Arguing On Social Media Quotes

It’s no use trying to reasonably argue with unreasonable people. Better to spend your time in more productive pursuits.

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience. The deep life, of course, is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.

If word-of-mouth pundits agree on anything, it’s that being interesting is essential if you want people to talk. Most buzz marketing books will tell you that. So will social media gurus. “Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads,” argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate. Unfortunately, he’s wrong.

If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media - having tasted blood - would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed of the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

This book will argue that the companies on their own can’t do enough to glue the world back together.

NEUROBIOLOGISTS HAVE IDENTIFIED ‘mirroring’ as one of the neural routes activated in the brains of primates – including us – during interaction with others. In a connected age, the mirrors get bigger. When people feel scared after a horrific event, that fear spreads like a digital wildfire. When people feel angry, that anger breeds. Even when people with contradictory opinions to us exhibit an emotion, we can feel a similar one. For instance, if someone is furious at you online for something, you are unlikely to adopt their opinion but it is quite likely you will catch their fury. You see it every day on social media: people arguing with each other, entrenching each other’s opposing view, yet also mirroring each other’s emotional state.

But these social media critics wanted to imply that my whiteness was an ideological error, that my comfortable unawareness was an indisputable problem, yet I’d argue that living without a direct experience of poverty or state-sponsored violence, growing up without ever being presumed a guaranteed threat in public places and never facing an existence where protection is hard to come by don’t equate to a lack of empathy, judgment, or understanding on my part and don’t rightly and automatically demand my silence.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

He looked directly at Grant: “I will tell them that I think you are guilty of the murder of three people and that you were the sponsor of the child-pornography smear, and that I think a person of your brand of social pathology—I believe you are a psychopath, and I will tell them that—has no place in the Senate. And I will continue to argue that here in Minnesota for the full six years of your term, and do everything I can to wreck any possible political career that you might otherwise have had.” Grant smiled at him and said, “Fuck you.” The governor said, “Okay, okay, Porter. Now, Taryn, do you have anything for us?” “No, not really. I’ll be the best senator I can be, I reject any notion that I was involved in this craziness.” She looked at Smalls: “As for you, bring it on. If you want to spend six years fighting over this, by the time we’re done, you’ll be unemployable and broke. I would have no problem setting aside, say, a hundred million dollars for a media campaign to defend myself.” “Fuck you,” Smalls said. And, “By the way, I’d like to thank Agent Davenport for his work on this. I thought he did a brilliant job, even if I wound up losing.” Grant jumped in: “And I’d like to say that I think Davenport created the conditions that unnecessarily led to the deaths in this case, that if he’d been a little more circumspect, we might still have Helen Roman and Carver and Dannon alive, and might be able to actually prove what happened, so that I’d be definitively cleared.” Smalls made a noise that sounded like a fart, and Henderson said, “Thank you for that comment, Porter.

In the pages that follow, I want to invite readers who don’t regard themselves as social conservatives to reexamine the traditionalist roots of attitudes about children they may have come to accept. And I want to invite all readers, regardless of their political and cultural views, to take a fresh look at common assumptions about kids and parenting. We’ve been encouraged to worry: Are we being firm enough with our children? Are we too involved in their lives? Do kids today feel too good about themselves? Those questions, I’ll argue, are largely misconceived. They distract us from—or even make us suspicious about—the shifts that we ought to be considering. The sensible alternative to overparenting is not less parenting but better parenting. The alternative to permissiveness is not to be more controlling but more responsive. And the alternative to narcissism is not conformity but reflective rebelliousness. In short, if we want to raise psychologically healthy and spirited children, we’ll need to start by questioning the media-stoked fears of spoiling them.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

