The Meaning is Undermined
How the Information Society Affects V.E. Frankl's "Attitudinal Values"
I don't intend to stoke anxiety. However, this may come across as stressful, so please feel free to ignore it if you don't have the bandwidth right now. The world isn't ending today or tomorrow, after all.
Einstellungswerte is V.E. Frankl's term. As logotherapy demonstrates, I deeply respect him as someone who possessed not only understanding of meaning but also the capacity to perceive beauty.
Our civilization progresses through repeated cycles of "technological revolution → social transformation → power systems → institutional responses." For example, the Industrial Revolution concentrated people in cities, leading to epidemics, which gave birth to public health systems. After 30 years of transitioning to internet society since the 1990s, with AI now becoming widespread, what will happen next?
Confirmation bias
Filter bubbles
Echo chamber phenomena
Fake news
All of these are complex, with ambiguous responsibility, and difficult to address.
Looking at global media coverage, I believe there's a trend of people becoming unable to trust one another, and the above factors are likely related—whether causally or correlationally.
What am I trying to say?
In short, meaning will break down and become impossible to share, putting us at a disadvantage against despair.
Furthermore, since meaning is involved in choosing what V.E. Frankl called "attitudinal values," we can expect that even attitudinal values—which should be difficult to take away—will be affected.
So how should we defend ourselves? We have options: reducing smartphone notifications, reading classics in libraries, immersing ourselves in café atmospheres, walking in nature, or taking extra time and care to cook our favorite foods. In addition to these, I personally would use and cross-check the following three AIs daily. Since their policies, training, and algorithms differ by product, the probability that all three would simultaneously become biased, break down, or make mistakes is low. Moreover, three-way operation is rational for controlling and collaborating with higher-performance AI in the near future.
https://chatgpt.com/ https://claude.ai/ http://gemini.google.com/
Furthermore, if you create a whitelist using RSS feeds or similar tools, your whitelist will serve as a shield against damage even if fake news increases exponentially. If RSS is too cumbersome, a simple link collection like this: https://trgr-karasutoragara.github.io/zen-info-your-life-is-yours/info-umbrella-2001-08-01.html can be easily edited with a notepad or text editor, allowing you to create your own whitelist at minimal cost.
In Michael Ende's Momo, there were time thieves, but in our modern era, we may be experiencing the erosion and replacement of meaning itself.
While lamenting slightly that the information society shouldn't be heading in this direction, I will quietly do what I can now to prepare for the next generation.
So that the next generation won't fall into despair in an age when meaning is being eroded.
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/tall-trees-with-shade-of-light-69825/
Trgr KarasuToragara
Thank you for writiing this. My response to the potential that you describe has been to turn away from technology and toward in-person conversations, library books, and walks in the woods. I'm slowly deconditioning my mind from the fast pace of social media and screen-based media in general.
It is meaningful to me that you continue to seek and create solutions that are based in the same technology that I'm trying to avoid. But of course, I can't avoid it. I can only choose (to some degree) how much I engage with it. Thank you for the solutions and ideas that you offer!
Thank you for this article. I especially agree with the importance of nature, and reading classics, as well as cross reference. I hope this will reach many people.