internet, 'We are all cranks now.'
No. The Internet hasn't made people cranks. Social media has.
The internet, itself, doesn't make people assholes. Social media's business model is based on the celebration and monetization of narcissism, insecurity, and conspiracy theories. Social media trains people to be assholes -- the bigger the asshole, the greater the rage generated, the greater the money the sociopaths make.
But, I fear, there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. So, yes, the Internet is now saturated with assholism thank