This linking of bullying to mental illness and the idea that it causes 'life-long damage' really concerns me. I fear it is the anti-bullying industry that is the real threat to young people's state of mind. Rather than reassure, it adamantly stresses, indeed exaggerates, the harmful effects of bullying. Such scaremongering is impacting on young people's coping mechanisms and possibly exacerbating the problem. As such, it actually contributes to the young feeling overly anxious, and ironically creates an atmosphere likely to encourage symptoms of mental ill health. The headline should be 'anti-bullying causes mental illness'. The anti-bullying industry has made a virtue of catastrophizing, always arguing things are getting worse. With the advent of social media, bullying experts are quick to point out there is now no escape: 'Bullying doesn't stop when school ends; it continues twenty-four hours a day'. Children's charities continually ratchet up the fear factor. Surely it is irresponsible when Sarah Brennan, CEO of YoungMinds, declares that 'if devastating and life-changing' bullying isn't dealt with 'it can lead to years of pain and suffering that go on long into adulthood'. Maybe I am being over-cynical about the anti-bullying bandwagon, and there is a danger that such a critique will cause me to be labelled callous and hardhearted. Certainly, when you read of some young people's heartbreaking experiences, there is no doubt that it can be a genuinely harrowing experience to go through. But when we hear these sad stories, surely our job as adults should be to help children and young people put these types of unpleasant experience[s] behind them, to at least put them in perspective, rather than stoking up their anxieties and telling them they may face 'years of pain and suffering'.

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimised by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Daly (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilise 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the catharthic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

Network analysis can be focused, they argue, on three separate regions of commerce: organizational network analysis, value network analysis, and influence analysis, which map loosely to internal, vendor, and consumer populations.

Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt “best-practice” techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is sthe emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems, and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies.10 The very convergence of major institutions makes peoples all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess.

When social software becomes a component of formal education, students and teachers interact with one another in more meaningful ways, creating a variety of positive results. Ted Panitz (1997) details over 67 benefits from engaging in collective learning, arguing that collaborating reduces anxiety, builds self-esteem, enhances student satisfaction, and fosters positive relationships between students and faculty.

I begin by describing the saturation of everyday life by media technologies, for example, how people are meshing multiple devices. I then present some of my own research on the mobile phone’s role in shifting the boundaries between work and home. The main use of the mobile phone turns out to be social, with much value placed on the enhanced ability to microcoordinate the timing of complex family activities. In this way, I argue, mobile phones have become a new tool for intimacy.

For some time now, the conventional wisdom at most agencies has been to partner with experts in specific fields—social networking, gaming, mobile, or any other discipline—in order to “get the best people for the job.” But given the success of AKQA, R/GA, and so many other innovators, perhaps it can be argued that to be truly holistic in our approach, it’s better to grow innovations from one’s own stem cells, so to speak, than to try to graft on capabilities on an ad-hoc basis. Some would no doubt argue that it makes the most economic sense to hire experts to execute as needed, rather than taking on more overhead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But it should be pointed out that it’s hard to have the original ideas themselves if your own team doesn’t have a firm grasp of the technologies. Without a cross-disciplinary team of in-house experts, who knows what opportunities you—and by extension, your clients—may miss. “It comes down to the brains that you have working with you to make it a reality,” John Butler, cofounder of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, tells me. “The history of the ad agency is the Bernbach model—the writer and art director sitting in a room together coming up with an idea,” he says, referring to legendary adman Bill Bernbach, cofounder of DDB and the man who first combined copywriters and art directors as two-person teams. Now, all that’s changed. “[Today, there are] fifteen people sitting in a room. Media is as much a part of the creative department as a writer or an art director. And we have account planners—we call them ‘connection planners’—in the room throwing around ideas,” he says. “That facilitates getting to work that is about the experience, about ways to compel consumers to interact with your brand in a way that they become like free media” by actively promoting the brand for you. If his team worked on the old Bernbach model, Butler adds, they would never have created something like those cool MINI billboards that display messages to drivers by name that I described in the last chapter. The idea actually spun out of a discussion about 3-D glasses for print ads. “Someone in the interactive group said, ‘We can probably do that same thing with [radio frequency identification] technology.’” By using transmitters built into the billboards, and building RFID chips into MINI key fobs, “when a person drives by, it will recognize him and it will spit out a message just for him.” He adds with considerable understatement: “Through having those capabilities, in-house engineers, technical guys who know the technology and what’s available, we were able to create something that was really pretty cool.

