socialmedia

Blink.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Philip K. Dick

There’s been so much going on in the world that is disturbing that I disconnected for a while – not out of disdain, but out of the acknowledgement that there’s not much I can do about things I wish I could do something about.

The Internet can be like that scene from Clockwork Orange, where eyelids seem taped open to get us to react to some things in more ‘approved of’ ways1.

I closed myself off from the world for a while, and I’m the better for it. I hung out with some new friends and completely forgot about things that others have not had the luxury to forget about in war zones. The reality is that most of us are not in war zones. The reality is that most of us have that luxury, and we waste it getting upset over things we cannot directly impact.

I wish we could.

Sometimes, we need to blink.

In this last languorous blink, I made a few decisions.

I’ll be planning one post a week on RealityFragments.com – which means I get to think about it over the week while I work on the book. I plan on that to be on Sundays – so subscribers, I expect it will be more worthwhile to read one solid post rather than trying to keep up frenetically with a world…

A world where we should blink more.

  1. Of course, that movie was an exploration of a different sort of punishment for violent crime that somehow managed to humanize someone who had dehumanized others. However, that particular scene, was a pivot point and is reminiscent of how many of us consume media. ↩︎

Decreased Interest in Strategy Games: Why?

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Games in general are powerful tools for humanity because just like any other version of play in the animal kingdom, there’s value. Kittens learn to hunt by sinking their razor sharp claws and teeth into things. It’s preparation.

Mankind isn’t too different. We try to make education ‘fun’ for the same reason, with very mixed results, but one thing is constant in humanity: Play, and as our technology has become more pervasive, games.

That’s why maybe it should be disturbing that a recent study shows that there is less interest in strategy games.

“…But across its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two thirds of strategy fans worldwide (except China, where gamers “have a very different gaming motivation profile”) have lost interest in this element of video games. “67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer back in June 2015,” the report reads.

When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past nine years,” Quantic Foundry said. “Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past nine years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change…”

“Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds“, Ryan Dinsdale, May 22nd, 2024.

That China has ‘a very different gaming motivation profile’ is interesting. The postulation presented in the article is that social media may be ‘wearing people out’, which is a fairly summarization that could related to the average attention span falling from 150 seconds to 47 seconds.

As Quantic Foundry’s post points out, it’s pretty easy to just blame social media and move on.

…the decline in Strategy is likely not an idiosyncratic phenomenon among digital gamers, but parallels the general reduction in attention spans observed by researchers in different fields.

But because all over-time comparisons are inherently correlational, it’s difficult to pin down cause and effect. While we often blame social media for our decreased attention spans, there’s a lack of concrete causal evidence for this. Of course, it bears pointing out that causal evidence for this would be difficult to produce since it’s unethical to raise children in artificial labs. Also, the shot duration analysis in movies is a counterpoint to blaming social media entirely: this downward trend in media attention span can be traced as far back as the 1930s, although it is certainly possible that social media accelerated the underlying trend.

Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have. Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things. For example, higher engagement with social media is correlated with lower math and reading scores and poorer mental health among teenagers. Of course, again, these findings are correlational and not direct causal evidence…

“Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning“, Nick Yee, Quantic Foundry, May 21st, 2024.

Before Social Media.

Yet if we dig in through one of the links in Quantic’s article, we find this before social media. We find that shot durations in movies have also been dropping in length.

…Although pacing can refer to motion (Cutting, Brunick, DeLong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Cutting, DeLong,and Brunick 2011) or to the rate of cross-cutting between narrative threads (Bordwell 2013),we will use the term referring to the duration of shots as they have become shorter over time (see also Pearlman 2009). Indeed, the averages shot duration in Hollywood movies has declined from a mean of about 12 seconds in the 1950s to a bit less than 4 seconds in the 2000s (Cutting, Brunick, Delong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Salt 2006)…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Interestingly, this same document has this:

…The second popular account for the shot-duration decline concerns a possible cyclical reciprocity between mass-media screen content and the attention patterns of viewers—sometimes described as a nearly ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) affliction. The idea is that quickened screen
content (television programs, websites, and movies) alters our general attention patterns, perhaps shortening our attention span, and that the makers of this content must incrementally continue to quicken content to keep up with ever-shortening attentional capacity.

