Tag: internet

Ten Days Free Falling Tree

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

This then is day one of ten without the news. It doesn’t feel a great deal different from yesterday except I missed listening to the two daily Economist podcasts I would usually listen to while driving. Not checking the BBC feels like absolutely zero loss which is quite a pleasant and reassuring feeling and without access to my Facebook wall I am unlikely to come up with any articles from independent or alternate media sources. Life doesn’t feel much different then as I said after one day, but then I wouldn’t expect it to, it’s after five or six days that I’m curious to see the affects.

This is not my first time without any access to the news. There have been plenty of opportunities for me to be ignorant of the worlds ignorance’s when travelling and either being away from the internet or just with better things to do. It is probably important then to get this straight; there are many more important things in life than knowing what is going on in the world, or a version of the world people you don’t know want you to see. When I have been away from the internet for a bit though my first thought is not to check the world or local news but is to find out what the score in the football was. That’s my weakness, everything else is secondary.

These moments of no internet are incredibly rare in modern times. We have access to the internet in ways unthinkable just ten to fifteen years ago. I do remember a time before mobile phones let alone phones with all this infinitely accessible information. I have no idea of the figures and will perhaps expose my ignorance but I imagine the majority of houses in the UK have wifi or at least access to a neighbours. Failing that a trip to McDonalds is the norm for some and even public transport has wifi these days. We’ve come along way from dial-up connections and it taking a minute to download one image.

It is probably a good thing. Long term it is unclear but then what the people of the future think is good will probably be different to what I do now. We apparently have less ability to remember information because we have Google as a surrogate memory bank. Our lack of real face to face connection has been shown to create feelings of loneliness which is surely the opposite of what a world of connectivity is supposed to do. Maybe we need to refine our understanding of the nuances of connection. On the flip side, unless we switch off our devices which can genuinely be really difficult, we are never fully alone and able to relax in our own company. We seem to be in a middle ground that does nobody any favours.

But I started out with discussing taking a break from the constant barrage of news not a one-sided take on the ills of technology. The news then makes us excitable in all the wrong ways and feeds into some primordial survival network going on in our brain. It undoubtedly leads to increases in anxiety and it’s only real benefit seems to be in allowing for a good conversation with someone about, well, the news. Yet being able to share information of massacres, injustices and private and state corruption is invaluable even if it does get drowned out by all the rest of the bullshit. In these ten days though I’ll be fine, as will the world without my observations for I suspect it is true; a falling tree does make a sound in the woods even when nobody is there to hear it.

The Traditional New Scrabbler

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Well I’m supposed to be writing this but I’ve gone and got myself distracted by a game on an app. I try to resist playing games on the phone or computer because I know how addictive they can be when I enjoy them. I assume they’re designed in that way to do exactly that and that just makes me even more wary. I’m a little bit of a traditionalist when it comes to these things too. I like my board games to be a physical things you can play with you hands and I’ve never really got into the computer game versions of them that much. It’s a little like a physical book and a Kindle. I appreciate the practicalities but give me the pleasure of an actual book any day. These games then are the same. Today though in response to the offer of a game I downloaded the Scrabble app.

I’ve not played the actual game that often in my life; a few unsuccessful and self-conscious times as a kid was about it before I played a few games with a housemate of mine in Athens. He was a passionate fan and we would smoke and drink through these epic battles. Scrabble as it should be played. I’ve probably played only a couple of times since then but it would always be a game that I would suggest if there was the option. I was a little bit cautious then on playing it like this, and like a Kindle, it’ll never compare to an actual book but unlike a Kindle I might actually give it a shot. So I’ve been enjoying it is the point.

Computers have managed to replace and recreate so many things. Smart phones are simply incredible; phone, camera, music, internet, an app for anything and so on. Technology though hasn’t been able to replace everything yet, not the board game, nor the book and I’m sure there are countless more. Perhaps it’s just my age though. Mobile phones started to become a thing when I was about sixteen years old, like an old man I can still remember a time before. Maybe this lack of appreciation for something technology has managed to ‘upgrade’ could be this emotional attachment. Maybe it’s just that there’s something much more to physically experiencing something than technology can ever create. Let’s hope something manages to survive with the evolution of this new normal and this old man can rest easy.

