Sitting there in his favorite specialty coffee shop, furiously typing on his computer, headphones playing the theme song to Blend S, Bob is currently in the middle of dunking on the argument of an alt-right troll account on Twitter. With a cup of Colombian robusta roast, on his Chinese made knock-off laptop, writing on an American website, listening to Japanese music, Bob is a part of the global chain of information and commodities that have been growing exponentially ever since the advent of the internet and globalization. Yet just three months after that moment he is sitting alone in his damp room alone, lonely, and unable to connect with anyone due to the pandemic that has spread in some part due to the globalization he has come to love. With no support system from those around him.
Many of us can relate to Bob during this pandemic. Our quaint yet glamorous life before the pandemic has been in part due to the explosion of transportation and communication technology that has happened to us as a species after the 19th century, culminating in a “Cambrian explosion”-Esque boom after the Two Great Wars, allowing us to connect with places far away in all facets of life through this thing we called globalization.
Globalization as we know it today started accelerating at a high pace in the 19th century due to advances in transportation and communication technology1Albrow, Martin, and Elizabeth King. Globalization, Knowledge, and Society : Readings from International Sociology. London ; Newbury Park, Sage Publications, 1990.. From the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ships, to the telegraph, Internet, and mobile phones, the increase in global interactions has caused a growth in international trade alongside with the exchange of ideas and culture2fordStever, H. Guy. “Science, Systems, and Society.” Journal of Cybernetics, vol. 2, no. 3, Jan. 1972, pp. 1–3, 10.1080/01969727208542909. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.3Wolf, Martin (September 2014). “Shaping Globalization” (PDF). Finance & Development. International Monetary Fund. 51 (3): 22–25..
In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge4“Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?”. International Monetary Fund. 12 April 2000.. While some technologies push the boundaries for one specific aspect of globalization, most technologies collaborate to contribute to multiple aspects all at once due to the compounding nature of evolution. Two technological advances that come to mind as the greatest push toward globalization would be containerization and the internet. How so?
Technology That Shapes The World
With economics, trade, and transaction as the main reason for globalization, it’s not hard to argue that globalization as we know now wouldn’t exist without the technology of containerization 5“Containerization as Globalization.” Communications and Mobility, 5 May 2017, pp. 198–231, 10.1002/9781119372080.ch9. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.. Containerization is a system of transferring things using a standardized unit of storage that allows the loading, unloading, stacking, transporting, and transfer through a multitude of different vehicles—container ships, rail transport flatcars, and semi-trailer trucks—without having to open it. The technology reduces the cost of international trade by a significant amount to the point where it might be cheaper for us to buy goods from China cheaper than it is to buy one from locally.
Laying down the works for a world fit for globalization, 1866 marked the start of the interconnection of the entire world with the first commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. Completed on the 18th of July, 1866 by the ship SS Great Eastern, the laying down telegraph lines shows the potential of an interconnected world not limited by physical distance 6Wilson, A J. The Living Rock : The Story of Metals Since Earliest Times and Their Impact on Developing Civilization. Cambridge, England, Woodhead, 1996.. First adopted in the 1840s, the electrical telegraph superseded optical telegraph systems, becoming the standard way to communicate by distance. By the latter half of the century, most developed nations had commercial telegraph networks with local telegraph offices in most cities and towns, allowing the public to send messages called telegrams addressed to any person in the country, for a fee. This interconnectivity allowed for an unprecedented level of economic and societal impact as information is shared faster and more freely across a greater distance, allowing an easier transfer of ideas across communities 7Tancia. A History of Telegraphy. 2014, http://www.pens.co.uk/pen2paper/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-History-of-Telegraphy.pdf.
That technology then evolved into the form that we are very much comfortable with now is part of our identity. What we know as the Internet now has its first working prototype in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense 8“An Internet Pioneer Ponders the Next Revolution.” Archive.Nytimes.Com, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/biztech/articles/122099outlook-bobb.html. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.. Evolving and merging with other technologies of its times, ARPANET with a host of other technology as part of the building blocks that formed our modern understanding of the net with the idea of the World Wide Web.