Although this idea promotes an incremental change like that seen in Figure 1, we know of no evidence in its support…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Taken by itself, this would lend itself to a net effect of movies becoming shorter. In fact, movies have become longer, which would indicate that there are a lot more shots in a movie and density of content. There’s some more movie length statistics here.

While Attention Spans Might Be A Factor…

It could simply be the cost of doing a good strategy game. In essence, it may not be about the gamers, but about the gaming companies. Creating compelling strategy games is more difficult, and combined with a world that might have people simply wanting some less mentally taxing game to unwind with could be the crux of this. As someone who enjoys a good real time strategy game myself, I am not too interested in the offerings of the last few decades.

A good strategy game, too, generally outlives other genres and therefore doesn’t need to be replaced as soon. This means that it may not be as lucrative for a game company to release strategy games when it could be pumping out first person shooters.

And the other hypothesis Yee described, ‘increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have’, could also mean that in the fight for the time of people who would be interested in strategy games, social media might be more attractive.

Movies have gotten longer, attention spans have gotten shorter- but in the end, we only have 24 hours of temporal currency to spend every day, and every move technology makes to ‘make us more productive’ never quite gives us that extra time it promises.

There’s certainly a lot to think about here – if you have the time.

Wanted: Another Renaissance.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard not to feel at least a little dismayed every day these days. It seems that the news is full of headlines that twist knives of fear in our fragile human hearts. We’re largely kept pretty busy simply maintaining our own lives.

Food and shelter are as needed now as they were needed when our ancestors first slithered from the primordial ooze. Our bodies did not evolve to stand our environment, instead we wore the skins of those that had. We did not evolve to consume abundant vegetation, so we ate those that do, yet our bodies did not evolve to become predators.

In fact, compared to most animals on the planet, our bodies aren’t that evolved to suit the planet at all – we’ve been ‘cheating’ with technology, appropriating as much as we can from others on our planet. Our technology has evolved faster than we have, our impact on the planet has evolved more than we have, and our technology is not really being used to reduce that impact.

We communicated, we coordinated, and we took on greater tasks. Oral cultures formed and passed down information from generation to generation, but there were flaws with this sometimes as we played the telephone game (or Chinese Whispers) across time. Contexts changed. We figured out how to write things down – to literally set things in stone. From there we found more and more portable ways to write.

Imagine the announcements of tech companies back then: “New stone allows more words on it for the weight and the size! Less oxen needed to pull! They will pay for themselves!” and later, “Use Papyrus! Have a stone-free library!”

So at first only those who were literate were allowed to participate in writing, but more and more people became literate despite those who once controlled written language. In a few thousand years, we managed to spread literacy pretty well across humanity, and the cacophony of it began to build on the Internet.

And yet we ourselves still haven’t really evolved that much. We’re basically still living in caves, though our cave technology has increased to a level where we have portable caves and caves we stack on top of each other to great heights.

We’re still basically pretty much the same with more of us, and our technology almost provides enough for everyone, maybe, but our great civilization on the planet is hardly homogeneous in that regard. Most people can point to a place where people have less or more than themselves, and the theory of hard work allowing people to progress seems flawed.

Now that so many people can write, they get on social media and jibber-jabber about the things that they like, most of it just being sending packets of information around through links – some not reading what they pass along because it has a catchy headline that meets their confirmation bias. Others have learned how to keep people talking about things, or to start people talking about things, and despite having the capacity to think for themselves, they only talk about what they’re manipulated into talking about.

Our feeds fill with things that we fear. Election years have become increasingly about fear rather than hope – any hope is based on fear, and people just twist in place, paralyzed by a lack of options. The idea that we could, for example, have women control their bodies and not fund a foreign government’s version of Manifest Destiny. We could have a better economy and better healthcare that isn’t wrapped in a sinkhole of people making bets on our health and forcing us to do the same – insurance companies. We could do a lot of things, if people simply trod their own minds more thoughtfully.

We’re insanely busy getting the latest technology because… well, technology is what we have to evolve since we haven’t. Tech companies are the new politicians, making campaign promises with each new release. It can’t be ‘new and improved‘ – pick one; you can only improve on the old.

