View of the Alps through Spring blossom
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On Friends, The Series, Being Offensive

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Friends is a television series that aired in the 90s and that still makes millions today, as the show is re-aired. Jennifer Anniston, Rachel Green in the series, says that people today find the series offensive today. I find it ironic, that in a day and age where books are edited to be more politically correct, parties that are immoral, are voted into power.

Brexit, the Tories, the UDC and The US Republican Party are two examples. They represent old fashioned views and yet people not only vote for them but they lead politics. In the age where people are worried about what people said and thought decades ago, people are showing more bigotry in who, and what they vote for today.

If we edit books to be more politically correct, and if we criticise television series and films for representing old fashioned views, then we should edit the bible and Quoran, to make them more representitive of modern values.

Television series, films and books represent the world as it was, and if we have moved on from the values seen in TV series, films and books, then that is the entire reason we study them in the first place, whether through english litterature classes, film studies or media studies. The fact that our values change is part of the academic discussion to be enjoyed.

The danger comes not from laughing about something, but about growing angry, and showing intolerance. Remember that joking about something, offending someone by accident, and apologising is one thing.

Brexit and some political parties are about radicalising hatred against people based on race, religion or national identity. Whether Roald Dahl or Friends shows old fashioned attitudes to one thing is an interesting quirk to be discussed by parents, children, and students.

The movement to divide, radicalise and spread hatred is quite another. Until Drumpf and Brexit I felt that England and the US were making forward progress. With BRexit and Drumpf the US and England took a big step backwards, morally.

Complaining about books, televisions and films is nice, but it’s a desire to change the past. What worries me is that the Far Right is thriving in the US, England, Switzerland and other countries. I want people to vote against the Far Right, in government, rather than worry about how people thought three decades ago. What I see happening now worries me. England voted against Europe and the European identity. They behaved in a xenophobic manner and no one noticed.

Rather than complain about television, books, and films people should vote to keep the Far Right out of power. If the Far Right is in power then the very things that people decry in films, books and television, are shaping government policy in the wrong direction. Vote intolerance out of government.

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Twitter, As a Joke
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Twitter, As a Joke

Byrichard

Twitter went down and I didn’t notice, yet again. According to The Verge it has been down five times in five weeks. It goes down so regularly that it feels as if they have allowed the Netflix Chaos Monkey to run freely around Twitter code. They say that they need to rewrite the entire site.


Twitter had plenty of downtime many years ago but these were growing problems that were eventually resolved. It would go for months or even seasons without serious issues. They had learned how to make Twitter reliable. Now that so many staff have been fired the people with less experienced are stuck, trying to understand the old logic, and failing.


They want to rewrite the entire website. I wish them good luck. I don’t see how they can when they’re firing people, and overloading those that are left behind, with work.


“This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on. “

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down


Google Reader, Jaiku, and plenty of services have lived, thrived and eventually been abandonned. Twitter is not something I rely on anymore, so whether it lives or dies, at this point, doesn’t matter.


I am no longer invested in the social network. I am no longer invested in social media, because social media has shown that it is a glossy mag, rather than a social network. Glossy mags are not social networks. They are advert sellers. I loved Twitter. I expect nothing now.


And Finally


I don’t want to use Twitter anymore for the same reason I stopped using Facebook and Instagram. I don’t trust those in charge to be moral. I expect that our data and attention will be exploited. We will be used.


I am not a user. I am a community member. Destroy the community, like you did with Facebook and Instagram, and I will migrate.


My issue with Twitter is not that it goes down, but why it goes down. I also have issue with who owns and controls it. No social network should be controlled by the Far Right, especially when algorithms affect what you see.

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Social Media and the Lizard brain

Byrichard

I wanted to write about Social Media and the Lizard brain. My experience of information technology and Social Media is that it is a great tool for people from different backgrounds to come together and have a calm and logical conversation. Some people believe that “we need a social media with heart that gives us time to think.” I strongly believe that the culprit is not social media but rather the way people are taught to think in general and how the stigmatisation of online interactions has led people to feel negative when using social media.

With a smartphone in your hand, System 1 thinking becomes the dominant mode of thought. Nobody can handle the volume of data in 2016 without relying on ifeelings to come up with instantaneous responses, often triggered by how you see others reacting. There is less scope for deliberation and discussion – the pressure is to make a snap judgment and move on. I love this film, this article is deplorable/fantastic or politician X is a welcome breath of fresh air/duplicitous bastard.

This is an erroneous view. The World Wide Web is a powerful social tool because it allows us to think for a week or two before posting a reaction. Imagine that you are reading a printed newspaper article and you are offended. You write a letter the same day in the hope that it will be published as a reaction to the article. You react without the time to think. Once you send the letter it cannot be edited.