Capitalists," he argued, "will not agree to any social progress completely eliminating unemployment because such a program would reduce the supply of cheap labor. You will never persuade a capitalist to cause himself losses for the sake of satisfying people's needs.

Consider the average worker in almost any urban industrialized city. The alarm rings at six forty-five and our workingman or -woman is up and at it. Check the phone. Shower. Dress in the professional uniform—suits for some, coveralls for others, scrubs for the medical professionals, jeans and T-shirts for construction workers. Breakfast, if there’s time. Grab commuter mug and briefcase (or lunch box). Hop in the car for the daily punishment called rush hour or get on a bus or train packed crushingly tight. On the job from nine to five (or longer). Deal with the boss. Deal with the coworker sent by the devil to rub you the wrong way. Deal with suppliers. Deal with clients/customers/patients. E-mails pile up. Act busy. Scroll through social media feeds. Hide mistakes. Smile when handed impossible deadlines. Give a sigh of relief when the ax known as “restructuring” or “downsizing”—or just plain getting laid off—falls on other heads. Shoulder the added workload. Watch the clock. Argue with your conscience but agree with the boss. Smile again. Five o’clock. Back in the car or on the bus or train for the evening commute. Home. Act human with your partner, kids, or roommates. Cook. Post a picture of your dinner online. Eat. Watch an episode of your favorite show. Answer one last e-mail. Bed. Eight hours of blessed oblivion—if we’re lucky.

The ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes requires humility, and the impetus for doing so requires patience rooted in hope and tolerance grounded in love. This is increasingly difficult at a time in which, as Sherry Turkle argues, social media and other technology significantly reduce our ability to exercise empathy.11 Indeed, we have seen a sharp decline in our ability to sympathize, understand, and talk face-to-face with those who have different views and beliefs. If our culture cannot form people who can speak with both conviction and empathy across deep differences, then it becomes even more important for the church to use its theological and spiritual resources to produce such people. The Christian calling is to be shaped and reshaped into people whose every thought and action is characterized by faith, hope, and love—and who then speak and act in the world with humility, patience, and tolerance.

The philosophy of conversation-centric communication takes a harder stance. It argues that conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sense counts toward maintaining a relationship. This conversation can take the form of a face-to-face meeting, or it can be a video chat or a phone call—so long as it matches Sherry Turkle’s criteria of involving nuanced analog cues, such as the tone of your voice or facial expressions. Anything textual or non-interactive—basically, all social media, email, text, and instant messaging—doesn’t count as conversation and should instead be categorized as mere connection.

Spritz is for not-real readers, evidently. And here’s where our most sacred class values come in, pounded with a mallet. It’s no surprise that the Atlantic and the New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy. Spritz works, they concede, for stuff you have to read—discovery, briefs, memos, and social media “updates” for data merchants and info tradesmen—but not for the pleasure reading of books that defines the bona fide man of leisure and letters. Juxtaposing a moral line on a class line, Spritz, several reviewers argue, is not for virtuous people who like to read. It is for subliterate business types who have to read.

As Huffington Post reporter Michael Hobbes has argued in his article ‘Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong’, it is the stigma imposed upon the obese by doctors and the media that causes the most damage, rather than the fact that they can’t brush their own teeth without wheezing.

Iain Pirie, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at Warwick University, argues that it’s not just the way women are represented in the media that’s helping to fuel this rise (a well-documented problem), but capitalism itself, which has corrupted our relationship with our own bodies and the food that sustains them. Pirie argues that the cycle of bingeing and purging that characterizes bulimia nervosa is similar to the accelerated and chaotic consumption that underpins modern culture and is vital for economic growth.18 The conflicting expectations placed on our bodies by advertisers – bombarding us with messages that food is a reward and a compensation (Have a break, have a KitKat), while at the same time telling us that not eating puts us higher on the moral and social hierarchy – are actually deadly.† Eating so much it hurts and then throwing it up in a fit of utter self-loathing is the perfect metaphor for consumerism.

Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together argues that social media creates the illusion of companionship while leaving us isolated from one another.

I would argue that without social media and the internet, the Catalan independence movement could not possibly have progressed so far in such a short space of time, and even with the same chain of political events, levels of pro-independence activism and voter support would have been much lower at this stage.

Ecofeminist Carol Adams has written that in intimate human-animal relationships we come to recognize an animal’s individuality, or perhaps even personhood. I would argue that when we follow internet celebrities, we also come to see those animals as individuals, or even as persons, and, we mourn them when they die. When Biddy the hedgehog died in 2015, over 200,000 people publicly mourned him in comments on his Instagram page. Interestingly, Biddy’s online popularity has only increased since his death, as has been the case for a number of other animals made popular through social media. The fact that Biddy was so mourned (as was Loki the corgi and Colonel Meow the cat) after his death is a testament to the power and importance of his online presence and the connection that people feel that they have made to the animal in question. These are animals who were only personally known by a few dozen people, but hundreds of thousands of people were affected by their deaths. On the other hand, it may also be the case that for some animals, their posthumous popularity indicates something perhaps more troubling: the potential irrelevance of the animal him- or herself. (Margo DeMello)

Chain letters—yes, the type you still occasionally get via email, or see on social media—have their roots in snail mail, first popularized in the late 1800s. One of the most successful ones, “The Prosperity Club,” originated in Denver in the post-Depression 1930s, and asked people to send a dime to a list of others who were part of the club. Of course, you would add yourself to the list as well. The next set of people would return the favor, sending dimes back, and so on and so forth—with the promise that it would eventually generate $1,562.50. This is about $29,000 in 2019 dollars—not bad! The last line says it all: “Is this worth a dime to you?” It might surprise you that in a world before email, social media, and everything digital, the Prosperity Club chain letter spread incredibly well—so well, in fact, that it reached hundreds of thousands of people within months, within Denver and beyond. There are historical anecdotes of local mail offices being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of letters, and not surprisingly, eventually the US Post Office would make chain letters like Prosperity Club illegal, to stop their spread. It clearly tapped into a Depression zeitgeist of the time, promising “Faith! Hope! Charity!” This is a clever, viral idea (for its time), and I will also argue that this is an analog version of a network effect from the 1800s, just as telephones and railways were, too. How so? First, chain letters are organized as a network, and can be represented by the list of names that are copied and recopied by each participant. These names are likely to be friends, family, and people in the community, furthering the Prosperity Club’s credibility, thereby increasing the engagement level. It follows the classic definition of network effects: the more people who are participating in this chain letter, the better, since you are then more likely to receive dimes. And it even faces the Cold Start Problem: if enough people aren’t already on the list and playing along, then it will fail to grow.

This is especially poignant when one thinks about social fragmentation. So-called “interracial” adoption is a lovely thing in basic human terms. Yet not long ago, Ibram Kendi tweeted this amid media coverage of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of “black” children (two from Haiti): Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.19 Kendi then argued that adopting such children in no way makes someone “not a racist”: And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.20 A writer for Christianity Today, Sitara Roden, spoke of her own adoptive background in a positive way, but also agreed with Kendi’s perspective on bias: This is a conversation I’ve had with my own white family. Just because I am not white and a part of their family does not mean their implicit biases are any less real. How you view the nonwhite person in your family, that you might have raised, is bound to be a different valuation than

In his classic study on the origins of public opinion, Zaller (1992) argues that politically aware individuals are more receptive to pro-attitudinal messages. Similarly, Taber and Lodge (2006) find that those with highest levels of political sophistication are more likely to uncritically accept supporting arguments and reject counter-attitudinal arguments, leading to attitude polarization;

We are a Sad generation indeed. Everyday , We are entertained by scandals, gossip, rumors and quarrels. We want to argue about everything. Yet , We are senseless, careless, clueless and we know less. We are entertained by negativity . We find joy and comfort in the pain of others. We are used being entertained by negativity that if there is none, We are looking for one. We are amused by divorces, breakups, cyber bullying, retrenchment, and when others are failing. That is why ? We want those who are doing well to fall. We glamourize being toxic, alcoholics, drug addicts, adulterous, Blessers and being disrespectful. We are excited by violence, chaos and disruption. We celebrate hypocrisy and barbaric behavior. We idolize criminals and reckless behavior. We are enjoying bad news. That we surround ourselves with it. We are bewitching our minds. No good will come out of us. When we surround ourselves with bad things. We will end up being bad ourselves.