Mental Self-Preservation In The Internet Age

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The internet is quite simply the single biggest game changer since the printing press. This is not the first time this opinion has been presented on here and it probably won’t be the last. The internet has allowed us access to such a vast resource of information, one only dreamt of by intellectuals, students and conspiracy theorists fifty years ago, that we have no excuse for being ignorant of anything if we so desire. It is a shame our experiences have been coopted by click-bait, social media and kitten videos, who would have predicted such access to information would have in fact dumbed down society instead of enlightening it. Have our masters and overloads played their cards right when required or have we somehow done this to ourselves? It’s actually not clear, probably as ever a little bit of both. It is undeniable that we have access to information on social media which should bring down governments, and judging by my Facebook wall, the vast majority of people out there believe in the downfall of this corrupt system we live in. It is unfortunate of course that my Facebook wall is probably not representative of society on the whole.

I was reading an article about police in Australia beating up a man with mental health issues on his front lawn. They had been called to his address by his psychiatrist who was worried he might hurt himself. The golden rule in these situations is that the police will end up hurting him far more than he will himself, in America he will likely be shot. Again that may be true or it may not be but it does appear to be pretty commonplace if what I find on social media is anything to go by. Upon finishing the article I realised I was exhausted.

For nearly twenty years now I have been getting worked up about injustice in one form or another. I am instinctively drawn to it and appalled at what I find. For sure judging by what others post I’m barely excitable comparatively but that is probably something that has calmed in recent years from the heady revolutionary days of my youth. Perhaps it is just that after all these years you start to see how getting worked up serves no purpose beyond being emotively exhausting. Saying that there are examples of people making changes but they are not your average outraged person. There gets to a point that unless you’re actually going to do something then there’s no benefit to sitting behind a screen and getting angry, sad and / or excitable. Yet we still do, we keep on coming back to whatever fix it gives us. The buzz at seeing injustice, the feeling of being morally superior to some scumbag in uniform, the adrenal rush as you start fantasising about system change before going back to Netflix and watching Bojack Horseman or Peaky Blinders.

It just can’t be healthy getting worked up and mentally exhausted over things which will exist whether you read that article or not. This isn’t defeatist or fatalist, or at least I hope it isn’t and I’m aware I’ve just created a stick to be bashed with, but it is more a recognition of a certain type of pragmatism which leads hopefully to a little mental self-preservation and also the time and energy for more productive development of both the self and the environment around us. The world needs people to stand up and fight, and the reality is they will regardless, they will go out and make the changes. What it has and what it doesn’t need are people getting themselves outraged by events which have no effect upon them, can do nothing about and / or will happen regardless of what they do, which will most likely be little more than feel anger followed by moral outrage and superiority for the five minutes before they’re distracted by a kitten. Isn’t it wonderful that feeling of superiority, moral or not.

Historical Revisionism

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Revisionism in history is nothing new. From the dawn of record keeping people have been telling the stories of the past and re-telling them with their own unique take. From the days of the oral tradition with the traveling bards to the father of western historians Herodotus, we have simply had to take what was recording. In modern times we are able to revise this history, and this is not to say that history was never changed in the past, but with the development of technology in the last few hundred years the stories of the past have been recorded with an increased frequency. Prior to this events could be recorded and the re-recorded depending on the necessities of whoever the new status quo was within society. In modern times exactly the same happens but with the advent of first the printing press and then it’s contemporary equivalent the internet, the ability to hide events from the populace has grown increasingly difficult. The existence of a compliant media propaganda machine and an education system selective in it’s teachings still do much of the work of creating an ignorant populace but with technology evolving at ever faster rates it will be interesting to see what course establishment counter measures take.

China is an example of one way of dealing with the spread of information with certain sites blocked, disruptive opinions deleted and a general hardline approach to the spread of information. In the west we have the alternative approach, allow people access to information but discredit it as crackpot, hide it away from search engines and ultimately take a more distracting approach. It is hard to imagine which one will turn out the more successful. History has shown us you can’t keep people oppressed indefinitely but also they’ll eventually stop being distracted by the magic trick. Do they both then add certain aspect of each others approach, well only time will tell.

