2. My parents would rather have me drinking than playing Role-Playing Games
At 16, I had to lie to my parents to play RPGs. I'd tell them I was off drinking beer with friends (which, back then, was legal).
Why? Because they got their information from TV and newspapers like everyone else. And what they read was that RPGs were satanic rituals and that "playing RPGs" meant murdering people.
I think it's a bit shallow for the author to blame everything on the media without even mentioning the extremely conservative Catholic church or how Spain was a full on dictatorship until Franco died in 1975. Likewise his prescription to just ignore the trolls ignores a lot of solid research on information warfare, tipping points and the like; the idea of 'Gresham's law of content', where bad drives out good once it rises above a certain portion of the total, has been around a good 15 years.
In the end it feels as if the author is projecting personal feelings onto a preferred platform and declaring an individual expression of demand to be an objective inelasticity. In reality networks cleave all the time, and indeed do in rather predictable ways that can be derived from the pattern of follows or interaction without even paying much attention to the content.
Why? Because they got their information from TV and newspapers like everyone else. And what they read was that RPGs were satanic rituals and that "playing RPGs" meant murdering people.
I think it's a bit shallow for the author to blame everything on the media without even mentioning the extremely conservative Catholic church or how Spain was a full on dictatorship until Franco died in 1975. Likewise his prescription to just ignore the trolls ignores a lot of solid research on information warfare, tipping points and the like; the idea of 'Gresham's law of content', where bad drives out good once it rises above a certain portion of the total, has been around a good 15 years.
In the end it feels as if the author is projecting personal feelings onto a preferred platform and declaring an individual expression of demand to be an objective inelasticity. In reality networks cleave all the time, and indeed do in rather predictable ways that can be derived from the pattern of follows or interaction without even paying much attention to the content.