"The Internet Might Be Killing Discourse"

1. Perhaps, this is is something we need to face. The internet is not building discourse. \
2. It generating reactions, emotional driven, at times knee-jerk responses, lack of deeper thinking or reflection. A place where news are often not verified, just merely auto re-shared.
3. Social media is slowing down thinking by limiting our words. With a limitation in words, there comes a limiting in thoughts. Hence, killing discourse
4. We now have become reactionary beings. Predictable, big data analyzable and most importantly marketable - with this, the social media has truly becoming a marketing and IT professional's playground and paradise.

What will become of us?

(A post-#Trump, post-#Brexit, post-#Bersih5 reflection after reading this week's MIT Technology Review [below])

"The Internet Might Be Killing Discourse"

The Internet has always been championed as a tool for democratic good—but we must now perhaps question that view. “Isn’t the best way to fortify the town square by giving more people access to it?” asks Max Read in New York Magazine. “Free speech will expand, democracy will flower.”

But he says that the last few weeks suggest that may not be the case. While some have begun to muse over whether digital connectedness itself is good or bad, that discussion misses the point. Instead, author Hossein Derakhshan—who spent six years incarcerated for online activism in Iran—thinks that he’s identified the issue. “When I left prison ... I was confronted by a brave new world,” he explains, writing for MIT Technology Review. “Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered.” He believes that this amplifies our existing beliefs and habits, making us feel, rather than think. Read and Derakhshan both ultimately suggest that the monopolies of Facebook and Twitter must be broken, proposing that we should all read, link, and think, rather than watch and like video. They say the Internet can be good for democracy—but only if we choose for it to be."