How many people have you seen die or get seriously harmed, while you were scrolling through a social media feed? Our desensitization to seeing profound suffering among our fellow man can cause us to fail to see people as we ought.
I’m guilty of snacking on vile news for infotainment with my morning coffee. The sources I enjoy in this way specialize in brief, sarcastic presentations of the sorry state of our world in a way that risks making readers such as myself feel morally superior and very detached from the other side; the THEM. It feels good to do this; it’s cathartic in a way… but I do sense the wrong. It’s a distraction from my own shortcomings. And I really don’t like how tragedies are commoditized in this way to provide a brief daily jolt to schadenfreude junkies. Perhaps curating the info I consume through Substacks such as yours is one solution.
What your getting at is true. We cannot overload on the news. It creates an unhealthy pessimism. Police officers are always in danger of the very nature of their work. Try to keep the internet to something that is useful, but moderate the use of it.
Knowing the doom is a luxury. I haven't had a cell phone in 10 years. I've had many a laptop just die, and have been without for months even years at a time. I re-learned how to use notebooks and pens again, and found it to be a much better and organized interface with thoughts. Educated in video editing, broadcast radio and audio editing, I've seen the importance of what used to be called 'media.' Which used to be simply, the making of video, audio, and print to express and communicate. Now it is real time doom, so much so that one can be tricked by A.I. and photoshop. I even saw a staged picture once, all one needs to do is with one person and one sign, a camera, one can take a photo of a guy carrying a sign in front of a crowd, and the headline can read "Crowd Gathers to Protest x, y, z..." In fact it with staged with one person and one sign. The rest of the people were at a parade the year before.
In fact, slowing down, reading a book, writing in a notebook or if you don't live in a DMZ, going for a walk changes everything. In fact, one can go for a walk and not come back for awhile, and then the world seems different again. There's only so much one can do, especially if they're not rich, for the past few years, people have been confronting eachother in public over things they saw on their cell phone, taking cyberspace into their ordinary 'real life.'
William Gibson said around 2013 that before the internet, 'cyberspace' was a 'there.' (Out there somewhere, to be gotten to, perhaps even in the future.) Today, he says, the 'there' is now real life, because this internet has infected one's real life, to the point people live permanently in cyberspace. They live on facebook while brushing their teeth, they live on twitter while doing laundry, they live on tiktok when feeding the dog, they live on youtube while they drive to work.
Cyberspace was conceived of as 'another place' and it became 'another place' only what wasn't conceived of was that other place would eventually invade and spread so far into the real world that it would make the human domain a part of itself. Without a chip in one's head. The Alt.God is now there like the A.I. in the movie Zardoz, answering all questions, functions as the 'digital democracy' and judge and jury. Now this 'image' of the A.I. beast has people all hypnotized and baffled. What will be real and what will not be real? Was George Washington really a white guy from England? Are you sure?
Kids say today, how do you communicate with that person without a cell phone?
Speech and dialogue to be banned soon, and ultimately, the answer I think, is if you want the real world back, you have to take it back. You have to realize that the real world only exists offline. In fact, it, as civilization does, exists within your heart and mind, not the structure or the institutions. His kingdom is not of 'this world.' The old Anglo-Saxon 'woruld' only once meant or referred to dominion of mankind and his makings and doings, not that of the earth or the planet. God's country is not the plaza, not the market, not the colosseum. It is out there somewhere.
In E.M. Forster's "THE MACHINE STOPS" written over 100 years ago, the main character in the future exists in a world which we now inhabit. He discovers an 'outside world' where no human now lives. The first anti-transhumanist novel predicts this machine in which everyone now lives will STOP. It will break. It will collapse, and only those who have the courage to investigate this mythic 'real world' will survive. While those who worship THE MACHINE will be lost to its inevitable betrayal.
Obsessive consumption of information is a dissipation, an indigestion. Let us eat slowly and chew delicately. People choke all the time.
I’m guilty of snacking on vile news for infotainment with my morning coffee. The sources I enjoy in this way specialize in brief, sarcastic presentations of the sorry state of our world in a way that risks making readers such as myself feel morally superior and very detached from the other side; the THEM. It feels good to do this; it’s cathartic in a way… but I do sense the wrong. It’s a distraction from my own shortcomings. And I really don’t like how tragedies are commoditized in this way to provide a brief daily jolt to schadenfreude junkies. Perhaps curating the info I consume through Substacks such as yours is one solution.
What your getting at is true. We cannot overload on the news. It creates an unhealthy pessimism. Police officers are always in danger of the very nature of their work. Try to keep the internet to something that is useful, but moderate the use of it.
Knowing the doom is a luxury. I haven't had a cell phone in 10 years. I've had many a laptop just die, and have been without for months even years at a time. I re-learned how to use notebooks and pens again, and found it to be a much better and organized interface with thoughts. Educated in video editing, broadcast radio and audio editing, I've seen the importance of what used to be called 'media.' Which used to be simply, the making of video, audio, and print to express and communicate. Now it is real time doom, so much so that one can be tricked by A.I. and photoshop. I even saw a staged picture once, all one needs to do is with one person and one sign, a camera, one can take a photo of a guy carrying a sign in front of a crowd, and the headline can read "Crowd Gathers to Protest x, y, z..." In fact it with staged with one person and one sign. The rest of the people were at a parade the year before.
In fact, slowing down, reading a book, writing in a notebook or if you don't live in a DMZ, going for a walk changes everything. In fact, one can go for a walk and not come back for awhile, and then the world seems different again. There's only so much one can do, especially if they're not rich, for the past few years, people have been confronting eachother in public over things they saw on their cell phone, taking cyberspace into their ordinary 'real life.'
William Gibson said around 2013 that before the internet, 'cyberspace' was a 'there.' (Out there somewhere, to be gotten to, perhaps even in the future.) Today, he says, the 'there' is now real life, because this internet has infected one's real life, to the point people live permanently in cyberspace. They live on facebook while brushing their teeth, they live on twitter while doing laundry, they live on tiktok when feeding the dog, they live on youtube while they drive to work.
Cyberspace was conceived of as 'another place' and it became 'another place' only what wasn't conceived of was that other place would eventually invade and spread so far into the real world that it would make the human domain a part of itself. Without a chip in one's head. The Alt.God is now there like the A.I. in the movie Zardoz, answering all questions, functions as the 'digital democracy' and judge and jury. Now this 'image' of the A.I. beast has people all hypnotized and baffled. What will be real and what will not be real? Was George Washington really a white guy from England? Are you sure?
Kids say today, how do you communicate with that person without a cell phone?
Speech and dialogue to be banned soon, and ultimately, the answer I think, is if you want the real world back, you have to take it back. You have to realize that the real world only exists offline. In fact, it, as civilization does, exists within your heart and mind, not the structure or the institutions. His kingdom is not of 'this world.' The old Anglo-Saxon 'woruld' only once meant or referred to dominion of mankind and his makings and doings, not that of the earth or the planet. God's country is not the plaza, not the market, not the colosseum. It is out there somewhere.
In E.M. Forster's "THE MACHINE STOPS" written over 100 years ago, the main character in the future exists in a world which we now inhabit. He discovers an 'outside world' where no human now lives. The first anti-transhumanist novel predicts this machine in which everyone now lives will STOP. It will break. It will collapse, and only those who have the courage to investigate this mythic 'real world' will survive. While those who worship THE MACHINE will be lost to its inevitable betrayal.
Hows that for some 100 year old doom?
... and now there is an overt effort to destroy families, in the effort to completely demoralize and dehumanize.