As the technology gets easier and easier to utilize, it is much easier for information and ideas to bounce in the head of many different people. Starting from the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), to the mailing list, blogs, web forums, and the now ubiquitous social media, there have been plenty of ways for users to exchange ideas. The technology has allowed us to see activism to an unprecedented degree with things like the Black Lives Matter movement 9Conor Friedersdorf. “Distinguishing Between Antifa, the KKK, and Black Lives Matter.” The Atlantic, The Atlantic, 31 Aug. 2017, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/drawing-distinctions-antifa-the-alt-right-and-black-lives-matter/538320/., opened a whole new culture to blossom in the form of internet memes 10Shifman, Limor. Memes. Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press, 2014., and created the world’s most profitable companies in the form of Alphabet (Google), Facebook, and Amazon 11“List of Public Corporations by Market Capitalization.” Wikipedia, 22 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2020. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.. And yet it has also shown us the worst that humanity is capable of, from the biggest drug marketplace in the form of The Silk Road 12Wikipedia Contributors. “Silk Road (Marketplace).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 7 May 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)., an increase in cyberbullying and depression rates 13Hamm, Michele P., et al. “Prevalence and Effect of Cyberbullying on Children and Young People.” JAMA Pediatrics, vol. 169, no. 8, 1 Aug. 2015, p. 770, http://www.safetylit.org/citations/index.php?fuseaction=citations.viewdetails&citationIds%5B%5D=citjournalarticle_487993_24, 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0944. Accessed 22 Apr. 2019., to the rampant spread of child pornography 14“The Scourge of Child Pornography.” Federal Bureau of Investigation, http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-scourge-of-child-pornography#:~:text=They%20estimated%20that%20three%20in. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020..
As with any highway and mode of transportation, the internet as the highway of information does not care about the content it serves. It exists unfazed by the humans that use it, allowing anyone to form and decide how they are going to utilize this piece of technology. A safe place for anyone, a very liberal place.
And yet this exponential explosion of information is not for free. There is only so much information that we can absorb at one time, and as with any form of news not all of them are equally true, or useful. The idea of fake news is not new, be it the news of the king’s failing health to the discovery of creatures on the moon15Starmans, Barbara J. “10 Examples of Fake News from History.” The Social Historian, 24 Dec. 2018, http://www.thesocialhistorian.com/fake-news/.. But when all forms of information are absorbed either through the big media journalist or just our own sense, we have learned ways to handle them. Sure the press had control over the news, but we as a society have put standards and journalists have their own code of ethics to ensure the people’s trust in them 16“SPJ Code of Ethics – Society of Professional Journalists.” Spj.Org, 2014, http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.. And when it comes from news from those around us, there wasn’t that much news happening so we could carefully investigate to understand the truth.
So what’s the initial result of it? Right now, everyone is a journalist capable of broadcasting news on equal footing with the big media companies. While this growth in citizen journalism gives voice to those that normally are unheard, one question comes to mind. How do we find out which one is true in this torrent of information?
A World Too Complex for Truth
To say that the world has become more complex would be an understatement. The International Data Corporation estimated that we have around 33 zettabytes of data in 2018, with an expected increase to 175 zettabytes by 202517Reinsel, David, et al. The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core. 2018.. To get the scale of how much data that is, If you were to store 175 zettabytes on DVDs, your stack of DVDs would be long enough to circle Earth 222 times.
Yeah, we are having a lot of data.
And we are not slowing down. In 2019, there are 140 million tweets published and 460,000 new accounts daily on Twitter, while 95 million pictures and 250 million stories daily are created on Instagram18“Average Time Spent Daily on Social Media (with 2019 Data).” BroadbandSearch.Net, 2019, http://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media.. This torrent of information divides our attention, creating a state described as Continuous Partial Attention19Misner, Ivan. “The Danger of Continuous Partial Attention.” Entrepreneur, 26 Nov. 2014, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240254. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.. Everything feels pointless as we are constantly giving a small amount of our attention to a lot of different things, instead of fully focusing on what we’re doing. Be it endlessly scrolling through Twitter, looking through pictures on Instagram, or the notifications from your one uncle that loves to tag you with conspiracy theory.
