That's a really powerful insight. I was on the inside of the journalism profession as a university student, and while we did a weak job of it, we did exercise a gate-keeping capacity. We called it "professionalism."DWill wrote:Giving anybody in the world the opportunity to publish and be read by perhaps millions of people is the unique gift the internet has bestowed. Now we know the Trojan Horse quality of that gift. Without gatekeepers to inspect the products before publication and have right of rejection, all the owners of Facebook or Twitter can do, if they are suddenly concerned about the social harm of their contributors, is to ban them from submitting/publishing in the first place.
Professions give people a set of standards and procedures which safeguard not only the individual professional (who might otherwise make poor choices and get herself in trouble), but also the profession itself and its sense of mission. As observed in the book "New Power", the internet works on a dynamic that is completely opposite to that. Many people spread stuff because to them it seems like something the gate-keepers would disapprove of. A feature, not a bug.
But if silencing is the only possible answer, this runs the real risk of increasing the resistance (to gate-keeping, not to the abomination) to any such self-monitoring.
DWill wrote: With Facebook, censorship does arise, because it's presumed that anything Jones says is bad, even though it's not the type of censorship the Constitution forbids.
Well, it sounds like the alternative approach is to provide a "cellular" level of nourishment to keep aging curmudgeons from feeling isolated and useless and angry. We used to call this "grandchildren." Maybe part of the answer is to help with other people's grandchildren.
Men in particular tend to get themselves socially isolated. Most women have spent their lives cultivating the skills of connection: conversation, keeping track of each other's lives, cooking, child care reciprocity. Men are often just appendages to that, if they are involved at all. And after 50 it gets harder to go on long hikes, to ramble through the wilderness or kayak along the coast, and other projects that are manly enough for the self-image thing. Working on old cars is a dying hobby, though my dad found social interaction there.
In a world where almost all work is done according to specific formulas provided by specialists in marketing, where you have to know a field pretty well to have any voice at all about how things are done in it, it's easy for aging men to feel like there are gate-keepers everywhere they turn. (Not that younger people face this any less, but they are not comparing from a past in which it was dramatically less pronounced.)
