Tag Archives: Social connections.

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: IS SOCIETY SET TO COLLAPSE?

19 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Climate Change., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Disconnection., Human Collective Stupidity., Life., Pandemic, POST COVID-19., Purpose of life., Society, Speed of technology., Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., THE NEW NORM., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Fifteen-minute read) 

Not quite, but every major social indicator imaginable is either flatlining or declining and unwinding, from longevity, to trust, to happiness, to wealth.

 

History shows us that economic collapse will essentially happen with entrenched elites seeking to maintain the status quo.

You would have to be an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand not to see that in exchange for your Freedom, Liberty, and Independence, governments are printing currency to pay their bills and support the tens of millions on public assistance.

But if you take a look around societies that are failing to anticipate their own impending collapses.

There are political classes, intellectual classes, and capitalist classes, to name a few that can conceive of the possibility that society is in a grave, profound difficulty. With the help of the Pandemic now reaching unprecedented proportions, and the continuing Climate crises all are adding up to a pending collapsing society.

Why?

Because we are all too preoccupied with merely surviving the vicious cycle as the collapse intensifies. On one hand are acting as if we are already living in scientifically-planned societies, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. On the other is the idea that everyone is entitled to have what others have earned is now permeating society with the help of social media.

It is not our hard-won liberties that are being taken away it is our means to live a life in an attempt to save dying economies.

                                  ____________________

If that is not enough just look at what COP26 achieved. 

As you know COP26 was an opportunity for nations from across the globe to agree on a way to limit the devastating impacts of climate change.

What we got was a deal that does not go far enough and will not limit global warming to 1.5C by the end of the century.

Because of the current Pandemic, carbon emissions will continue for the foreseeable future, combined with Methane, we are set to see more wars.

Climate change is going to result in mass migration with wars over resources with the pandemic affecting not just the cost of living but the ability to earn a living. We’re already seeing (with the most recent example in Cameroon where farmers and fishermen are killing each other for water) both ( Climate/ Pandemic ) escalating resulting in steep recessions in many countries.

Current projections suggest that the worldwide recession of COVID-19 would be the fourth deepest and most extreme since the Second World War during this time.

Surely it’s time we started to look at both the Pandemic and Climate Change through the eyes of human liberty, consensus, and laws, all are becoming more relevant day by day, which is paramount to all of us.

Today we are not immune to anybody’s problems.

A collapse of a society anywhere is a global issue, and conversely, anybody anywhere in the world now has ways of reaching us.

However, there are obvious differences between the environmental problems and pandemics in the past and the ones that we face today. The difference between today and the past is globalization.

In the past, you could get solitary collapses.

                                            ———————-

If elites wish to maintain the status quo, why don’t people…take action against those elites?

Are we able to choose what we will do with our lives?

What is the point of life if we cannot choose our own paths?

Common sense tells us that with the state of our planet, that we’re is no longer at liberty to ignore what is happening. If we really can choose, then these choices we have made must be uncaused — something that cannot be explained within the model of science that many of us rely on.

However from a purely scientific perspective, how is it possible that anything can occur without having been caused by something else? 

A human act is an act that is deliberately performed by one possessed of the use of reason. Branches of psychology and many wisdom traditions, attempt to make sense of human existence and experience and to connect those experiences to the world at large. 

Our current view of human mental evolution is like a jigsaw puzzle where many of the pieces have been taken out of the box.

They have not yet been put together to form a coherent picture.

One of the oldest questions in psychology, and in other fields such as philosophy, is whether humans have free will. The central puzzles about human cognition are its curious combination of flexibility and efficiency.

But is this all that defines us?

We don’t have to live with what we got.

Take, the technology behind a nuclear bomb.

It only exists because of the technology because of a cooperative hive mind: hundreds of scientists and engineers working together on an atom bomb.  

This same unique intelligence and cooperation also underlie more positive advances, such as modern medicine and now the vaccines we are using to fight covid. 

Still, as far as we know, we are the only creatures trying to understand where we came from. We also peer further back in time, and further into the future, than any other animal.

