TRX
June 24, 2013
42:
> "Halting State" shelved in Crime

Len Deighton's "SS-GB" and Robert Harris' "Fatherland" are normally shelved in the "thriller" or "military fiction" sections.

TRX
June 27, 2013
116:
@102:
I'm curious about how, if at all, the live-your-life-online (virtually) option has changed people's sense of culture, regionalism, etc. From some of the comments above, I'd say not at all;
---
Bingo.

James Lileks wrote an article for a newspaper back in the 1990s on that very subject. He used to have a link to it off his web site, but it went away a few versions ago.

Basically, his comment was that everyone expected the internet to be a broadening experience; you could meet all sorts of strange people, be exposed to different ideas, philosophies, and viewpoints, boldly go where no man has gone before, etc.

Instead, what happened was that the internet allowed people to search out others who thought and acted just like themselves, and join a community where they fit in and never had their basic ideas challenged. So instead of being a broadening experients, the net turned out to allow them to narrow their social interaction down to others like themselves.

Lileks stopped there, but an extension of that is that when everyone in your world agrees with you, you get the idea that all the world thinks like you do. That sort of thing goes back way before electronic communications, of course, but going online makes it much easier.

Blinkered thought patterns like that result in things like the Japanese Army circa the 1930s, Heaven's Gate, jihadis, various politicial parties and economic schools, etc.

TRX
June 27, 2013
124:
@122:
> self-reinforcement

Correct.

> claiming a majority of society
> supports their position when
> the polling suggests it's a
> 75/25 split in the other direction.

In that case, it's hard to tell if it's self-delusion, or just another example of the Big Lie school of persuasion. Tell the lie with enough frequency and vehemence, and people who know better will sometimes give up just to avoid the hassle. Or substitute lie for "opposing viewpoint" as needed.

Perhaps related, I often look up historical dates, etc. when discussing things online. In the last half-decade or so, I've seen people who should know better accept the first hits from Google or Wikipedia as fact, even when the results are... questionable. The ease of online lookup vs. driving to a library, filing an Inter-Library Loan request, and waiting a week or two has had the interesting effect of generating a new concensus of truth; if the information is not online, it's likely to be challenged now. To which my usual reply is something along the line of, "buy or borrow some real reference material; I'm not going to annotate your thesis for you."

We might call this the "Glasshouse Effect." If everyone is operating from the same (abridged) reference material, they're more likely to come to the same conclusions...