So to help curb this ever-growing mass of information that we have in the world, we look towards algorithms that can predict what kind of content we like and engage with, in an effort to condense and focus only on the most important information. But that’s only exchanging one problem with another. As the algorithm optimizes itself to our desire, it is also prone to our confirmation biases20Wikipedia Contributors. “Confirmation Bias.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 May 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.. Compounded over time, this leads to a much more radical and polarized news feed based on our unintended bias 21“Radical Ideas Spread through Social Media. Are the Algorithms to Blame?” http://Www.Pbs.Org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.. It doesn’t help that news and content that stokes emotions are much easier to go viral and show up on your feeds22Berger, Jonah A., and Katherine L. Milkman. “What Makes Online Content Viral?” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009, 10.2139/ssrn.1528077. 23Brady, William J., et al. An Ideological Asymmetry in the Diffusion of Moralized Content among Political Elites. 28 Sept. 2018, 10.31234/osf.io/43n5e. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020..
That situation fits perfectly with Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year, “post-truth” 24“Oxford Word of the Year 2016 | Oxford Languages.” Oup.Com, 2016, languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/.. They define the word as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” or in simpler terms, a world where emotions mean more in shaping public emotion than facts.
The Earth is Flat and The Moon Landing is Fake!
Take, for example, the weird and bizarre world of flat earthers. While seeming to be an old phenomenon, most modern flat Earth beliefs originated from the English writer Samuel Rowbotham in the 19th century. After dying down for a few decades, the idea reemerged in internet culture through various groups and communities in the form of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories’ simple definition is the belief that a group of people — often powerful people — collude in secret in order to make plans that are publicly seen as malevolent or evil 25Goertzel, Ted. “Belief in Conspiracy Theories.” Political Psychology, vol. 15, no. 4, Dec. 1994, p. 731, 10.2307/3791630..
However, conspiracy theories can also be understood as a way for people to understand the world around them. Rooted in a desire to make sense of the complex world around them, most conspiracy theories have an internal consistency that may coincide with a strong belief that they may have about the world26Douglas, Karen M., et al. “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 26, no. 6, Dec. 2017, pp. 538–542, 10.1177/0963721417718261.. Previously, it’s only in the minds of a sliver of people, then the advent of mass media, and in our context, social media have amplified the abilities for these theorists to share their ideas and find people that might gel together with a cognitive resonance.
Sure, when the conspiracy is something as absurd as flat earth or the fact that the moon landing was faked doesn’t have that much of an impact on our daily lives. However, we can see the damage possible through the combined force of our post-truth world and conspiracy theorists during the Covid-19 pandemic. There have been countless theories and misinformation about the pandemic, from a Chinese biological weapon27Kaszeta, Dan. “Perspective | No, the Coronavirus Is Not a Biological Weapon.” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/26/no-coronavirus-is-not-biological-weapon/. and a forced vaccination program that will inject people with chips to track them28Byford, Jovan. “Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories: 6 Tips on How to Engage Anti-Vaxxers.” CNN, edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/health/conspiracy-theories-covid-19-response-tips-wellness-partner/index.html. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020., to the rumors that the virus is not more deadly compared to the flu29Faust, Jeremy Samuel. “Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges.” Scientific American Blog Network, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/. and that mask is not useful in slowing the spread(it is30Chu, Derek K., et al. “Physical Distancing, Face Masks, and Eye Protection to Prevent Person-to-Person Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” The Lancet, vol. 0, no. 0, 1 June 2020, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext, 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31142-9.).
This overexposure to all sorts of information combined with the erosion of the basis of a free neutral internet that has been eroded in the past two decades didn’t help our mental health in the slightest. From the threat of corporations taking away Net Neutrality31“Easley, Robert F., et al. “Research Commentary—From Net Neutrality to Data Neutrality: A Techno-Economic Framework and Research Agenda.” Information Systems Research, vol. 29, no. 2, June 2018, pp. 253–272, 10.1287/isre.2017.0740. Accessed 21 Aug. 2019., social media that sells user privacy for money32“Facebook–Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal., to authoritarian governments censoring things that do not fit their agenda33Xu, Xueyang, et al. Internet Censorship in China: Where Does the Filtering Occur?. It seems that the day of the free world of the internet is waning, giving way to much stronger control of information from an authoritarian state akin to that from 1984.
