Shadowing Practice: The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In 2022, nearly half of Americans expected a civil war in the next few years.
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One in five now believes political violence is justified.
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And it's not just the US, but around the world.
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People increasingly see themselves as part of opposing teams.
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There are many different reasons for this, but one gets blamed a lot.
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Social media.
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Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic.
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It riles us up or sucks us into doom-scrolling, making us stressed and depressed.
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It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world.
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New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case.
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It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work, but not in the way you think.
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The myth of the filter bubble.
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You've probably heard about online filter bubbles.
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give you exactly what you want or what they think you want.
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You only see information that shows you opinions that agree with yours, while dissenting opinions or information are filtered out.
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Since you only see content close to your world view, more extreme and toxic opinions suddenly seem less extreme.
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You're trapped in a radicalizing filter bubble and your view of the world becomes narrower and more extreme.
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But is that true?
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Extreme filter bubbles seem to be rather rare.
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Studies that investigated what people actually look at online, or are shown by search engines, found little evidence that you are ideologically isolated.
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It's the exact opposite.
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Online you are constantly confronted with opinions and worldviews that are not your own.
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It turns out that the place where you are the most ideologically isolated is your real life, in the real world, with real people.
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Your real world interactions with your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors are much less diverse than your online bubble.
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The filter bubble exists in your real life, not online.
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Okay, wait.
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Online filter bubbles have been the prevailing explanation as to why
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we've all started hating each other more over the last two decades.
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If that's not the case, shouldn't the internet open our minds and make us more empathetic with each other?
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Unfortunately, your brain is stupid it.
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Your brain is stupid.
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Human brains didn't evolve to understand the true nature of reality, but to navigate and maintain social structures.
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Our ancestors desperately needed each other to survive, so our brains had to make sure we cooperated.
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That's why social isolation or exclusion feels so horrible, because it was actually life-threatening.
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A tribe that that worked together survived.
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A divided tribe died.
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The way communities worked for thousands of years is that sure, you may have disliked a neighbor, but because you lived close to each other, you also rooted for the same sports club or saw them at church.
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You both thought that the people from the other village were idiots.
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Being physically close made you familiar and created similarities that bridge the gap of different worldviews so you didn't murder each other.
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And your worldview was probably not that different in the first place because it was formed by the same local culture.
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When our brains evolved, this was enough.
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Whoever was around was similar to us.
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liked what was similar to us.
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This kept us aligned enough to work together despite our differences.
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As humanity moved on from small tribes to towns and cities, from chiefdoms to kingdoms to nations,
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our brains and our communities had to adapt to more diverse sets of neighbors.
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We began to meet on the town square or in universities where we argued and screamed at each other, but in the grand scheme of things, communities were still relatively isolated,
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we were still pretty similar and aligned with the people around us.
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Conflict and disagreement are not a bad thing per se.
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Tension over how we should live can create new and wonderful things.
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Our values, norms and taboos are always evolving and whatever we think is normal today will not be normal in the future.
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But we also need social glue to hold our societies together
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because our brains don't care about the meta-level of humanity but about being safe in a tribe.
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Until about 20 years ago, we did something truly new that hit our brains like a freight train.
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The social media internet, the digital town square.
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Don't you dare disagree with me.
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Social sorting.
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In a nutshell, our brains are not able to process the amount of disagreement we encounter on the social internet.
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The very mechanisms
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that made it possible for our ancestors to work together in
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the first place are derailed in ways we were not prepared for.
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Whether you want it to or not, your brain sorts people by worldviews and opinions into teams.
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This is not simply tribalism, it goes further.
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Researchers have called this process social sorting.
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On the digital town square, you encounter people that express opinions or share information that clash with your worldview.
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But unlike your neighbor, they don't root for your local sports club.
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You're missing the local social glue your brain needs to align with them.
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your brain, the disagreement between yourself and them becomes a central part of their identity.
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And this makes it less likely that you will seriously consider their position or opinion in the future.
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If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to believe it uncritically.
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On the flip side, there are people who share your worldview
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and are maybe even more similar to you than many people in your real life, which makes your brain like them a lot and kind of hyper-align with them.
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People who think like you are probably good people
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because you're a good person and whatever social group you belong to is good.
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So your brain is more likely to believe their opinions.
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If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to dismiss it uncritically.
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The engagement driven social internet makes it worse because it wants to keep you online as long as possible.
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And the most engaging emotion is, unfortunately, anger.
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The more angry you get, the more likely you are to share and engage.
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And this leads to social media amplifying the most extreme and controversial opinions.
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It optimizes not only to show us disagreement, but the worst disagreement possible.
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And because your stupid brain is sorting people into teams, whatever the worst opinions are, it assigns the same opinions to everybody on the other team.
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What's striking and new about online polarization is that all the aspects of our lives that make us individuals, our lifestyle choices, the comedians or shows we watch,
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our religion, sense of fashion and so on, are condensed, making it seem that they're parts of opposing and mutually exclusive identities.
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This simplifies and distorts disagreements about how we should run society
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so much that it often seems as if the people on the other team are actively, willfully making the world worse.
