OMG we’re all gonna die of swine flu!
No, actually, we’re not. In fact, very little will happen at all. So why is it being so blown out of proportion? Think about this…more people die every day from…well, everything, than swine flu. Name it. Even the common cold has a higher body count. More people have died of being blown up in space shuttles than Americans have died of swine flu. Just think about that. Space shuttles. How rare is that? Swine flu is even rarer. So why is everyone freaked out?
I’ll tell you why…because humans are a panicky bunch. Oh, sure, we like to make myths and stories about ourselves being fearless warriors and unstoppable killing machines, but really we are primates who evolved to live in cooperative groups. We did not gain dominance through martial prowess but through our tendency to work in concert and run when outmatched. Those that didn’t run are no longer with us, genetically or actually. When we try to make humans into these mythic creatures, these warriors, it very often breaks them. Post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional disassociation, and periodic depression are common symptoms of broken humans, but of course there are matters of degree; some are not broken but merely bent, and these often make very good soldiers but very poor humans. While this is regrettable, until humans learn a different way to resolve disputes, it is also necessary. Some must give up their humanity so that others may keep their lives.
But the rest of us are a fearful lot. We repeat unlikely things because they scare us rather than because we know them to be true. We spread fear and inspire chaos. And, even worse, we give license to ourselves and each other to act in idiotic and horrendous ways, all because we were afraid.
So enough. Quit it. You are spreading panic and making everyone anxious for no reason. Quit tweeting and retweeting the latest stupid update on swine flu. Stop making Google Maps mashups. Stop posting the latest WHO and CDC figures. Stop. Even if there were a real danger, this chicken-little crap would not be helpful. Save it for the zombie holocaust…I am sure Tom from accounting will get a big giggle out of your last tweets of “OMG ZOMBIES WDFFBKW” as he chomps your brains.
And on that note…celebrities aren’t celebrities here, so quit letting the media lead you by the nose.
That’s right, I’m talking about Oprah and Ashton and whoever else wants to ply their dirty little trade here. They don’t get it, and most likely never will. Narcissists don’t do well in social media because they give nothing back. Look at the so-called celebrities’ profiles…look at the ratio. Look at how much they interact. Ashton at least seems to make an attempt…most of the “celebrities” seem to think that Twitter is just another place for them to play “look at me!”.
The real celebrities of our ranks are those who interact, who have ideas, and who actually do things. Robert Scoble, Howard Rheingold, Tara Hunt, Leo Laporte, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis…we all know the names. The people (and many more, some of them I am lucky enough to know personally) are the real celebrities of social media. And I know some of you are groaning about me listing all these A-listers and crowing about “internet fame” like it’s “real” fame, but hear me out: I don’t know what “real” or “unreal” fame is. All fame seems to be an abstraction; we made up the concept and apply it as a social construct. And on the basis of this construct I say that “internet famous” (I am talking about the Jason Calacanis kind of web famous, not the Numa Numa guy kind, in case you are confused) is more “real”, or at least handed out for better reasons and according to values I am more in agreement with, than the fame dished out by Hollywood, TV, and the music industries. I like our kind of fame…it comes because a person is smart, cool, funny…not because an executive someone decided to promote them and turn them into a cash cow. I will take the Gillmor Gang over The View any day.
And for my final trick, I will also rant about #amazonfail.
What the hell is wrong with us? Do we so enjoy schadenfreude that we will leap to offense just on suspicion? I was just as guilty in this one…I jumped up on the issue when it first surfaced in the stream and posted, tweeted, and argued as I usually do about anything remotely related to gay rights. And we were wrong. While Amazon dealt with it horribly and I am still unsure as to whether it was a hack (as was claimed on livejournal) or an honest error on their side, we allowed our collective righteous indignation to flow out and attack with no real information.
Why care?
Well, I am a bit shocked at how easily we are all directed. We make a huge noise about how we have taken control of the conversation, but we are really just spinning in circles. If some of our pet theories are true and there is a collective intelligence going on in social media, then this intelligence has just woken up, is barely sentient, and reacts like an anxious teenager: eager to embrace every fad, governed and led around by emotional reactions, and unsure of its own place. If we are to take advantage of this new world, then our “smart mob” needs to get a lot smarter.
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Evan 12:38 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply
What is Identity? Is it the thing you think you are? or the thing other people think you are? or is it an aggregation of actions that you have done or others have witnessed?
If identity is made up of the perceivable part of us, the part others (and one can argue, our conscious minds) can see or interact with, than we have always been made up of those individual and speratic events.
But what about the Myspace me, and the facebook me, and the SMPP me? I suppose just as we regulate our actions based on the situation, I find myself adjusting my online actions according to the type of audience I expect to be there.
I wonder, how far the online community as a whole has allowed their online identity to become their primary externally facing identity
thePuck 2:17 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Looked at logically, identity is defined as:
Let there be sets A and B. These sets are defined by their elements such that if A={n} and B={n} then A=B
In life, this is cashed out as:
Concrete particulars have properties and any concrete particular can be seen as a set of properties. Since a set is defined by the elements it contains, a given concrete particular is the sum of its properties.
The problem to me seems to be an equivocation about the meaning of identity when we switch from concrete particulars to abstracts. My notion of identity is informed by my thoughts, memories, and experiences, and the experience of my identity is shaped by qualia…the actual sensations as perceived “from the inside”. Since these properties can never be discretely defined, unlike my physical properties, I am left with a notion of identity which can never be fully cashed out…never fully defined. This problem is not so bad IRL, and various philosophical and religious systems account for this indefiniteness of identity in various ways. Some say they are “folk psychology” and just a problem of language, others say they point to mind-body dualism…that there is something about us that is distinct and separate from our physical properties.
What I find interesting, however, is that these entries on posts and profiles online are discrete properties, but they are non-localized in space and time. All our normal notions of identity involve localization; I have hazel eyes, but some pair of hazel eyes somewhere else don’t share identity with my hazel eyes. Our properties, both the physical and perhaps non-physical I spoke of before, are equivalent to our identity because they are copresent in time and space. But these accounts, profiles, connections, they are non-local, yet they still represent us and act as us when we are using them. Thus the question is not one of the respective notions of mind-body dualism identity vs. eleminative materialism identity, it is one of copresence…do all of my properties, the parts of me, need to be local to be considered “me”, or are they distributable to online accounts, avatars, game characters, etc?