Social media and the World Wide Web allow two things. They allow you to read around the subject. Rather than write based on anger and emotion you can study the topic you are responding to. You can write on reaction, you can rewrite it. You can share that reaction. You can change your mind and you can delete it.

I find it an interesting paradox that articles are written about how Social media require us to use the lizard brain rather than reflect when I personally find the opposite to be the case.

System 2 thinking is slower and more deliberative. You marshal evidence, you exercise judgment, you discuss with others and you try to arrive at conclusions

When I am unfamiliar with a topic I go to Wikipedia to familiarise myself with a topic and there is a good chance that I will read articles on the subject. I really appreciate that in modern life when we find interest in a new topic we can either buy e-books or audiobooks in order to study topics in depth. We start the day with limited knowledge about a specific topic and by the end of that same day, we have enough background information to join the conversation.

To use a cliché social media is not the villain that people are making it out to be. Social media is a conversational tool and a democratising opportunity. When people are taught to think independently, when people are taught to reason, and when people are taught to research topics before writing a response they are productive.

I have a rule. If my response takes more than 140 characters I will drop by Facebook or Google Plus. If it is longer than a paragraph I will write a blog post. By following this logic, emotion is taken out of the post.

Marshall McLuhan talked about hot and cold media decades ago. Social media is a cold medium. The audience needs to do the work. The audience needs to fill in the gaps. Parents, Schools and Universities need to teach people to understand the limitations of the media they are using whilst at the same time teaching them to be critical, to find more than one source before forming an opinion. The problem is not with the medium but with the way in which people are prepared for the new medium.

Twitter’s Not For Me
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Twitter’s Not For Me

Byrichard

Twitter has a new For You page inspired by TikTok’s For you page according to Quartz. Many years ago we had Seesmic, a video chat community where people could share video messages 24 hours a day. We even experimented with recording videos and sharing them by phone when this was still novel.



Tik Tok has a critical flaw, as do plenty of the more popular social networks. As someone said on Mastodon today, “You have to be fast to say something new, before hundreds of other people have posted every possible reaction. That is what’s wrong with social networks today. I use social networks because I think social media is an awful term, used to encourage abuses rather than empathy.


By shifting to the “For You” algorithm based model Twitter is making the mistake that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other websites have made. It is forcing people to see populist crap rather than personal and meaningful chats.


I saw someone tweet “I have 8000 followers and my tweets have 3 million views.”


Social media should never be about huge follower numbers, and millions of views. It should be about personal conversations that lead people to want to meet in person. It should be about connecting with people.


The more Musk destroys Twitter, the easier it is to stay away for hours at a time, and to spend minutes rather than hours on the site. I played with Substack but I don’t want to post too often because I don’t want to generate too much noise. I am also playing with a shorter form WordPress blog. With the short form blog I don’t mind being noisy because I clearly state that it is a Facebook/Twitter replacement.


As soon as websites use recommendation engines, rather than chronological posts, I move away and I lose interest. Social media should be relevant and timely, not algorithm driven populist mediocrity. Time to move on.

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Another Pandemic Weekend Without Plans

Byrichard

Normally at this time of year, as the snow melts and the temperatures increase the opportunity for spring and summer sports returns. These sports are via ferrata, outdoor climbing, hiking and more. This year is different because although today is Friday no plans have been made for the next two days. There is a excellent chance that I will either hike or cycle alone. Usually I avoid cycling on Saturdays because that is the day when people are anxiously driving between their homes and their shops.


Walking feels like the safer option on such days. It’s usually on Sundays that I like to go for a bike ride, to range a little further than when I am on foot, and to enjoy different sensations. During this pandemic my favourite route is not possible because it crosses the Franco Swiss Border in two places and I prefer to avoid crossing the border unless it is essential.


At the moment the prospect of everyone being vaccinated, and of everyone being able to meet in groups of ten to fifteen to do via ferrata, hike or climb seems unlikely. It would seem that this is another year of relatively solitary sports. Hiking and cycling are good solitary sports because we often go at our own speeds anyway. These are also sports with almost no carbon footprint. You just walk out of your house and enjoy.


Scuba Diving, Climbing, Via Ferrata and other sports sometimes require a two or more hour drive to go to and come back from the activity location. With cycling and local hiking you burn no petrol, except for the rubber soles of your shoes but those wear out quite slowly. We’re speaking grams, rather than litres.


During my walks I often visit the old phone boxes that have been converted into libraries. I browse through the books. Some villages have a good selection of free access books. No one has thought to block access to them during the pandemic.


If I wrote a blog post for every walk or bike ride at the moment it would either be a clockwise or an anti-clockwise loop that always begins and ends in the same place. The main change are the crops, the animals and people I see, and the weather.


Yesterday I did meet someone in the physical world, for a walk, and I came to the conclusion that I much prefer to meet people for bike rides. The problem with walking with people during a pandemic is that you don’t have the freedom to walk into a field or patch of grass as you’re walking “with a person” rather than alone. You’re also working on set paths.


