The semantics of News and what an NDP is
I enjoyed Pro's only self-typed constructive point, which is that SM has deteriorated our societal understanding of what actual serious News is to the point that someone making themselves a meal or an ordinary person having a birthday is held to be in the same category as the war in Ukraine. Let me agree with Con's semantics. I agree to that definition of News. I agree that SM has successfully destroyed our capacity to comprehend that News has tiers and there are tiers so low they shouldn't qualify as News. You have people competing with actual solid and important News by posting the meal they are eating on the same feed for their friends' brains to absorb the information. This is the heart of my case as Pro and actually encapsulates 3 of my contentions (all except the divide one).
There was no rebuttal 3, it was a 1-liner.
In fact, every single one of his rebuttals are just 'prove it' worded differently. So, before I 'prove' what I was going to expand on anyway (especially the clickbait angle), I want to clarify what 'harm' and 'good' are since my opponent chose not to define them.
Now, since my opponent defined News as loose as would have people laugh one out the room back in the 90s, not just 80s and I say this not to mock my opponent but notice that the other 2 debates have similarly ridiculous definitions in place, I must note something:
Since Con includes casual posting into News Distribution, all harms attached to casual Social Media use are now included and let me expand my points further.
The 'cancel culture' (CC) boogeyman
I didn't say once in Round 1 that SM is totally to blame for CC. I said that CC has reached such a scale where for casual opinions on anything (which now is literally anything as my opponent defined 'News' that way), people can lose their jobs. Due to the fear of expressing oneself on said platforms, it follows that people are now oppressed and simultaneously driven to blend in if they wish to not socially perish with those engaging in SM.
My opponent's rebuttals were that I had to prove CC didn't occur before and that enough use SM that way. The first rebuttal is wrong. If I can merely prove that SM has perpetuated CC and escalated it, I can include that as proof of my contention. CC isn't the actual argument though, it was an aiding point. The real point was about division and how it's driven far and severe on SM.
I would like to expand on the 'divide' going further than just views being pressured:
Some respondents predicted that those individuals who are already being left out or disadvantaged by the digital age will fall even further behind as algorithms become more embedded in society. They noted that the capacity to participate in digital life is not universal because fast-evolving digital tools and connections are costly, complicated, difficult to maintain and sometimes have a steep learning curve. And they said algorithmic tools create databased information that categorizes individuals in ways that are often to their disadvantage.
Pete Cranston of Euroforic Services wrote, “Smart(er) new apps and platforms will require people to learn how to understand the nature of the new experience, learn how it is guided by software, and learn to interact with the new environment. That has tended to be followed by a catch-up by people who learn then to game the system, as well as navigate it more speedily and reject experiences that don’t meet expectations or needs. The major risk is that less-regular users, especially those who cluster on one or two sites or platforms, won’t develop that navigational and selection facility and will be at a disadvantage.”
If the current economic order remains in place, then I do not see the growth of data-driven algorithms providing much benefit to anyone outside of the richest in society.
CHRISTOPHER OWENS
Christopher Owens, a community college professor, said, “If the current economic order remains in place, then I do not see the growth of data-driven algorithms providing much benefit to anyone outside of the richest in society.”
Tom Vest, a research scientist, commented, “Algorithms will most benefit the minority of individuals who are consistently ‘preferred’ by algorithms, plus those who are sufficiently technically savvy to understand and manipulate them (usually the same group).”
These proponents argued that “upgrades” often do very little to make crucial and necessary improvements in the public’s experiences. Many are incremental and mostly aimed at increasing revenue streams and keeping the public reputations of technology companies – and their shareholder value – high. An anonymous sociologist at the Social Media Research Foundation commented, “Algorithms make discrimination more efficient and sanitized. Positive impact will be increased profits for organizations able to avoid risk and costs. Negative impacts will be carried by all deemed by algorithms to be risky or less profitable.”
