Here's something that's shocking to say: Most of what you think of as traditional, regardless of where you live, has only appeared 3 generations ago, three generations only. For the few things that existed beforehand, they mostly didn't exist in their current form, and weren't as widespread — thus can't really be called an authentic heritage. Try it, list 10 things that you personally consider classics and find when they originated and started to be commonplace with the general population, you'll notice 8-out-of-10 are relatively recent, or at least more recent than you thought.
Life is pretty bland today! Indeed, we're the cozy spectators of homogenization through globalization, pushed by a series of ephemeral trends, one dying after another, and carried by consumer society. It's as if the cultural vibes all seem to walk in the same direction. What is this direction? Where did novelty go, have countercultures disappeared? Yet, they were omnipresent, bubbling and thriving, in yesteryears. What is a counterculture anyway?
Every so often we need to regroup and give shape to our scattered ideas, turning them into well-structured paragraphs so that they make sense. From simple observations of events to shower thoughts. That's what I'll try to do in this article, swapping heavy words for a lucid mind.
Is someone that is subjectively experiencing something more knowledgeable than someone who didn't or currently isn't? Are analytical external observers sometimes more adept at understanding what is happening than the persons that are currently deep in the experience?
After writing a whole book about internet and narrative control I want to share what I personally do, in my own limited ways, to try not to get stuck in bubbles. The book covers a lot of ground on this used up road, especially in the last part, but let's be practical instead. This isn't meant to be didactic but only informative of my reflection on how I attempt to achieve this and the issues I've encountered.
Our mini internet study has come to an end. In this series we've seen the new actors and spaces introduced by the internet, the actors using them, from the new economies, to netizens in between, to state actors. We've also took some reflective time to understand why we can be susceptible to biases and why we have so much difficulties with online interactions. Next we've looked at the big picture by diving into subjects such as paralysis, neoliberalism, the truth and trust crises, and a future glance at mass hypnosis and psychosis. Finally, in the last part of the series we've seen four type of solutions, market and economy or laissez-faire, legal path with governments being involved for transparency and accountability, technical software solutions, and web literacy as education and a maturity to learn to live in the information society, a post-modern society.
We can attempt to patch things, use tools and software as countermeasures, to add laws and regulations, or to let the market decide, but in the end we are at the center of everything. If we are facing difficulties with the medium it's because we haven't matured enough to handle it properly. Right now we're still in the process of trying to grasp how it works, in an apprenticeship stage. Knowing our tools, how to use the internet medium properly, is a foundational skill, as important as any other in our information society. This goes under the name of digital, internet, or web literacy, the ability to read, write, and participate properly on the medium, in its full extent. It's an application of the broader information literacy.
When free market and regulations fail, when the laws of rights can't properly protect anyone and trust has eroded, we're left only with ourselves. In that scenario, tech is seen as the savior of the internet, the weapon and armor of choice for everyone, building and selecting software that resolve issues. For social media platforms and other big entities such as governments, algorithms can be used for detection, categorization, and remedial. The first step of an issue is to know, without knowledge it's hard to defend.
The market and corporate self-regulation have their limits. They cannot in themselves be sources of morals and ethics. This is the realm of laws, the legislations that governments make are the real arbiters of duties and rights. The governments, as state entities, can impose the rules that should be followed to be able to act on their territories. However, laws are bound by geographical areas and as such cannot be international. They can only be inter-governmental if treaties and partnerships are in place. Companies can decide to comply to different regulations in different areas to be able to operate on these markets.
In this last part of the series we'll go over the adaptations we are undergoing to remove the frictions we have with the internet — anything to make it better suited for us. We'll take multiple perspectives, primarily the ones of users, societies, and others that are encountering the issues we've seen related to this new communication channel. Let's start by taking the point of view of the market and economy as ways, in themselves, to provide solutions to problems we've had. Keep in mind that these heavily depend on the locality, culture, and practices of the tech companies at the epicenter of the internet drastic changes that are taking over the world. Most of these giants embody a neoliberal mindset and originate from the USA.