Societal Shifts… or is it?
The 2020 Freedom House reports that democracy and global freedom has been in a decline for the 14th year in a row. In its survey evaluating 195 countries and 15 territories, Freedom House found that political freedoms and civil liberties all over the world are moving away from its path to approach democracy34“A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy.” Freedom House, freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2020/leaderless-struggle-democracy.. From the crackdown on the protest by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over at Hong Kong, India’s turn toward Hindu nationalism, to the unsteady bastion of freedom that is the USA under the current administrator, tells us how democracy is on the verge of its end.
Was the decline of a liberal and democratic world something unprecedented? We don’t know, but history has shown that a non-democratic form of government—be it an autocracy or an oligarchy—has more success under its belt compared to its democratic counterpart. From the Nile kingdom of Egypt35“History of Ancient Egypt.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 31 Jan. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ancient_Egypt. to the collection of kingdoms we now call China36“History of China.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China., what we now consider the norm of liberal democratic capitalism has only been the norm for the last couple of centuries37Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London, Penguin, 2012..
While some form of the democratic process was present all over history, most civilizations are mostly autocratic or oligarchic in nature. Some theorize that democracies have to be small in size because as the size grows, it is more likely for the government to turn despotic. However, due to the small size, they were vulnerable to conquest from neighboring states. Hence was the reason why democratic governments were rare throughout history38Deudney, Daniel. Bounding Power : Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007.39Thorhallsson, Baldur, and Sverrir Steinsson. “Small State Foreign Policy.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 24 May 2017, 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.484..
Democratic and liberal ideas started its journey toward the mainstream from the Age of Enlightenment. The philosophy and political idea was used by leaders in the Glorious Revolution of 168840Pincus, Steven C A. 1688 : The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009., the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 to justify the armed overthrow of royal tyranny, with its greater worldwide adoption happening after the French Revolution.
A much more liberal and democratic world was then created off the back of World War 1 and World War 2 through the economic strength and political influence that the United States has against the weakened world. In an effort to establish democracies and stop other forms of hegemony, the United Nations was established as a way to check and control the newly democratic nations, becoming a pseudo-government that represents the entire world.
However, during WW2 we saw the rise of Fascist Nazi Germany and Communist USSR with a new yet familiar form of government and political system, Authoritarianism, which is characterized by a strong central power and limited political freedoms41Furio Cerutti. Conceptualizing Politics an Introduction to Political Philosophy. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY Routledge, 2017.. While defeated during WW2, the government system seems to not die under the influence of democracy. With countries like China, India, Philippines, and much more adapting from its playbook, it is a real possibility that a modern incarnation of an autocratic/oligarchic system will come back to regain its throne as the main political system of the world.
The Long Tail
“So what does it have to do with me?” you ask dear readers, “Sure I’m connected but I’ll be fine,” you say. What is the connection between the highly complex interconnected world we live in and the return of a non-democratic political system? The unprecedented scale of damage that one part of the system can cause to the world. Called the Black Swan theory, this condition was developed by Nassim Taleb to describe three conditions. Those conditions are the disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology; the non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities); and the psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.
As we evolve into a more complex and interconnected society, the risks of these Black Swans increase dramatically as there are more variables than we can handle with our models of risk management. We are extremely used to forecast things about the world by assuming that they will go and follow the normal distribution. However, real-life does not map itself to our statistical model and it will never be because our statistical model is based on incomplete past data and it cannot predict things that have never happened42Nassim Nicholas, Taleb. “The Fat Tails Statistical Project.” http://Www.Fooledbyrandomness.Com, http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020..