What other species would think to ponder the age of the universe, or how it will end?

                                    ———–

Either we put our survival before GDP.

Continue as we are or change by putting our Health before Consumption, putting equality before greed, putting transparency before political power, and sharing our responsibility to future generations. 

We don’t know exactly what led to our brains becoming the size they are today, but we seem to owe our complex reasoning abilities to notice the unexpected, which our world is now experiencing and will continue to experience with less and less critical reflection.  

Critical reflection requires that the thinker examine the underlying assumptions and radically question or doubt the validity of arguments, assertions, and even facts of the case. 

We are now in need of some critical thinking, not reflection to consider the results of having linked our scenario-building minds into larger networks of knowledge that have made us increasingly reliant on each other.

So what if anything will bring us together to act as one or when will we hit peak humanity becoming a singularity basically?

By peak humanity I mean we’ll have the ability to do things we can’t do alone.

If we could all work together as well as the human body can, that’s when I think we individual humans will be “cells” and we as a collective would be called an individual.

Our problem is that the majority of us are incapable of putting anything before our daily needs.

                                       ———————–

Because our rapidly expanding technology has allowed us all to become instant publishers means we can share information at the touch of a button.

This transmission of ideas and technology helps us in our quest to uncover even more about ourselves with an immense capacity for good. At the same time, we risk driving our closest relatives to extinction and destroying the only planet we have ever called home.

The technology that defines us can also destroy the world.

Why?

Because we’re simply trying to advance too much too fast.

Our cultures and mindsets cant keep up with our technology and morality, so chaos ensues.

How do you expect to survive in a world that is based on imaginary delusions of people without basic knowledge about how Earth works in terms of physics and biology.

This tells us something profound about ourselves.

Unfortunately, we don’t know all of the determinants of human behavior, and we may never understand all of these determinants—so the question of whether or not we have free will is likely to remain a philosophical quagmire.

This is why we are unable to act as one.

So we are left pretty much where we started.

Religions, Languages, Nations, and Cultures are what divide humanity today which is just another flaw as a species. 

So of course, we pass on the good and the bad.

Not until we learn to pull together our unparalleled language skills, our ability to infer others’ mental states, and our instinct for cooperation, will we have something unprecedented to fight Climate Change and future pandemics.

We understand what others think based upon our knowledge of the world, but we also understand what others cannot know. 

The answer lies in fundamentally changing social behavior away from the rapidly moving consuming beings that we are.

We are the only society in world history that has the ability to learn from all the experiments being carried out elsewhere in the world today, and all the experiments that have succeeded and failed in the past so at least we have the choice of what we want to do about it or do we. 

Most people realize that 2020 has thrust two game-changing trends upon us that will change the world for years to come.

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS SOCIAL MEDIA BECOMING JUST A PHONY WAR.

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Social Media

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(Twelve-minute read) 

Of course, it is being blamed for eroding trust, but trust isn’t something that can be immediately forged; it must be built over time.

Social Media, on one hand, has tremendous power for good but it also causes a breakdown of trust casting a negative net far and wide. 

The real power of Social Media is its decentralized nature.

Random stories, true or not, posted on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, can achieve sudden popularity and notoriety by touching the minds and hearts, not just millions, but tens and hundreds of millions of people.

So is Social Media the perfect mechanism for spreading emotionally powerful messages designed to generate an epidemic of fear even when the content is totally and obviously false, who cares?

This is why dictatorships cannot tolerate Social Media. Autocratic governments can’t control the content or who receives it.

There is no easy fix.

The issues involved are complex.

In little more than a decade, the impact of social media has gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many.

Yet one thing is certain, developing trust is contingent upon authentic communication and algorithmic mechanical content has no authenticity.

They are destroying our ability to create and consume valuable content.

What qualifies as “valuable content” is, of course, subjective.

For a piece of content to qualify as valuable, it must be relevant.

Valuable content isn’t static. 

Content that isn’t useful isn’t valuable.

Doesn’t that sound like Social Media should support and enhance the idea of democracy, that more people will be exposed to more diverse news and therefore more intelligent overall?