The internet brings with it technological advancements that reminds us of dystopia that sci-fi writers have written about. So let's go beyond what we've tackled so far and project ourselves in hypothetical futures to posit bigger consequences. The two archetypical stories of dystopian futures are Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell.
Nobody likes to be put in a box, nobody likes to be paralyzed. In a world where the individual is put first, we want to feel in control. Yet, we are lost in a whirlpool of chaotic and clashing ideologies, memeplexes and absolutist templates. Who are we, how should we define ourselves? This makes us distrust any form of authority and renounce classical forms of media. As individuals, we're looking for authenticity, whatever form it can take even if disingenuous, so that we can find our new roots, our new base. Then, there's nobody better suited to affirm justice than internet mobs. It feels like the internet is the new far-west, a lawless land of incessant doubt, lacking meaning and trust, where gurus, inspirational influencers, and vigilantes reign and data, personal data, and metrics of reputation are the currency held by the banks of social media. Or it may also feel like eunemics in action — the deliberate improvement of the meme pool — and people wanting to take part in the cultural meme wars and genocides.
In this part of the series, we'll explore the bigger picture and the generic issues and 'ill effects' on societies that are brought by the emergence of the internet or accelerated by it. We'll begin with a look at three inter-related subjects, a general social paralysis, an apparent sentiment of homogeneity, and the relation with the widespread neoliberal mindset.
To be a netizen means to be part of the online social sphere. There's no way around it, to have a voice and participate people have to join a platform, which comes with its own limitations. The rules of the platforms are the rules of the information society but the platforms adapt more to fit us than we adapt to them. Anything happening on them is directly because of real people interacting together. People that have their own hopes, emotions, values, prejudices, and beliefs. Consequently, through our own cultural differences, ambiguities, and insecurities, we are indirectly manipulating ourselves.
Humans are prone to manipulations by their own experiences and biases. Let's review what are some of the cognitive biases and cultural weaknesses that make us fall for all sort of things on the internet. We've already looked at coercion, deception, and other types of persuasion principles in a previous sections. In the following two we'll emphasize on ourselves instead of external factors.
Since ancient times, nations have tried to write history from their own point of view. As they say, history is written by the victors. Today, the speed of the internet allows rewriting the narrative in real-time, and state actors will certainly take advantage of this. Namely, there are two ways, or generations, of state information-control practices, an information scarcity approach, aka censorship, and an embracing of information approach, speech itself as a censorial weapon. Both require monitoring of the population to properly adapt the tactic in use.
The internet is a new resource and when introduced in our social structures it has fueled the construction of utilities around it. Like any tool it has no effects on its own but only through its usages. In particular, it has altered our capacity of communication making it interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, many-to-many, one-to-many, one-to-object, object-to-object. In this section we'll go over some of the things the internet allows to do through the platforms and services hosted on it. We can't go over everything because that would be equivalent to describing what modern life is about. Instead, we'll paint a rough picture of the internet in between the corporate, private, and public sphere.
The artifacts we've previously seen have given rise to new types of economies, tools, and arsenals that can be used by different actors for different incentives. Let's start by focusing on the economic aspects by looking at actors such as social media platforms, newspapers, and advertisement companies. Life in an information society is about moving data, the new raw material, around our manufacturing pipelines. This data is then consumed by either paying with attention or money. Data and attention are the two assets of the digital economies that emerged.
In this last section of our first part about artifacts and places, we'll explore memes, internet memes, and cults, their definitions, how they have transformed and crisscrossed, their relationship, their role as communication vectors, and the extreme forms that they can take. Meme is a word that comes up in many conversations. It can refer to two related definitions, the classic one and the internet-related one.
The internet is littered with nuggets of information, some made of gold and some worthless. From this mine we can extract meta-information, inferences that can lead to more lucrative valleys. Two of the most talked about are personal data and models, also known as statistical trends visualizations, big data analysis, and predictive studies. Let's take a look at what is personal data, where and why people share them, why they're valuable, and how they can be used with different types of models. In another part of the series we'll focus on the actors and consequences.