We have plenty of examples of this happening already to some extent, the 2009 financial crisis and the uncontrollable spread of Covid-19 being two of the recent ones. The 2009 financial crisis was a problem that started due to the housing crisis in the USA. Yet because of how interconnected and interdependent the world financial system is when one part of the system fails the other collapses together with it. The Covid-19 rapid and uncontrollable spread was also due to the world’s dependence on China’s manufacturing and the interdependence of our supply chain, leading to one of the worst in recorded history.
There is also one of the diciest and scary parts of our history. War. For most of human history, war has been the life and blood of a civilization, and yet its effect has always been kept to those in the area of the war due to logistics and the nature of war itself. Even World War 1 wasn’t really a world war, with it basically only involving the European states plus a little bit of Asia. But war after World War 2 changes dramatically with the advent of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Bombs. No longer is the battlefield a specific place, as any place within range of a nuclear missile—virtually everywhere—is a potential battlefield. We see a glimpse of this during the cold war where the battlefield shifts into a war of information and ideology instead of a war of bodies and steel, with the looming fear of it tipping too far into a nuclear war. The effect on the entire world is also dramatically increased. While a conventional war between two countries may leave a large spot of land unusable with shells and mines, any war after nuclear weapons will only end up in mutually assured destruction43Wiratama, Anugerah Tryandi. “Mengapa Indonesia Belum Siap Menghadapi Perang Nuklir.” Economica, 9 Feb. 2019, http://www.economica.id/2019/02/09/kajian-online-mengapa-indonesia-belum-siap-menghadapi-perang-nuklir/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020.44“Mutual Assured Destruction.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction..
Lastly, there is the unknowable risk that our complex interconnected and interdependent world might have, where one action by one of the players could spell the destruction of the world as we know it. It could be another pandemic, a rising sea level, an artificial intelligence reaching singularity, or maybe aliens. We don’t know, and we might never know until the time comes.
What Can I Do?
If you take away one thing from these fragmented (yet interconnected! LOL) points, let it be this: The world is never what it has been, it is always changing, always coming together, and always becoming more interconnected and most importantly, more fragile. If we don’t realize this and rely on our standard models of understanding politics, economics, and society as a whole, we would be, as Taleb puts it, “using the wrong map of reality rather than no map at all”. And this map may well lead us astray; to take the analogy further, we are looking at the map while the ground beneath us shifts and contorts in ways we have never seen. And whatever the next crisis is, it will be massive, all-reaching, and most crucially unexpected. And so, if the world is going to shit and any little disruption to the fragile system could collapse it at any second, what can we as individuals feasibly do? I believe that we should brace ourselves for a time of uncertainty, where survival of the fittest would be the primary way of living.
Utilize the system, but don’t depend on it because it is not as robust as we expect or hoped it to be. Be mindful of systemic risks, be wary of your pension fund accounts, of economists, of pundits and “advisors” or “consultants”, and realize that any notion of stability is merely an illusion; the house of cards may collapse at any moment. Read less news and spend less time on social media because the information is toxic and it can lead you to think that you know more than you actually do. Start investing time and energy to create value in your immediate community, and shield yourself from the system as best you can. Because when the time comes, only you and those around you that will help you survive.