On a long enough timeline, the rules of man change, and they change quite often. What was once considered a sin punishable by death is now a simple social media update, an expression of sexual preference, politics, religious belief. A hundred years from now, sin in its current state might be a laughable pastime, the way we look back on our ancestors who once believed the world was flat. Or the way we resent the ignorance of the Salem Witch Trials. Our justice system and our beliefs are a direct reflection of our politics, based on what we’re willing to accept—what society as a whole can accept. But then there are rules to which we can’t argue, like those governing our existence.

Earlier O’Brien and Pottinger had aggressively argued against allowing the Chinese firm Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, into U.S. markets. O’Brien was convinced that Huawei wanted to use its fifth generation (5G) wireless network eventually to monitor every citizen in the world. It was another major national security threat to the United States. O’Brien said, “Backdoor your medical records, your social media posts, your emails, your financial records. Personal, private data on every American. Micro-target you based on your deepest fears.

The author's thesis is that the right to free speech is being attacked. He goes over several cases in which he feels this is evident: state censorship, freedom of the press, cancel culture, non-hate hate speech regulations, social media companies, "thoughtcrimes," and a lack of trust among the citizenship, to name the major ones. But despite what he claims and how he frames each of these subjects, it's clear that he's either missing the point or, ironically, criticizing the people who have exercised their right to free speech when it wasn't in line with his own personal ideals. [...] In his acknowledgements, Doyle writes: "I am grateful to all those organisations upholding freedom of speech at a time when there are so many who would see our liberties curbed." This is his fear incarnate. Who are these "so many"? By the end of the text, we still have no clear idea. I'd argue that it's a phantasm of the privileged few, one that signals a loss of social power. This text would then be a dirge for changing times ... the author and those of his station mourning the shift, in denial and desperate to pin the blame somewhere, even while time drags them through the stages of grief. I hope that they turn to each other for this emotional labour.

The claims of the president directly contradicted much of the early public health information. And while information would sometimes find its way onto the networks, more often they would parrot the president’s misinformation—and, because conservative outlets were his primary source of news, he would parrot theirs. That led to a situation where, for instance, the Fox News medical contributor told Hannity viewers on March 6, 2020, that “the virus should be compared to the flu,” calling flu-level illness the “worst-case scenario.” Misinformation spread about masks, lockdowns, and even death totals, which pundits on Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio, and social media falsely argued were much lower than reported. 23

On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dishonesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let’s just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn’t radical at all.

A sense of failure had dogged him in the five months since Pamela OD’d in a Starbucks restroom and was revived with Narcan. Her mother drove to San Francisco, helped Pamela pack, and drove her back to Nebraska. Pamela texted Chris that she would be out of touch: “I just need to focus on gtng well…” Who could argue with that? Except that now, according to her social media stories (which Chris monitored more closely than his own), she’d completed another treatment program and gotten matching ring tattoos with an Ultimate Frisbee player named Skyler. He’d failed, but how? Was it failure to cure Pamela? Failure to be enough—in bed, in life—to keep her from relapsing? The truth felt deeper, weirder: failure to descend alongside her into catastrophe.

When we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” Turkish sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues in the MIT Technology Review. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium.”26 That combative, tribal environment encourages loyalty to your own team and animosity toward outsiders—and toward whatever the outsiders try to tell you about your team’s beliefs.