They promise us more productivity, implying that we’ll have more time to ourselves in our caves drawing on the walls when we spend more and more time being productive for someone else. We’re told this is good, and some of us believe it, and some of us tire of the bullshit we believed for so long.

We could use another renaissance, if only so that people begin thinking for themselves in a time when AI promises to do their writing – and their thinking.

Opinion: AI Art in Blogs.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Years ago, I saw ‘This Space Intentionally Left Blank’ in a technical document in a company, and I laughed, because the sentence destroyed the ‘blankness’ of the page.

I don’t know where it came from, but I dutifully used it in that company when I wrote technical documentation, adding, “, with the exception of this sentence.” I do hope those documents still have it. The documentation was dry reading despite my best efforts.

I bring this up because some artists on Mastodon have been very vocally negative about the use of AI art in blog posts. I do not disagree with them, but I use AI art on my blog posts here and on KnowProSE.com and I also do want to support artists, as I would like artists to support writers. Writers are artists with words, after all, and with so much AI generated content, it’s a mess for anyone with an iota of creativity involved.

Having your work sucked into the intake manifold of a generative AI to be vomited out so that another company makes money from what they effectively stole is… dehumanizing to creative people. Effectively, those that do this and don’t compensate the people who created stuff in the first place are just taking their stuff and acting like they don’t matter.

There has been some criticism of using AI generated imagery in blog posts, and I think that’s appropriate – despite me using it. The reason I got into digital photography decades ago was so that I could have my own images. Over the years, I talked with some really great digital artists and gotten permission here and there to use their images – and sometimes I have, and sometimes by the time I got the permission the moment had passed.

When you have an idea in the moment, at the speed of blog, waiting for permission can be tiresome.

These days, a used image will still likely get stuck in the intake manifold of some generative AI anyway. There are things you can do to keep AI bots that follow ‘rules’ at bay, but that only works if the corporations respect boundaries and if you follow the history of AI with copyright lawsuits, you’ll find that the corporations involved are not very good at respecting boundaries. It’s not as simple as putting up a ‘Do Not Scrape’ sign on a website.

So, what to do? I side with the artists, but images help hold attention spans, and I am not an artist. If I use someone’s work without permission, I’m a thief – and I put their works at risk of getting sucked into the intake manifold of an AI.

I could go without using images completely, but people with short attention spans – the average time now is 47 seconds – should be encouraged to read longer if the topic is interesting enough – but “TL;DR” is a thing now.

So yes, I use AI generated images because at the least they can be topical and at worst they are terrible, get sucked into a generative AI intake manifold and make generative AI worse for it, which works to the advantage of digital artists who can do amazing things.

Some people will be angry about this. I can’t help that. I don’t use generative AI for writing other than for research and even then carefully so. I fully support people’s works not getting vomited out of a generative AI, but that involves a much larger discussion regarding the history of humanity and the works that we build upon.

Protesting The World.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I have avoided this topic for some time.

I oversaturated myself yesterday about the college protests over the Israeli-Hamas war, where civilians have been showing up dead faster than police can arrest protesters around the world in the United States. Clearly, I have a bias, and that bias is for civilians, not a ‘side’, but in supporting the civilians, I end up having to look hard at the people killing and maiming them.

The children didn’t do anything wrong but be born in an accident of geography that happens to be behind walls – or in front of them – on every side of their existence. That’s pretty shitty1.

As someone without a distinct tribe, that’s what I see. As a TCK and a hyper-multicultural, I’m not vested in the tribalisms of yesterday, the present, and the future. I just see people.

This morning, washing dishes, I thought about it, and I recalled my youth and what my mother said about cleaning my room.

Anecdote on Perspective

As a boy, my room was… well, not something that would pass any form of inspection. My mother, who then in the 1970s spent all day cleaning, boycotted my room for her own reasons – some selfish, some not – and tasked me with cleaning my room. This was one of the first responsibilities given to me, and I did not like it. Since I didn’t like it, I didn’t spend much time on it – but time is relative, and as a child, play time is always less time than responsibility time.

This did not work well for my mother, who would ask me if I had cleaned my room and I would say, “Yes!”. Of course I said that. The backyard beckoned, the friends on bicycles beckoned, even the dog beckoned. And, of course, it was never clean. She would stand at the door, look in my room, and say, “That’s not clean. Keep cleaning.”