The point of this though was not to get into a piece on internet freedoms, but instead write about the manipulation and revisionism of certain characters within our own history. I previously wrote a piece on the myth of the barefoot doctor Li Shizhen, an example of China’s revisionism, and we have done the same with figures from our own past like Winston Churchill; responsible for leading the country against the Nazi’s on one hand and directly responsible for the death of three million people in the Bengal famine with the other. Can you guess which part of his life we are taught in school?

Today I listened to a very interesting podcast on Emmeline Pankhurst. It is undeniable that she was responsible for one of the greatest social changes in this country since the industrial revolution. Through her direct action, determination and network of followers women received the vote, some of the things they pulled off during the struggle were incredible and I’m in awe. However what is not always taught is that she was a classist. Throughout this struggle she wasn’t actually fighting for universal suffrage as is taught about her in modern times. Her intentions were never to get working class women the vote as she believed they were better being led by those above them in society. Arguably she was only ever fighting to get the vote for women of her social standing and above. She actively fought against the spread of communism which was in those days more about the emancipation of the workers than the spread of Soviet authoritarianism. When she moved to Canada in later life she then fought against ‘non-white immigration’ before returning to Britain, joining the Conservative Party and standing for them as an MP much to the horror of her daughters.

That is not to say her achievements are unworthy and she did some great things which should be recorded and educated but it is important not to ignore the less savoury, or the parts which don’t fit the idealised narrative. With technology and the spread of information, as well as misinformation only increasing, it may just be time to redevelop a little trust back between society and those directing it. If not we can only envisage the inevitable suffragette style movement to follow. People are fallible, get over it.

A Manipulated Mass

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It is very hard in this day and age to know what is true and what isn’t. The internet is arguably the fount of all knowledge, and when we’re not looking at pictures of cats and stalking ex-partners we are quite simply blessed with the opportunity to discover – or to google which is a disturbing example of the evolution of language – the answer to any question we may want to ask. The problem here is that it seems very easy to get a variety of answers to one question. On the one hand that is great, difference of opinion will further debate and understanding within and of society. On the other though you have powerful financial interests manipulating which arguments are most easily accessible, the only inevitability is that debate becomes inaccurate and corrupted. There are few long term positives of such things unless you are the one doing the corrupting.

While this is all seemingly quite obvious, what appears to be the outcome are articles using public opinion to validate the argument, angle or narrative they are attempting to push. For example if you want to push a news story about public perception of an issue, it is very simple to go on the idiots validator – Twitter – select a few tweets – cringe – and post them within your article as proof of your argument. While it may seem obvious that people will dismiss the arguments of morons or people who are clearly not experts in the field – a corruptible concept too – people for one psychological reason or another seem unconsciously more likely to agree with the article if they believe it to be the majority opinion.

I saw an article recently describing how the left have disowned George Orwell because it had come out that he gave the names of suspected communists to the British government in 1949. The article was backed up by a few angry tweets criticising and disavowing him from people who clearly missed the point and didn’t understand the background to why he may have done that. This was in The Independent too which is a left wing British newspaper but it was total bullshit being validated by total bullshit.

The same could be done on the news. When a segment presents interviews with three people in the street for example, we often see two or three with one opinion that supports the overall message and one who doesn’t, how do we know that they only ever interviewed them and not ten others. The point is the media is as corrupt and untrustworthy as the politicians have always been yet we take what they say at face value. With eighty-three percent of mainstream media in the UK owned by three corporations, they can pretty much convince anybody of anything with enough coverage. They can be corrupt and it doesn’t matter. We have vaults of information online but who really looks beyond supposedly trustworthy news sources such as the BBC, or their equivalent in other countries and cultures.

Ultimately we’re as much a pack animal as dogs and if we believe the majority think something we’re more likely to go with it to remain part of the group. If you have such an array of opinions all appearing to validate something it has never been so easy to convince people even when it is in your interests and actively against theirs. The internet is arguable the greatest invention since the printing press, and with such knowledge comes the opportunity for rebellion and sedition live never before. Unfortunately it also seems to bring rise to the polarising and manipulating of peoples the world over. It is though early days, the internet is but a baby in the long history of information. There is still time yet.