Category: Media

Just What the Truth Is,

Heard this old song by the Moody Blues the other day:

“Nights in white satin, never reaching the end. Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send. Beauty I’ve always missed, with these eyes before, just what the truth is, I can’t say anymore…..”

Hard to tell what the truth is these days. Everyone is spouting their version to the universe daily, or sometimes multiple times per day. The internet has given us many wonderful things, but social media is not one of them. For the first time in history, anyone can say anything and have a global audience.

When radio and especially television came on the scene decades ago, there was wisdom enough in the world to know that there needed to be some rules about what could be broadcast. When a technology is new, it is not wise to let it run unchecked through society. Now, most of the controls that were in place back then are gone. Broadcast media bears little resemblance to the programming of the fifties and sixties.

But social media has shattered all the rules, which is the company mantra of one of it’s founders. Run fast and break things. What if the thing they are breaking is society itself? Because individuals can say one thing to journalists and then post on social media to talk about how ‘they really feel.’ We say things on social media that we would never say to someone’s face. That’s part of the charm. But these posts are finding their way to more and more audiences. More and more we are engaging in behavior that really had no place in society prior to the advent of social media. Sure, there was the National Enquirer, available at most grocery store checkout lanes. It was marketed with the magazines and entertainment, not with the newspapers. But now, people just read what they see on social media and think it’s the same as news, which it is not. Anyone can take a photo and post a comment about it. Many can alter photos, it’s not hard to do.

And what’s with Twitter, now called X. I signed up for it when it first came out but I never could see any value in it. Do I really need someone basically texting me every day, or several times a day with whatever’s on their mind? Isn’t this a kind of brainwashing, someone whispering little blurbs in your ear all the time? Or several someones, like a schizophrenic. I recently read about a woman whose life was ruined by some false social media depictions of her in a compromising situation with a teacher or coach, I don’t remember the details. I thought, if you weren’t on social media, it would never have mattered. It’s only because we let this form of technology invade our every moment that it has any power at all. And all we have to do to stop it is quit using it. It really is that simple. You don’t need it. I used to spend at least an hour a day checking in on my feed. I quit several years ago, when I realized all the damage that was being done, not to me personally, but to others who had gotten to far into it. And I got along just fine without it. Yes, I may have missed my friend posting a picture of the lovely steak dinner he had cooked, or another group of friends out at a local restaurant. But very little of any real importance has slipped by me after cutting loose from it.

It is an addiction, by any definition of the word. The harm that is being done to society, by breaking down the social norms may end up being devastating. Don’t for a second believe that the inventors of this technology care in the least about the plebes who use their tech. They absolutely consider you to be fools whom they have tricked into giving them all your data so they can profit from it. And profit from it they have, to the tune of billions of dollars. So it’s not just a place where you can go and check in with your friends. It’s a data-driven, world-wide surveillance system with no oversight, in most countries. In a few countries there is oversight in the form of the government knowing every single key stroke you make online.

Hope is a wonderful thing. It keeps us going when times are tough. I have little hope that the world will turn it’s back on social media on a scale large enough to stop the damage being done to our civilized world. I’ve been saying this for years and no one has listened in the least. But unlike the lyric in the song, I do know a few things that are true.

Posted on by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

Posted on by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

Project Liberty

I read an article today about a new service that seeks to create an altogether different Internet. The inventors of the current model say it’s fundamentally flawed. It’s design allows a few tech giants to gather up everyone’s data and use it without consent or even knowledge that it’s being done. They say that it can never be fixed because of the way it was built and the only solution is to start over. I agree wholeheartedly.

I remember when the Internet first came into use. I was thrilled with all of the amazing things it was going to bring into our lives. And in many ways it has. I currently work from home which could not happen without it. I check out many websites on a weekly or even daily basis for updates. But outside these places that I feel fairly confident of I no longer have much faith in the authenticity of what I’m seeing. And this is before the full implementation of AI. Just think what can of worms that’s going to open up. Very soon you will not be able to trust anything you see online. The ability to gather up data and manipulate it to fit whatever model is in vogue at the time will overwhelm the internet.

One thing I know, having worked in the tech field for almost twenty five years, is you do not want the current group of tech wizards to be in charge of anything. They are brilliant in many ways but they are also not and most likely never will be adults. It’s as though we’ve given the keys to the universe to a group of teenage boys who have no more moral aptitude than you would expect of a smart ass sixteen year old. You keep hoping to see some glimmer of responsibility beginning to appear but it never does. There’s too much money blinding them to what their success is really about. Part of it, a large part, was being at the right place at the right time. Some deliberately positioned themselves there but others were just the lucky ones. Their adolescent egos will never let them admit that nor will adversity ever cause them to stop and re-evaluate.

The damage done to society by the digital garbage in our online environment may turn out to be as devastating as the plagues of the dark ages. No one knows what’s true anymore so they choose what they want to believe and once started the internet provides justification for any and every point of view. We rush headlong into the abyss of our worst nightmares. That’s what the current version of the internet is providing us, a way to make almost anything we can imagine seem real. Don’t for a moment think that the boys behind all of this will have any qualms at all about using any and every device they know of to get you to click. True or false, right or wrong, makes absolutely no difference. Getting you to click is the only thing that matters.

Unless we drop their version of the internet and adopt a new one that is built on principles of privacy and trust. Check out Project Liberty. I hope we all live to see it flourish.

Posted on by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

Good Citizens

I notice frequently while driving that a majority, or close to a majority of people do not bother to use turn signals. I almost always use mine, unless there’s no one else on the road. Sometimes if I’m in a turn-only lane I will forego the blinker but most of the time I turn them on about fifty feet before turning. I am especially careful to do this when on the Interstate. That way if I don’t happen to see a car in the next lane, at least they can see that I intend to move over and hopefully avoid any accidents.

Sometimes I think other’s failure to use the turn signal is due to them being on the phone and not having a free hand at the time. But today I saw a couple of instances where they just didn’t bother. They saw me signalling and just turned in front of me without any indication that they were going to do so. Just another indicator of how we have come to treat each other, in many cases, our neighbors, in this society, formerly known as the greatest democracy in the world. A growing lack of respect for each other cannot in the end be a good thing. When we show disregard for others who are in our near proximity, what does that say about our society? Are we really so busy that we cannot extend common courtesy to those who are around us? Busy doing what? It saddens me to observe what we are turning into sometimes. I worries me to think that we are short selling the things that make for a great society: consideration, kindness, justice. I wonder too about the implications of our disregard for each other in these small matters, if it indicates the same feeling in matters of more importance. My hope is that before we get too far gone in this we will stop to consider where all of this is leading. Is this going to be the land of the selfish and the home of the greedy?

Posted on by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb 0