I didn’t know what she meant. Everything is exactly where it should be, in my eyes, even the dirty socks in the toybox thrown there in a rush so I could go out and play. I had no idea what she meant.

One day, apparently after taking a deep breath, she stood at the door of my room and looked in and said, “Come here.” So I did, and she said, “When you look at your room, pretend that you’re me and look at your room from here.” From that vantage, I could see I had not hidden my mess as well as I had thought.

Soon, my room looked clean from that vantage point, a tribute to my mother showing a different perspective, flawed by being twice my height at the time. It was flawed for other reasons, but from her perspective, it worked because she didn’t have to look at a dirty room when she walked by2.

This would serve me well on Navy and Marine Corps bases: Learning what inspectors looked for and making sure it was sat(isfactory). But it didn’t teach me why the room had to be clean. That would happen as I matured.

Battles of Perspectives.

The world has become so polarized that it seems often we forget to consider things outside of ourselves, or our tribes. As someone generally outside of the tribalisms, I often see individuals and groups fighting over things that they disagree about and forgetting everything they agree about. Sometimes it’s a matter of social inertia. Not everyone is cut out to be a free thinking individual3. I used to get upset about the blind followers, but having interacted with them over a half-century, I understand why some of them are the way they are and are probably better off that way.

Even so, the leaders of groups have a responsibility to their followers to be mindful of what they’re doing. Eventually, because humans tend to more vocal disagreement than agreement, people split off and do their own thing – which gives us diversity of perspectives that we often ignore. As someone expressly against the killing of children, Israel’s actions and policies do not align with what I would be willing to agree with – yet I cannot deny that the Jews I have known over the years deserve a place to live in peace. Israel increasingly doesn’t seem to be that place for anyone. I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but if you have to kill children to protect yourselves, you have to wonder what you’re protecting yourself from.

On the flip side, I don’t think kidnapping civilians is something that’s tenable. In fact, it seems an act of desperation, that things are so bad that you need to make a point by absconding with another human to imprison them until someone else meets your terms. Anything negotiated at gunpoint only results in ceasefires, and ceasefires are just pauses in war where children are born to die when the ceasefire is over.

Many people are trying to clean the room by hiding their socks in their toyboxes when it comes to ethical stances, while some are simply protesting to make the world a better place – a better place from their own perspective.

Protests.

When things get bad enough, people are moved to side with something because they want to feel like they have done something. When I saw the invasion of Ukraine, I wanted to go over and help with the medical as a former Navy Corpsman, and explored it seriously only to find that I had become old, I had a wonky knee sometimes, that battlefield medicine had evolved a lot in tools and equipment, and that I would be a liability in a war zone4. I had purchased tickets to get there that I cancelled, not because of the potential for death or injury to myself, but because I could cause others to die or be injured.

It was humbling in ways that I still wrestle with at times.

So I got on Twitter, pre-Musk era, and supported there through social media, because I could do that but I found myself looking at the mob and seeing things that I considered overstepping. I pulled back. I still support Ukraine sovereignty, but I am careful about weighing the cost to others.

Protesting for or against something isn’t as high of stakes, but in a way it is. I believe in peaceful protest, but peaceful protest always gets people together with perspectives that may be slightly different, that we overlook because at the time they may work towards our ends – and sometimes that hits us in the soft nether regions later on and undoes the good we thought we were doing.

It’s like when the Soviet Union was still a thing. Pilots in Germany would come perilously close to starting a war as the pilots tested each other constantly. With too many people on alert for different perspectives interacting so closely, things can get very hairy very quickly. Sooner or later, something goes just a little too far and both sides need to pull back because they don’t actually want a war. Only fools want war, thinking it’s like a Hollywood production of Rambo. If fools were the only victims of other fools, humanity would be much stronger for it, but fools have a tendency to kill people who are not fools simply because they disagree with them – even if they’re on the same ‘side’. There’s really no such thing as friendly fire. Just fools with excuses.

We should first do no harm.

Israel And Palestine

The sad truth is that until now, Palestinian children weren’t really counted when they were alive and now we count their dead. The sad truth is that the whole situation could have been resolved decades ago and the Palestinians have found themselves to be convenient pawns of the big players in Middle Eastern politics. The sad truth is that those same children grow to become adults and don’t want to be pawns anymore.