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That they are almost evil beyond convincing with rationality, facts or civil discussion.
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While you are of course on the correct team, it may be hard to process that you may seem like that to people on the other team.
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On a societal level, this is dissolving the social glue that's the foundation of our democracies.
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If we think our neighbors are evil, how can we live together?
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This is especially bad in the US, where the two-party system makes it extra easy to think of people in terms of teams.
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Negative opinion about the other party has reached record highs.
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Okay, is there something we can learn from this?
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Is there something we can do?
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Something more positive?
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Opinion part.
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In the end, it's important to be aware of what social media does to your brain.
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It's easier to change yourself than to change the world, so you can self-examine why you believe the things you believe,
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and whether you dismiss or believe information based on who the person is who is stating that information.
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The internet comes with a lot of ups and downs, and just like we had to adapt from living in small tribes to living in cities,
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we need to adapt to the information age where we have access to billions of people.
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Evolution is too slow, so we need to find models that work with what our brains are able to tolerate.
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One model that seemed to work well was the pre-social media internet old people might remember.
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Bulletin boards, forums, blogs.
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The main difference to today was two-fault.
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For one, there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost.
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At some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind-blowing as this may sound.
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But more importantly, the old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
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These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains.
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These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media.
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Each village had its own culture and set of rules.
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Maybe one community was into rough humor and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
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If you didn't play by the village rules, you'd be banned.
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you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
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So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a town square that in the end just leads us to going insane,
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one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple.
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Go back to smaller online communities.
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Because what our stupid brains don't realize is that we are actually all on the same team.
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Humanity, on a wet rock, speeding through space in a universe that doesn't think about us.
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We are all in this together.
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But until our brains adjust to being able to deal with that, we might be better off being a tiny bit separated.
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One of the worst things about the media we consume is that most news organizations tend to cater to one team, making you feel you're on the correct side.
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Ground News, the sponsor of this video, is trying to make these biases more transparent by giving you tools that help you think critically about the information you consume,
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a mission we wholeheartedly support.
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Ground News gathers related articles from around the world in one place, so you can compare how different outlets and sides cover them.
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They provide context about the source of the information, if they have a political bias, how reliable their reporting is, and who owns them.
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This makes the news less stressful and makes you understand the world much better.
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If you want to check them out, go to ground.news.nuchal.
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If you sign up through this link, you'll get 30% off their unlimited access plan.
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A subscription supports Kurzgesagt and Ground News, so they can continue to build more media literacy tools.
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Our favorite tool has a personal background.
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In 2018, Kurzgesagt founder Philip, who wrote this video, was going through chemotherapy and was intensely bored.
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So he ended up reading all the big German newspapers, even the ones he hated front to back, every single day.
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Aside from the obvious biases, what was the most shocking were the stories each side did not talk about.
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Both sides ignored things that are inconvenient to their worldviews.
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The Ground News blindspot feed highlights this exact thing, showing you news stories that are heavily covered by one side of the political spectrum and ignored by the other.
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So check them out at ground.news.nutshell to make sure you're seeing the full picture.
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About This Lesson
This lesson focuses on enhancing your English speaking skills through practical application of the transcript from the video titled "The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?". During this lesson, you will practice important vocabulary and phrases related to contemporary social issues, particularly how social media impacts society. By engaging with the content, you will gain insights not only into the language itself but also into the concepts discussed, leading to improved comprehension and conversational abilities. This lesson is particularly beneficial for those preparing for IELTS speaking practice, as it addresses relevant topics that could appear in exams.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Polarization – the division of society into contrasting groups.
- Empathy – the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
- Filter bubble – a situation where one is exposed only to opinions and information that reinforce their own views.
- Doom-scrolling – continually consuming negative news online, often leading to stress.
- Radicalization – the process through which individuals adopt extreme political or social views.
- Isolation – the state of being separated from others, leading to feelings of loneliness or disconnection.
- Community – a group of individuals living in close proximity, bound by shared interests or values.
- Cooperation – the act of working together towards a common goal.
Practice Tips
To effectively utilize the shadowing technique with this video transcript, listen closely to the speaker's tone and pacing. The video uses a relatively moderate pace, which is ideal for shadowing practices. Follow these steps for optimal English speaking practice:
- Play the video segment by segment: Start by playing short clips and pause after each sentence or phrase. Repeat exactly what the speaker says, focusing on pronunciation and intonation.
- Emphasize tone and emotion: Pay attention to how the speaker conveys feelings related to the topic. Mimicking these emotions can add depth to your expressions.
- Record yourself: After shadowing, record your version of the transcript. Compare this to the original audio to identify areas for improvement.
- Engage in discussions: Once you feel comfortable with the vocabulary, practice using these phrases in conversations with peers. Discuss topics like social media's impact on empathy and division.
- Use shadowspeaks: Explore shadowing sites that provide additional material and resources to enhance your learning experience.
By incorporating these strategies into your English learning routine, you will not only improve your speaking skills but also develop a nuanced understanding of pressing societal issues, making you a more informed and confident speaker.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.