With the advent of smartphones, social media platforms are on the rise. Let's step back and try to understand what social media are, not by citing events and instances happening on the different platforms, nor the countless consequences but by describing the characteristics of this new informational channel. We'll go over the rest later but let's take some distance for now.
Our journey begins with three terms, propaganda, influence, and persuasion. To most, they sound like synonyms but each convey a different concept. Like any form of communication the internet can be used as a channel for them. What does communication consist of? The very broad domain of communication studies — with multiple sub-disciplines such as journalism, film critic, public relation, and political science — often use a simple reductionist model called the Shannon–Weaver model of communication.
To no one's surprise, the internet has permeated all aspects of our lives. All other means of communication have dwindled in comparison, even though the technological behemoth is relatively young (around 50 years old as of 2021). Worldwide, according to statistics from 2019, people spent an average of 2 and a half hours a day on social media. The top place goes to The Philippines with 3h53min per day.
Finally, The project about mapping wild mushrooms in Lebanon is out! The project consists of a map with wild mushroom specimens, their locations, along with pictures and descriptions of them. It is based on the only two research papers on the topic I've found, Joseph Thiébaut research paper Champignons observés dans le Liban et la Syrie de 1930 à 1933 along with Nadine Modad research paper Survey and identification of wild mushrooms in Lebanon and my own research and findings over the past few years. It took me around 2 months, or almost 15h to fill the map. These research papers have been my bedtime stories for quite a while.
Collapse, the word that is on everyone's lips in Lebanon. What does it mean, will Lebanon fall or survive, and what does the future have in store? "We can predict everything, except the future", I hear someone say, but can we at least get some possibilities.
Time can be measured in all sorts of ways, some more accurate than others, but the perception of its flow varies widely depending on the subjective experience. That's the distinction between physical and psychological time. Psychological time is influenced and influences our cognitive systems. It influences how we act and respond to information and events around us, and the information and events around us influence it.
In this article I'm going to pose a not so novel compatibilistic idea about the so-recurrent philosophical discussion of free will and determinism. However, this can apply to any topic where reductionism is over-used. Let's get started.
This article is about nothing surprising but may act as a reminder to anyone that wanders online or that manages a community. There's too much already written about the subject of echo chambers so what I'll do is list ideas that I find interesting but that aren't mentioned enough.
This article is about a rarely discussed component that resides in the background of our lives. No word clearly describes this phenomenon as it's a fusion of different ideas. We blueprint ourselves according to media that display extravagant versions of winners and losers. The profiles on social media are facade created around individuals — Profile being a well-chosen word as it misses the other angles. All across those there's an implicit demand of mechanized efficiency which slipped from our workplace to our interaction with ourselves. We are our own employee and are expecting results.
It's not uncommon to hear, from persons that relocated to a new country, discussions related to the dissatisfactions with the new land they've set upon or the land they've just left behind. Apart from the stifling reply, "they're just not used to it", what else is hiding behind this phenomenon. Let's dissect this case.
There may exist someone in your entourage, someone you may care deeply about, or maybe even yourself, that is being crushed by the real and raw perception of themselves. They may appear to an external observer as someone who expresses a lot of self-deprecation or negativity, but the observed categorized this as realism. We often hear the sentence "I am not a pessimist, but I am a realist," which doesn't necessarily carry the connotation we're bringing to light here. However, for that particular someone we mentioned, realism is equivalent to a degraded nihilism. Realism in itself is a challenging subject because definitions are nebulous. We also tend to find absolute and eternal answers more attractive than vague ones. Certainty feels good to us. But nothing is like that for "real", we define and delimit things and at the same time we can see that those limits are vague and change through different lenses and scales. The absolute and vague are there at the same time.