“Ignorance is Bliss”
-Thomas Gray45Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 1978
Editor: Miftah Rasheed Amir, Rama Vandika Daniswara, Muhammad Daffa Nurfauzan
Illustrator: Saffana Putri
Referensi
↵1 | Albrow, Martin, and Elizabeth King. Globalization, Knowledge, and Society : Readings from International Sociology. London ; Newbury Park, Sage Publications, 1990. |
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↵2 | fordStever, H. Guy. “Science, Systems, and Society.” Journal of Cybernetics, vol. 2, no. 3, Jan. 1972, pp. 1–3, 10.1080/01969727208542909. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵3 | Wolf, Martin (September 2014). “Shaping Globalization” (PDF). Finance & Development. International Monetary Fund. 51 (3): 22–25. |
↵4 | “Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?”. International Monetary Fund. 12 April 2000. |
↵5 | “Containerization as Globalization.” Communications and Mobility, 5 May 2017, pp. 198–231, 10.1002/9781119372080.ch9. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵6 | Wilson, A J. The Living Rock : The Story of Metals Since Earliest Times and Their Impact on Developing Civilization. Cambridge, England, Woodhead, 1996. |
↵7 | Tancia. A History of Telegraphy. 2014, http://www.pens.co.uk/pen2paper/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/A-History-of-Telegraphy.pdf. |
↵8 | “An Internet Pioneer Ponders the Next Revolution.” Archive.Nytimes.Com, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/biztech/articles/122099outlook-bobb.html. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵9 | Conor Friedersdorf. “Distinguishing Between Antifa, the KKK, and Black Lives Matter.” The Atlantic, The Atlantic, 31 Aug. 2017, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/drawing-distinctions-antifa-the-alt-right-and-black-lives-matter/538320/. |
↵10 | Shifman, Limor. Memes. Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press, 2014. |
↵11 | “List of Public Corporations by Market Capitalization.” Wikipedia, 22 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2020. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵12 | Wikipedia Contributors. “Silk Road (Marketplace).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 7 May 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace). |
↵13 | Hamm, Michele P., et al. “Prevalence and Effect of Cyberbullying on Children and Young People.” JAMA Pediatrics, vol. 169, no. 8, 1 Aug. 2015, p. 770, http://www.safetylit.org/citations/index.php?fuseaction=citations.viewdetails&citationIds%5B%5D=citjournalarticle_487993_24, 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0944. Accessed 22 Apr. 2019. |
↵14 | “The Scourge of Child Pornography.” Federal Bureau of Investigation, http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-scourge-of-child-pornography#:~:text=They%20estimated%20that%20three%20in. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵15 | Starmans, Barbara J. “10 Examples of Fake News from History.” The Social Historian, 24 Dec. 2018, http://www.thesocialhistorian.com/fake-news/. |
↵16 | “SPJ Code of Ethics – Society of Professional Journalists.” Spj.Org, 2014, http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp. |
↵17 | Reinsel, David, et al. The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core. 2018. |
↵18 | “Average Time Spent Daily on Social Media (with 2019 Data).” BroadbandSearch.Net, 2019, http://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media. |
↵19 | Misner, Ivan. “The Danger of Continuous Partial Attention.” Entrepreneur, 26 Nov. 2014, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240254. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵20 | Wikipedia Contributors. “Confirmation Bias.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 May 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias. |
↵21 | “Radical Ideas Spread through Social Media. Are the Algorithms to Blame?” http://Www.Pbs.Org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵22 | Berger, Jonah A., and Katherine L. Milkman. “What Makes Online Content Viral?” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009, 10.2139/ssrn.1528077. |
↵23 | Brady, William J., et al. An Ideological Asymmetry in the Diffusion of Moralized Content among Political Elites. 28 Sept. 2018, 10.31234/osf.io/43n5e. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵24 | “Oxford Word of the Year 2016 | Oxford Languages.” Oup.Com, 2016, languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/. |
↵25 | Goertzel, Ted. “Belief in Conspiracy Theories.” Political Psychology, vol. 15, no. 4, Dec. 1994, p. 731, 10.2307/3791630. |
↵26 | Douglas, Karen M., et al. “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 26, no. 6, Dec. 2017, pp. 538–542, 10.1177/0963721417718261. |
↵27 | Kaszeta, Dan. “Perspective | No, the Coronavirus Is Not a Biological Weapon.” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/26/no-coronavirus-is-not-biological-weapon/. |
↵28 | Byford, Jovan. “Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories: 6 Tips on How to Engage Anti-Vaxxers.” CNN, edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/health/conspiracy-theories-covid-19-response-tips-wellness-partner/index.html. Accessed 23 Aug. 2020. |
↵29 | Faust, Jeremy Samuel. “Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges.” Scientific American Blog Network, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/. |
↵30 | Chu, Derek K., et al. “Physical Distancing, Face Masks, and Eye Protection to Prevent Person-to-Person Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” The Lancet, vol. 0, no. 0, 1 June 2020, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext, 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31142-9. |
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