Frazier nevertheless insisted that the Black press’s “demand for equality for the Negro in American life is concerned primarily with opportunities which will benefit the black bourgeoisie economically and enhance the social status of the Negro.” The elite in control of prominent Black media, he argued, would advance these subgroup interests seemingly without regard to the welfare of the larger group. Frazier gave as an example the celebration by Black newspapers of the election of a Black doctor to the presidency of a local affiliate of the American Medical Association, even though the doctor had opposed a national health program and the AMA itself opposed “socialized medicine.”11 Good old respectability politics at work.

Negativity is everywhere. Everyday we are assaulted by negativity. No wonder we can't help but dish it out as well as receive it. We report the aches and pains of the day, rather than the small joys. We compare ourselves to our neighbors, complain about our partners, say things about our friends behind their backs that we would never say to their faces, criticize people on social media, argue, deceive and explode into anger. Negativity chatter even takes place throughout what we might consider to be a 'good day'. Negativity often comes from within.

Senator Ted Cruz lambasted him as a “narcissist” and “utterly amoral.” Cruz argued that voters could not afford to elect someone so unfocused and social-media-obsessed. “I think in terms of a commander in chief, we ought to have someone who isn’t springing out of bed to tweet in a frantic response to the latest polls.

Many parents wonder if we really need to worry about this stuff. Some argue that the flurry of concern over smartphones resembles the panic over previous advances in media, such as radio, music albums, TV, or even novels. That might be true, but it’s not particularly relevant. Social media and electronic device use is linked to higher rates of loneliness, unhappiness, depression, and suicide risk, in both correlational and experimental data. Novels and music are not. TV watching is also linked to depression, and sure enough, more Boomers (the first TV generation) were depressed than previous generations that had grown up without TV. Just because an argument has been made before does not mean it’s wrong; the “panic” over TV turned out to be somewhat justified. Thus an argument about whether a “panic” about media has happened before seems trivial—our kids need help now.

The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail).

The war for ideas has real consequences. Hitler argued for eugenics and a cleansing of the gene pool. He shut down the intellectual class who might challenge him, took guns away from the people so they could not resist him, set up a police state with sophisticated surveillance, then murdered more than six million Jews in concentration camps. Today, our Big Tech oligarchy censors pro-life social media accounts to give free rein to abortion advocates. The media and universities work hard to present a one-sided argument to the world. The game is rigged and the results are tragic.

No risk of arguing; no confrontation with painful jealousy, shame, or embarrassment; no need to dress up or to even leave the house. It also uniformized social exchanges. Public space, including the political sphere, was increasingly dominated by a shrinking number of voices that conquered the living room via the mass media.1 In other words, social relationships lost their diversity and originality.

Why Shiba Inu is losing all its popularity? Several cryptocurrencies are losing their lustre as a result of the crypto crisis. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is one such case, created as an Ethereum-compatible alternative to Dogecoin (DOGE), previously in the top ten digital tokens but currently struggling to pass DOGE in market cap. The dog-based meme coin has declined almost 90%% from its high value of ₹0.0061 in late October 2021. Currently, it is trading around ₹0.000950. Furthermore, the price has not shown any exponential growth in the last several months. Related- What Are Meme Coins | Leading Meme Coins: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu Shiba Inu's overall market capitalization has plummeted to ₹519B. During its peak, it was around ₹3,031B up to five times what it is now. However, because of the token's cheap pricing, trade volumes have remained steady. Last year, Shiba Inu (SHIB) became a worldwide sensation, and everyone wanted to get on board the hype train. Now, that hype is non-existent, and interest in Shiba has vanished. In this article, we will explain why this happened. But first, let's go through some analysis. Google searches and social media mentions As per the google trends, searches for "Shiba Inu" had returned to pre-hype levels in October and November of last year. It's also worth mentioning that "Shiba Inu" refers to a dog breed, after which the cryptocurrency is named. As a result, those interested in the coin itself are likely to be even fewer.’ While many may argue that this is due to the overall downturn in the crypto market (and they would be somewhat correct), Bitcoin and Ethereum did not see such a significant drop in retail interest. According to data, searches for "bitcoin" are down approximately 65% from their 12-month peak, while searches for "Ethereum" are down around 60%. These are significant drops, but nowhere like the 95% drop in interest that Shiba Inu suffered from its 12-month peak.

This is the reason that Montaigne argues for a separation between public and private spheres - the subjective nature of happiness demands it. We each need space to try to achieve happiness privately, without interference from the public. Montaigne would be horrified, for example, at the proliferation of social media, where we take what we should, in his view, be private and make it public. Not only is it obscene, it doesn't serve us. We obscure our own happiness from ourselves by trying to project it and articulate it and prove it to others. These sites, he would say, flatten and falsify happiness when they ask us to affirm each other's life choices through likes.

I would argue that this ability to feel compassion makes our behavior equally uncivilized at times. We turn a blind eye to cruelty, not because we don't care, but precisely because our deep human values are inconsistent with how we treat animals in our time. The information we are fed about this, which comes to us via newspaper articles, shocking video images that appear on social media, and now via the words written on these pages, makes us so uncomfortable that we can do nothing other than immediately distance ourselves from it. We ignore it; we act as if it's not happening.

Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment. "By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life

The proponents of identity politics on the left would argue that assertions of identity on the right are illegitimate and cannot be placed on the same moral plane as those of minorities, women, and other marginalized groups. Rather, they reflect the perspectives of a dominant mainstream culture that has been historically privileged and continues to be so. These arguments have obvious truth. Perceptions on the part of conservatives of advantages being unfairly given to minorities, women, or refugees are greatly exaggerated, as is the sense that political correctness has run amok everywhere. Social media contributes heavily to this problem, since a single comment or incident can ricochet around the internet and become emblematic of an entire category of people. The reality for many marginalized groups continues as before: African-Americans continue to be objects of police violence, and women continue to be assaulted and harassed.

The research of Larry Rosen and his colleagues has shown that time in front of a screen is positively correlated with increases in 1) physical health problems, 2) mental health problems, 3) attention problems, and 4) behavior problems.19 Similarly, in her troubling recent article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Jean Twenge (whose research we discussed in Chapter One) argues that smartphones and social media are making the current generation of children, teens, and young adults “seriously unhappy.” Her research suggests that despite their constant connections through media, contemporary young people increasingly feel lonely, tired, and left out.20

It might sound undesirable to someday have to pay for things that are currently free, but remember, you’d also be able to make money from those things. And paying for stuff sometimes really does make the world better for everyone. Techies who advocated a free/open future used to argue that paying for movies or TV was a terrible thing, and that the culture of the future would be made of volunteerism, with the digital distribution funded by advertising, of course. This was practically a religious belief in Silicon Valley when the big BUMMER companies were founded. It was sacrilege to challenge it. But then companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called “peak TV.” Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid “peak social media” and “peak search”? Watch the end credits on a movie on Netflix or HBO. It’s good discipline for lengthening your attention span! Look at all those names scrolling by. All those people who aren’t stars made their rent by working to bring you that show. BUMMER only supports stars.

It argues that the early history of electric media is less the evolution of technical efficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed.

Israel’s social media warriors know that connecting its mission to Washington’s post-9/11 struggles is vital to eliciting sympathy and support. “The so-called threat of Palestinian terror constitutes a key component of Israeli trauma narratives—a quotidian threat layered on top of multigenerational trauma over exile and genocide,” Tramontano argued:

Israel’s social media warriors know that connecting its mission to Washington’s post-9/11 struggles is vital to eliciting sympathy and support. “The so-called threat of Palestinian terror constitutes a key component of Israeli trauma narratives—a quotidian threat layered on top of multigenerational trauma over exile and genocide,” Tramontano argued: More concretely, Israel’s actions are presented as moral and legal, and the state’s current plight is explained in light of Israel’s tragic past. Images of New York City burning then directly connect Israel’s military operations to the American military response to the “trauma” of 9/11. Conversely, Hamas is cast as a barbarous and irrational enemy with no legitimate claims to trauma, much like narrations about al Qaeda, the self-declared Islamic State, and the like.16