It would seem that the protesters for the Palestinians have the same thought, that they see something that should be fixed and want it to be fixed. This I can agree with wholeheartedly and without reservation. It’s clean, it’s ethical, and it reflects the values of humanity that we’ve all been taught at some basic level.

What I cannot agree with is supporting Hamas. What I cannot agree with is supporting the policies of Israel that have galvanized the attention of the world by their ruthlessness and impunity for human life, as Russia has shown in Ukraine.

I’m all for people living peacefully, but that seems almost oxymoronic because of the lack of mindfulness of leaders of followers, and of followers that should know better.

Now the violence is spilling blood on the other side of the planet, all because we as a species have let the issue sit for far too long.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know what the answers aren’t.

The answer is not ignoring the problem – we’ve done that for decades. The answer is not funding weapons to one side, ally or not. The answer is not becoming as polarized as we allowed the whole situation to become. The answer is not creating laws that make it illegal to criticize a country’s policies and actions. The answer is not violence between protesting groups. The answer is not making the world more unsafe. The answer is not giving to one group at the cost of another. The answer is not electing politicians who ignore the problems because of election cycles while effectively shouting ‘squirrel!’ and pointing at some other issue.

Sometimes, we have to sit down and wrestle with our humanity and acknowledge how ugly we can be, even if our own tribes don’t see it because they’re too busy dehumanizing the other side.

Humans are always stronger together, except when humans are together.

So I go back to my favorite quote and wonder what we can build together that would make things better, because the world is broken and we can’t afford the amount of glue to fix it. We have the technology and will to do great harm, but no one seems as intent on the greater good.

We should change that, through social media, through interacting with each other even when we disagree, and find ways to build things because otherwise we’ll run out of things to destroy.

We should be better than this. Let’s try that.

  1. I try not to use profanity, but sometimes profanity is the only way to express something. I wrestled with that sentence. ↩︎
  2. Closing the door would have helped her too, but it wasn’t something I would dare say at the time. ↩︎
  3. including some free thinking individuals. ↩︎
  4. I had good friends who allowed me the dignity of coming to that conclusion myself. ↩︎

Almost A Month of Mastodon: Thumbs Up!

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

On April 1st I joined Mastodon, eschewing centralized social media networks because I felt like an experiment rather than a participant.

My experience so far has been great. I have some followers, not a lot, and I follow about twice as many as I follow (a good metric, I think). I interact with smart people, some who know more than me, some who know less, but everyone’s pretty polite.

It’s a sharp contrast to the other social networks I’ve been on – it actually reminds me of the good old days of the BBS systems, almost as if a few of us would form a party and go play D&D.

Sure, you have some annoying people now and then, but that’s life.

Centralized Social Networks: Blech.

Being away from the centralized social networks has given me perspective. In hindsight, this is what I saw:

Algorithms seemed to have washed the nutrients from my news feeds, instead pushing polarizing posts and spammy sales messages into my eyeballs. It was like a roundabout of billboards that I couldn’t get off – and what I did add to the networks was either not seen or interacted with.

On Facebook, with 1,250 connections, all of them felt distant, removed – not the flesh and blood people that I met, or the intellectually interesting that I had found. My newsfeed was repulsive.

“Hate Israel! Hate Hamas! Hate Russia! Hate Ukraine! Hate Republicans! Hate Democrats! Hate this one! Hate that one! Buy this! Buy that! Buy THIS AND THAT!”

Man, that’s tiresome. Hate takes a lot of energy and usually requires the suspension of the intellect in and an over-exuberance of negative emotion. I’m just not over-exuberant. To me it all looked like a litter box – and made me come to the understanding that walled gardens become litterbox prisons.

LinkedIn is pretty much a human caterpillar of professional brown-nosing. Everyone’s so worried about what a potential employer might think that they won’t rock the boat. They just want to be seen in a positive light, and so that network has become a beacon of bullshit as everyone’s interviewing and it’s a competition to be the most politically correct while maintaining some facade of professionalism all the time. It’s like being at an interview that never ends. It’s terrible, and oh- by the way – people always want to sell you stuff there too. Nobody cares what you can do, really, and the headhunters are more just about collecting skulls to make their bones. And Microsoft (LinkedIn) is constantly asking you to upgrade your subscription so that it can find you a job you’ll likely be unhappy with – otherwise they wouldn’t make money when you go back on bended knee.