I like to walk along roads and other paths, and I like to change route as soon as I see people come the other way, or to climb up an embankment, or to choose a path between two fields. When I walked in Geneva yestreday I decided to take off my mask because I thought that there would be an opportunity to always be two or more metres from people but this wasn’t the case. If I was alone I would have put the mask on. In this context I didn’t feel as free to do so.


Cycling, during a pandemic, in contrast is excellent. The first reason for this is simple. You’re going at 20 to 30 kilometres per hour so whatever you breathe in or out is going to be diluted into the turbulence that is behind you. The second reason is that you’re on a road or path and the pedestrians you encounter are close for just a second or two, not even two breaths.


The other advantage is that you’re on some type of agricultural or normal road and there are usually not that many people on the same path so it provides us with greater freedom. People are cautious of bikes, but not of other pedestrians. Being on a bike makes us safe.


During my walks I often see people on bikes. Today I was surprised to see three women riding alone. Usually it’s two or three guys at a time, riding together and talking. It makes a nice change. Having said this the conditions today were unpleasant for cycling, a cold strong wind. These are the right conditions to make cycling cold and tiring.


I hope that Sunday will be good for cycling.


How far will we cycle in pandemic solitude? We will have to see.


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Narcissism and the World Wide Web

Byrichard

According to a New York Times writer, Narcissism and the World Wide Web are increasing. “Narcissism is increasing…“

If our egos are obese with amour-propre, social media can indeed serve up the empty emotional carbs we crave. Instagram and the like doesn’t create a narcissist, but studies suggest it acts as an accelerant — a near ideal platform to facilitate what psychologists call “grandiose exhibitionism.” No doubt you have seen this in others, and maybe even a little of it in yourself as you posted a flattering selfie — and then checked back 20 times for “likes.”

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and others grew from a desire people had to connect with others. In it’s golden age both Twitter and Facebook were about dialogue and conversations. They were about mutual respect and listening. During the Golden age of social media we would get to know people so well via Twitter and Facebook that when we met in person we felt like we had known each other for years. For introverts and more reserved people this was excellent. We could hide behind the screen until we built enough trust and confidence to meet the person behind the username.

Fast forward to 2016 and the wrong people have been heard when it comes to social media and it’s purpose. Many people have the false notion that social media is about self-promotion and self-aggrandisement. This is incorrect. Social media is about dialogue and personal connections. I only follow people who will converse with me should I comment on one of their tweets. The images I share are of the beautiful world around me. Facebook is a network of people I have studied with, worked with or met at various conferences.

There are a number of topics that the article should have explored. The first of these is solitary living. How many of those who use social media live in a house or apartment alone. The second question is whether the commute to and from work allows these people to have a social life and meet friends once the work day is over. The third topic to explore is whether friends live next door or in another country. My friends are distributed around the world, from Australia to Europe and the Americas and Africa. Imagine keeping in touch with such a broadly distributed network of friends.

Social networks and social media, rather than lead to narcissism are encouraging the opposite. They are encouraging people to share their personal life with friends distributed around the world. It is because we live in McLuhan’s global village that social media play such an important role. Remember that just because one attractive woman has a million Instagram followers liking her pictures does not mean that there are not a thousand other people sharing images with a small network of friends from social media.

Don’t let yourself feel stigmatised for being a social media user. Connect with new people. Share your passions. Don’t let the Luddites question your motives.

 

 

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A Nonverbal Autism Video Interview

Byrichard

I saw Horyou share a link to Speechless with Carly Fleischmann. This is a Nonverbal Autism Video Interview carried out via typed words on a tablet.  The text is read out electronically. The interview is warm and convivial.

It stands out because it does not use a fast talking or energetic host. The interviewer does not talk, in the conventional sense. They could easily have inter-titles rather than synthesised voice. It is because they show the challenge of this interview that it is interesting. It shows that charismatic fast talkers are not the only people with an opportunity to interview artists. It shows that given the right circumstances anyone can interview artists and that desire and interest are required but that solutions can be found for other challenges. It opens up the world to a diversity of people. Imagine video interviews in sign language for example. There is no reason for a specialist channel not to take on this challenge, to fill this niche.

Three things make this possible: Video production costs have gone down so it is easy to find the budget to record such an interview, technology makes communication for nonverbal people much simpler and finally Youtube makes content distribution to an audience easy. This video has three and a half million views.

I will find more videos like this. I believe that they play an important role in modern society where we believe that everyone should be treated equally, to have equal opportunities. It is too easy to idealise the charismatic radio presenter who has a way with words and forget that charisma can be found in people’s intellect. You see it through the laughter in the interview, you see it in the way the interviewee is so relaxed. It’s a shame that there is just one interview. Imagine it as a weekly show.

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