Fringe porn
The massive amount of information on the web has enabled some marginal ideas to enter into mainstream discourse. This is not necessarily good for society as a whole.
Before worldwide communications, knowledge of marginal behaviours were subject to individuals feeling they were more worthy of sharing than more commonly discussed topics, so they may tell a few people about them. So, for knowledge to reach a wider audience, a lot of consecutive people had to rate it highly enough and often enough for it to gain public traction. It also took a long time for any to make it big.
As communications became more ubiquitous, the timeframes for dissemination decreased, but the tools to do so were expensive, so relatively few people could produce content. A similar situation applied to the channels for distribution. Together with these technical and skills limitations, producers had to prioritise some content over others, while competing with popular content, leading to only occasional glimpses by the general public. Of course, gossip about some prominent person may have made it to the front pages of newspapers for a day or so, but then sank away in the popular consciousness.
Today, we are relatively free of those technical, skill and economic limitations to content production, so we have access to a lot more information than we may come to know of through those around us. Algorithms are feeding up plenty of salacious content to amplify whatever minor excursions we have made into the nether reaches of world knowledge. Types of things that were formerly rarely known about or discussed can now be brought to mass attention by carefully gaming those algorithms.
Reputations can be trashed overnight, and crazy conspiracies can be popularised by manipulating the feeds of the gullible. Truth is competing with misinformation and lies, making it hard to really know what to believe. Legitimate grievances are amplified and distorted into weapons against social cohesion purely for the benefit of the agendas of a few. While more information has allowed us to have insights into other ways we can build societies, the means of disseminating those ideas have enabled just the opposite, leading to disintegration of trust in societies and their institutions.
While the privileged few have always been able to manipulate what information gets public exposure, we are seeing how far they will risk people and the earth to get their ends. They will promote whatever ideas will cause people to act against their own mental and physical health to stop them challenging that privilege. Most do it to amass monstrous wealth, but others just do it to see how much they can manipulate people.
To step back from all this insanity, we need to re-focus upon what is really useful to maintain our own physical, emotional and mental health by making choices about what we take on of the information that we come across. We can step back from just accepting what seems to play to our ignorance or preferences, and take the time to think through what the consequences are of believing such stuff.
We can see that there was a reason why so many activities and behaviours are not good to be well known, and that is that they don't scale up to be too widely followed. They are often too harmful and disturbing that mass adoption creates an unworkable society. While we can try to legislate against some behaviours, we will only make inroads into injecting some sanity back into societal life if we educate people to know how to manage information overload without just ignoring what doesn't suit them or making oversimplifications.
Complexity is part of life but some skills are needed to keep sane in a sea of misinformation. Knowledge is not power when it is abundant. Power comes with knowing how to apply knowledge, but with that comes some responsibility. Using it to manipulate others is always going to create problems. Using it to help each other find better ways to live together brings much more benefits. This understanding needs to be the basis of modern education.