Certainly, that is the idealistic view.

There is no centralized control to Social media so there are endless ways that your data is being mined on a regular basis to feed Artifical Intelligence algorithms that are conditioning consumers with algorithm content.

But does that actually happen?

The reading audience determines what’s considered valuable content.

Better education should lead to better opportunities for all people.

If the audience wants short-form content, platforms believe it’s their duty to give it to them.

  • Tweets are limited to 280 characters maximum.
  • Instagram Stories currently max out at 15 seconds, video posts at 60 seconds.
  • Snapchat Stories are capped at 60 seconds.

My question is why are these platforms not smacking the viewer over the head with hard-hitting messages that clearly states what the content is and where it comes from.

IE it has been posted by an unidentifiable source or individual it might encourage him or her to dig deeper.

Of course, you can use social media to give quick-hitting answers to burning questions while linking to long-form content.

Google’s algorithms work under the assumption that blog posts worth reading must contain at least 2,000 words.

Longform content tends to spread the message out, allowing the reader to become more and more emotionally invested over time.

In this environment, it’s no secret that short-form content is increasingly prevalent and popular.

how can we feel we have “independent thinking”?

Have we been herded into a collective bounded and defined by fear?

How is this a society that functions as a true democracy?

In fact, bad actors have an advantage because they are not constrained by legal, ethical or moral considerations. They can direct their money, knowledge, and power toward totally selfish goals.

From the perspective of a bad actor, Social Media, as a decentralized, “free” messaging channel, is actually the most powerful and cost-effective tool for manipulation they have ever had.

What do we do to change the direction of decline? 

How can we have rational discourse about our differences, to learn mutual respect?

How can we support more positive, life-affirming messaging? Regardless of the stories we tell, how can we commit to the narrative of Social Media as a means of increasing the state of well-being of society?

Each of us has a voice. Use it wisely!

The way that prominent social media platform companies, particularly Facebook, are currently operating and are financed is inherently undemocratic.

Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day, that’s 6 new profiles every second!

No other platform enables target groups to be so directly contacted and motivated towards interaction.

There are some 680 million Twitter users. 

The question is, are we at a point where the social media organizations and their activities should be regulated for the benefit of all.

Digital technologies have become pervasive.

Of course, many have begun to believe that the biggest challenge around the impact of social media may be the way it is changing society. The “attention-grabbing algorithms underlying social media… propel authoritarian practices that aim to sow confusion, ignorance, prejudice, and chaos, thereby facilitating manipulation and undermining accountability.

Facebook and Twitter and they’re like maybe gone in 10 years, but there will be something else.

Do we want to try to put the genie back in the bottle? Can we? Does social media definitely have a future?

Social connections are fabrics of society. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: FACEBOOK IS DESTROYING RELATIONSHIPS.

29 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Modern Day Communication., Technology, The Internet., The world to day., Where's the Global Outrage.

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( A three to four-minute read)

I suppose before I write this post I need to declare I am a Facebook user. One of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user.

Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed.

The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus.

When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors.

Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life.

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy.

The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.

We are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us.

We look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.

We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.

Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Facebook creates loneliness.

The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another.

For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

Our Internet connections are growing broader but shallower.

I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking.

WHY?

Because Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy.

Surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh.

One-click communication — the lazy click of a like. Passive consumption and broadcasting — correlates to feelings of disconnectedness.

We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible.

Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment.

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society.

We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

The effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time.

On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.

Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer. Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

Facebook capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company.

We are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are.

Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity.

We are underestimating: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

Sending out a friend request, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

It’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction that counts. Social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks.

Loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state.

The question of the future is this:

Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating.

Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

Facebook is merely a tool, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,it increases social capital. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse.

We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around.

So here is some advice:

The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society— Is it taking liberties by reminding your so called friends that your Birthday is arriving, by posting your memories, by passing your data to other servers.

A connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.

The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. 

Facebook never takes a break.

Instead of  sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in you should be using it as a signpost to what is wrong with the World.

Click the like button and Face book will log it. Make a comment and Facebook might take note.

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have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely.