
Unintended Consequences: The Printing Press and European Witch-Hunts (2009) - areoform
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-consequences/
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golemotron
Scary. What if social media leads to that sort of mob behavior?

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pjc50
/s? Because this is already very much in progress around the world. Everywhere
from the Rohingya massacre to the alt-right.

The last few paragraphs of the article hint pretty strongly at this:

> The witch-hunts do not directly affect literacy or education today, but
> there is a lesson to be learned. Dewar (1998) warns us that many
> developments have unintended consequences which often dominate the intended
> ones. Although the Catholic Church may have seen the benefits of the
> printing of intentions and the bible, it surely didn’t see the unintended
> consequence; that being the protestant reformation. The witch-hunts are
> another example of unintended consequences. “ If the future is to be
> dominated by unintended consequences, it would be a good idea to get to
> those consequences as quickly as possible….. or you will be overrun.” (p.
> 25) He goes on to say that if large institutions such as schools and
> governments choose to deal with inappropriate use through bans and
> firewalls, they may well find they have a reformation (or witch-hunt)on
> their hands. One that may have results of which they have no control. It is
> critical that we stay on top of these things and deal with them quickly in a
> creative way- not by pretending they don’t exist.

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jtbayly
This is explicitly a call to reject creating and using technology as a filter
to prevent the spread of bad information.

I thought that the liberal ideology had finally figured out the necessity of
filters after the last election. Fact checking sites, auto-hiding of
conspiracy theory videos, etc are all precisely the opposite of what the
author calls for.

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Nasrudith
The thing is all of them can and have backfires. Fact-checkers often encounter
the backfire effect from those who don't want to know the truth but
validation. Filters have the Streissand Effect where the cover up validates
that there is something to it because they fear it.

The last election has frankly lead to short sighted hysteria being exploited
ruthlessly by vested interests Big Lying their nonsense.

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raxxorrax
Ah, 2009... where it was understood that bans and canceling were infeasible.
The good old times and yes, it seems I am afraid of change now.

