Being the last generation to have relied on slow traveling information (library, wives tales, television news, word of mouth etc) and shifting into the age of (over)information…. Did you experience dramatic changes to your beliefs or have they remained generally the same?
Comments
More than my beliefs changing, social media has made me realize how many people who were adults when I was a kid don’t actually believe what they claimed to believe.
I was raised in a religious family and church groups. The number of adults who took it upon themselves to teach me “love your neighbor as yourself” who clearly don’t give two craps about their neighbors was a very disheartening realization.
Not much, no. I think a lot of what we see in the digital age is grifter bullshit, so I take most online discourse with a massive grain of salt unless there’s a credible institution to validate it, and even then I’m still sceptical.
Edit: On second thought, I used to be a massive proponent of free speech and the marketplace of ideas, and now, having witnessed the sheer stupidity of social media for over a decade, I no longer believe very strongly in either of those things. Reason cannot be expected to prevail and people cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.
Idk how to answer this, because I believe that we should always be capable of adapting our views based on our personal values and learning new information.
I’m much more reliant on first sources now, I prefer to watch the full uncut video vs clips made by news sites and actually read the study than trust the writer has any background in understanding the knowledge written within it to judge the quality and whether or not it’s actually news worthy. I also check the credentials of the person speaking or writing in judging how much of their opinion or take I should take, which was harder to validate in slower media. Everyone everywhere of all time has a bias in what they’re bringing to the table, and it’s important to understand what that bias is when deciding what you take as fact.
I dont think the digital age changed my beliefs as much as it has given me the opportunity to be exposed to more cultures and walks of lives which I do enjoy
They have, I’ve gathered so many perspectives from various people.
I think the proliferation of the Internet has had the opposite effect–people have lost the ability the parse and evaluate information, and they tend to silo themselves in echo chambers that reinforce their existing beliefs. I think people who spend a lot of time on the Internet are overall more narrow-minded, more committed to their beliefs, and less able to accept reasons for changing them.
Information is easier to get, if you are able to separate information from disinformation, propaganda and so on.
For example I never saw images or videos from German animal agriculture while growing up. It wasn’t on the news, nobody talked about it, nobody wanted to know.
Nowadays, I was able to watch footage from slaughterhouses and factory farms, and it definitely changed my beliefs around animals being considered “food”.
Other examples for things I like are news about conflicts and so on being far more accessible, including not only getting the information from German media, but from other countries as well. It’s not just one official perspective, but it’s multiple perspectives (and of course always the question who wants to tell which story).
I keep moving to the left.
I learned that my kindness and empathy wasn’t a weakness. I grew up to be kind, to be generous, to not be judgemental because you don’t know everyone’s story, people deserve second chances, etc.
And then in high school I had my contrarian edgelord phase and thought I had to be a hardened person because there were bad actors who would try to take advantage of my kindness, that certain people didn’t deserve second chances or kindness or empathy…
And then I just… Idk, had more access to information that allowed me to think critically about everything, to question my own beliefs, to really figure out who I was, what kind of person I wanted to be… And really just leaned hard into that.
The digital age with that kind of access to information played a huge role in it, but I’m sure I would have eventually come across the stuff in libraries or self-reflection or something. If anything, I think it just accelerated me coming into myself.
Yes. And no. I love being able to learn so much at any moment in time, or experience someone else’s day on the other side of the world from them. But so much misinformation has started to eliminate actual information. It can be hard to find what you are looking for.
Google used to actually work. Like a mind reading miracle full of ideas to bounce off of you. Now it just tries to sell you crap from illegitimate websites with urls nobody has ever heard of, and it’s fucking annoying.
Hell, even shopping is insane. We had The Old Internet. It was a think of beauty. Then Facebook came along and destroyed the world.
I have no faith or belief in the system of government in my country. It’s failing so many people in so many ways, and many of them don’t even realize it and voted to have it this way.
Edit: you mentioned wives tales, etc. You can’t find the true root of a lot of clichés anymore because those wives tales and rules of thumb don’t have have the right reason for doing the thing (think “life hacks” or “i do it this way” but why do you do it this way?) when passed down generation to generation. That’s what made me soft gears up there.
Same beliefs, I never believed in all information so I filter information the same as I always have.
Last night I was telling my husband that I used to learn things online but now all the search engines are horrible and the sites they link to are pure junk, so now I feel like I’m stupid. But at least there’s still some academics on Tumblr to learn from on occasion when they decide to infodump.
I guess….I learned about autism online and realized I’m most likely autistic.
Also I grew up and still am working class, and with middle class culture being so heavily dominant online I’ve learned a lot about class and culture and how privileged people think and how their beliefs affect the world.
Also in the last 20 years I’ve learned how very irrational and weird a lot of humans are and how they’re quite happy to kill themselves and others to feel included and/or special online, like people refusing vaccinations and choosing to die of Covid or choosing to let their children die of measles for the online clout, or voting for fascism and choosing to let millions suffer and die so they can fit in with hateful groups online. Not that I ever had a high opinion of the species after reading about the Holocaust when I was 9, but now I really don’t understand why I have to live under the actions of this evil species.