This week join Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher, and Keith Duggar have a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Roache in the last of our 3-part series on the social dilemma Netflix film. Rebecca is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, university of London and has written extensively about the future of friendship.
People claim that friendships are not what they used to be. People are always staring at their phones, even when in public Social media has turned us into narcissists who are always managing our own PR rather than being present with each other. Anxiety about the negative effects of technology are as old as the written word. Is technology bad for friendships? Can you have friends through screens? Does social media cause polarization? And is that a bad thing? Does it promote quantity over quality? Rebecca thinks that social media and echo chambers are less ominous to friendship on closer inspection.
00:00:32 Teaser clip from Rebecca and her new manuscript on friendship
00:02:52 Introduction
00:04:56 Memorisation vs reasoning / is technology enhancing friendships
00:09:29 Word of warcraft / gaming communities / echo chambers / polarisation
00:12:34 Horizontal vs Vertical social attributes
00:17:18 Exclusion of others opinions
00:20:36 The power to silence others / truth verification
00:23:58 Misinformation
00:27:28 Norms / memes / political terms and co-opting / bullying
00:31:57 Redefinition of political terms i.e. racism
00:36:13 Virtue signalling
00:38:57 How many friends can you have / spread thin / Dunbars 150
00:42:54 Is it morally objectionable to believe or contemplate objectionable ideas, punishment
00:50:52 Is speaking the same thing as acting
00:52:24 Punishment - deterrence vs retribution / historical
00:53:59 Yannic: contemplating is a form of speaking
00:57:32 silencing/blocking is intellectual laziness - what ideas are we allowed to talk about
01:04:53 Corporate AI ethics frameworks
01:09:14 Autonomous Vehicles
01:10:51 the eternal Facebook world / online vs offline friendships
01:14:05 How do we get the best out of our online friendships