It has become rampant nowadays to find many persons misinterpreting or skewing evolutionary psychology studies to praise or blame the stance they fancy or despise. The slants are non-sense and blot this relatively new field of social science by conflating it with bigotry and excruciatingly non-scientific arguments. Many of the pernicious individuals that advance them are confabulating and fabricating ideas to fit their world view. Their truculent piffles are due to multiple complex misunderstandings and internal fears. One of them relates to a common confusion about the definition of the term "scientific theory". A so common confusion that it has become an adage that the ignoramus abuses to spurt out, officiously, blatantly wrong statements.
Hello fellow readers, This is the first post of 2017, let's recap what I've been up to since the start of the year. Show me how you spend your day and I'll tell you what you care about
We take actions based on our unconscious mind, we follow our unspoken norms and taboos. For a little while we may think we are original or creative, but we aren't — at least not following the definition we attributed to the terms. This is not uncommon, everyone thinks that they are innovative. A positive illusion or just the opposite, let's not discuss determinism. The human brain works by re-interpreting and linking concepts. There's no blank slate, otherwise we would have no base to stack ideas unto. Those concepts come from the surrounding bubble, a relatively narrow one. Like a snowball rolling through fresh snow. The bigger the ball gets the more we can see of life, the more complex the components of the ball get, the more likely they are to stick, encroached on it, buried under the snow. But even that perception of reality isn't reality, it's a vehicle. A transportation that might take you somewhere no one has ever set foot. If only creativity would spur.
Let's start with definitions because the words themselves are not representative of my perspective. I think there's a clear distinction between words. We have different words for a reason, they have different meanings. They might be thought to be synonymous but do have backgrounds, connotations, history, roots, that differ, The generic aspect of what it should mean.
We are born, we live, and we die. Yet, humans presumptuously want to ply meaning with their existence. What am I — Just a coincidence? What makes me special, am I distinguishable? We're not blind and won't be satisfied with the unlaborious mythological answers. Which are only enough for the simple minds. The essence is there, somewhere downstairs...
I find it fervently infuriating when someone uses the word passion and degrades it. They degrade the meaning of the word. Passion is the ultimate upgrade of the hobby, a cultivated curiosity. Something you're currently dedicating your life to. You diminish it when blurting that a person that doesn't spend any time outside the "obligatory work hours" on his passion, not even a thought, to be passionate. What is passion if it's not thinking and living what you love.
Ten years ago we moved to Lebanon. There was a culture clash. In this post I'll explain why some locals go on destructive paths. We all know generalizations have the nasty effect of activating justice warriors. My intention is not to trigger rage, generalizations are what they are, a resonance of the state of mind *we* are living in. While everyone is not going to read this post and take value out of it I still wish for it to be a wake up call. For those awake that can't raise their voices; this is for you.
Hello fellow readers, This post is a refresh on correlated subjects I've discussed in the past. I'm revisiting them considering the recent media coverage. Social awakening is at the door.
Hello fellow readers, In this post I'll discuss a subject that has been nagging me. Justification After Actions I usually write to clear my mind about a topic. These days I can't really keep up with all the things that bug me. This subject is a preparation to a broader subject that I'm preparing to write about.
Hello fellow readers, The last two months I've been extremely interested in evolutionary programming and group dynamics. In this post I'll try to gather some important factors I've noticed repeating themselves across the multiple opinions and examples, and the ones that just seemed noticeably important.
About a week ago an instructor at university was asking why most students did not try the step-by-step tutorials at home, or why they didn't at least read it. He then started a speech, trying to understand us and saying that we would not be able to enter the work world easily with this mindset, and asking students what they thought of it.
Hello fellow readers, I've been away of the social networking scene for a year, after obvious wrong events such as Facebook entering the stock market. This post is a reminder of those horrible, so called, online social networks. Social networks make people look stupid! On a personal level, I've been out for a year and I still feel the weird nausea arising when looking at people wasting their precious time on those networks; wandering, laughing at debilitated pictures, and all that in the disgusting hope it will make them popular or raise their status.