What that means is this; the divide I talked about is more literal and provable than Con perceived. To begin with any journalist that's up-and-coming nowadays has to either work with an extremely well-established corporation or know the system. They have to literally compete with people uploading their dinner meals on the same feed people get their daily News from regarding stuff that actually matters to their local area and the world. They can't really do that so well unless they know the exact tags and ways to structure things to hit the audience hard and fast.
Let me just stop there a bit to turn things on Con
When something is patently obvious, blatantly true, it follows that it is difficult to prove it as barely anyone has actually done the research and article to prove that link. Almost every single article I found during my research on clickbait and social media addiction has within it a presumption, reasonably held. It is presumed that SM usage habits and the style of it led to people consuming less hard news (which they do now) and far more merging between junk like what your friend is wearing to a party held to equal importance to you, if not more importance, to what your local governor is running on their platform or doing with their position.
Why is it I have to literally prove that SM made this happen when it clearly did? What I can do, however, is explore the harms of SM and it being people's primary source if both immediate issues of high importance and least importance on the brain. I want to explore all my points at once with a fluid series of proofs since my opponent is only saying I lack proof.
The quantity of information that we are exposed to every single day is astounding: we now in 2021 take in five times more information than we did in 1986. With our attention spans eroded to approximately eight seconds in our digital landscape, we have learned that to consume is to skim. Most of the text content is forced to be skipped. The American Press Institute found in 2014 that six in 10 people reported not reading beyond the headline in the past week.
About 73% of Americans report feeling certain degree of information overload, yet we continue to interface with it on a variety of devices and media, both professional and social. 1 It is estimated that the average millennial picks up the smartphone 150 times a day. This is purely technology addiction. In 2008, a statistical study conducted at Scotland’s Dundee University found that adults over the age of 55 who grew up in a household with a black-and-white TV set were more likely to dream in black and white. However, younger participants, who grew up in the age of Technicolor, nearly always experienced their dreams in color. 2 This shows the etching impact of the media over the mind.
The American Psychological Association supported these findings in 2011. Over-usage of technology harms the brain systems connecting emotional processing, attention and decision-making. Another study links anxiety, severe depression, suicide attempts and suicide with the rise in use of smartphones, tablets and other devices.3
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is defined by The New York Times as “the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media”. Social media is blasted with pictures and posts of scrumptious dinners, raging parties and enviable travel check-ins.4
When I prove that actual corporations have spend money on experts helping them form crisis plans for any cancel culture hitting them due to any employee's habits in life or SM posts (usually the habits get cancelled for SM posting) I am serious.
This was several months before Andrew Tate was arrested on anything (actually he's being held while they gather evidence in some legal loophole in Romania). Not only could Andrew Tate himself never have been as potent an influence (positive or negative) prior to social media but someone couldn't have been kicked off being the CEO of a team he poured 8 years of passion, money and life into just for partying with Andrew and refusing to stab his friend in the back over being cancelled on SM (that was all that had happened so far).
The idea that you are 'with' those hating him or scum worthy of cancelling is the exact mentality I spoke of.
During this debate, I implied people would default to having unbiased yet active interest in News if SM wasn't their NDP. If you had honed in on the ignorance without SM being significant and focused on the fact different societies would be affected differently as well as giving examples of good of SM as NDP such as the ALS campaign etc, you would have left me drowning in points I could not cover in 10k if I did not want to leave my own case unguarded.
Yeah, RM knows what he’s talking about. It was hard to argue for a side I didn’t agree with let alone a view that was going to lose from the start. I agreed with everything RM said
Thanks! Glad you found it helpful, and I hope you found the topic interesting :)
Good vote, Tej. Accurate summary
Bump
Debates with the same name, I lost track of this one. I’ll get to it soonish
Yep, I’ll vote on this once the Voting Period opens!
Alright tag me again when its over
That depends which tags you are adding but if there's some kind of official tournament tag then sure
I’ll try to knock out at least some feedback today. Would you both like the tags updated?
Please vote on this debate.
I trust you will vote on this.
*Sarcastically*: I love debate rounds shorter than two weeks