There always another radio, newspaper, church. There's really only one Facebook, and it's now how you get essentially all of those things.
Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about.
I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true.
There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world!
If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage!
On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads.
While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head.
The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true.
That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
Is this a generational point of view? I don't think that the word "privilege" is "inseperable from personal attack. To me, this very much fits into the definition of a privilege as "a benefit enjoyed by a person, beyond the advantages of most". Access to and time to read a broad variety of news sources is very much a benefit enjoyed by some people, beyond the advantages of most. I don't see how there's any personal attack implicit in that...
I speak to communicate with people - that's communicate with, not talk to, and if you're unclear on the distinction, any dictionary with etymological information will serve you.
Talking about other people's opinions, behaviors, and beliefs in terms of privilege makes communicating with them harder instead of easier. So it's not worth my while to do.
This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth.
Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints.
I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
Now, your self-description is quite colorful, but seems to only support my claims. It almost sounds like you're saying that a diverse group of people do actually have the means to discuss complex topics and critically analyze diverse viewpoints beyond whatever Facebook's algorithm might choose for them.
And thank you bobcostas55 for bringing data to the conversation upthread.
But if this is what you call "communicating with people not just talking to them" I'll just step out now.
Sorry to say, yours is the first direct reply in years of HN I've regretted not being able to downvote.
Before I could get more than a few words into all of that, though, I got an email from my father, who told me that my distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up is in fact permanently paralyzed in the lower half of his body, and between that and other injuries will almost certainly require lifelong care.
I may be a sarcastic asshole of a redneck, but I am also an amazingly fortunate redneck. I have made a successful career in software engineering, which enables me to earn more in a year than both my parents combined. A lot of that I send back home. I cannot send enough. I do not make enough. In that light the perspective you express strikes me as thoughtlessly facile. I did a poor job of expressing that in my last comment, which was written in the heat of the moment. Perhaps this one, with the benefit of reflection, will make it more clear.
It's a shame you are unable to downvote that comment, if you feel it is warranted. Perhaps someone else will step up and do so.
And to give a little more background, Facebook was trying to get free "internet" access away in India, but it wasn't really internet access it was actually just a Facebook walled garden. The local population organized and ultimately the government rightly told them to piss off.
Because being able to access a diverse set of viewpoints on the Internet is not, actually, a "privilege" but rather the central point of the whole affair.
It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.