At least in psychiatric wards, they give you drugs so you don’t have to experience the other inmates, and in that regard that’s what I believe social media networks largely do.

Twitter? Never really cared about it because I foresaw the trusted sources issue a year before the company even formed. People got into it for various reasons with no exit strategy, as most of us did with social media networks. TikTok I never got into, I don’t even have an account – it’s bad enough I was handing my likes and habits to Big Tech in the U.S., which because of FISA is a grey area of government – why on Earth would I want to hand more information to another government?

Meanwhile, On Mastodon…

I started off by following hashtags I’m interested in, and interacting with other people. 99% of it has been really good, thoughtful, and sometimes challenging in good ways – new perspectives to explore, new trains of thought to consider, new… well, new! Yet that was just the first week, and like a car, you really don’t know how well things are working until you lose the new car smell.

There’s an intellectual freedom I found there that was lost on other social media networks – the Fediverse has it’s own wonkiness, and there are criticisms of Mastodon by longer time users that I don’t understand yet. That’s fine. Most of the issues I see with people on Mastodon is that they want the same confirmation biases fed that they had fed on centralized social networks.

One person wrote today of the centralized networks, “where friends are frictionless and things are predictable.” That sounds a lot like an echo chamber to me, an algorithmic ant mill. I don’t like watching NASCAR because it’s a boring track, I never would have wanted to drive in NASCAR because it’s a boring track, so doing the intellectual and emotional equivalent seems less than ideal for me.

I interact as I wish – politely, even with people I disagree with, and I have yet to block anyone for being douchebags. All in all, it feels a lot like I want a social network to be.

A few people are worried about ‘reach’ – one person posted that they wanted Dan Gillmore to have as many followers on Twitter, which when I looked was 10,000 or more than he has on Mastodon, and he’s talked about ‘reach’ – but it’s really engagement that’s the way to measure things in social media, and even with that engagement, it’s about the quality of engagement.

Also of interest – I’ve found more quality blogs to follow on WordPress.com on the Fediverse than I have on WordPress.com in unit time.

All in all, I feel that I’ve spent my time better on the Fediverse through Mastodon than any other social network. You’re not swimming against algorithmic flotsam and jetsam.

I’ll be on Mastodon. Links are on both of my sites at the top. If you pop in, say hi, and enjoy the interesting people with the understanding that you don’t have to agree with people – just like in real life – but you can have conversations, sometimes hard ones, respectfully – rather than dodging them in the echo chambers.

Criticize By Creating.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
View all responses

If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

How I use social media.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you use social media?
View all responses

It’s not often that I respond to WordPress.com writing prompts. “How do you use social media?” popped up, and using the WordPress.com reader I started looking through the responses.

That’s the key thing for me when it comes to social media – looking for things of worth, people with good ideas to discuss, etc. It’s about finding pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t have a picture on the box to refer to.

Scrolling through the responses, there are the few that mention making money, like the old advertisements in the back of 80s magazines with the get rich schemes. The way to make money off social media is telling people how to make money off social media. The way to make money off a product or service is to have a good product or service and not shoot one’s self in the foot when marketing it.

I don’t use social media to make money. I don’t use social media to be popular. What I do use social media to do is explore other perspectives, but in an age where everyone and their mother is training artificial intelligence, I am leery of social media sites. Even WordPress.com has been compromised in that regard, though you can take action and not be a part of it.

Unknowingly, many people are painting the fence of generative AI, giving the large companies building and training generative artificial intelligences the very paint and brushes that they need to sell back to them. It confounds me how many people on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are going out of their way to train artificial intelligences.

This is why I have gone to Mastodon. The Fediverse offers me some protection in privacy. I post links to social media accounts to stuff I write, but I only really interact on the Fediverse, where I feel more secure and am less likely to paint generative AI’s fences.

Facebook Algorithms Run Amok.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments

TheTruthHasNoConscienceI’ve used Facebook since I worked with a fashionable DC Drupal shop whose CEO at the time thought it was the best thing since… well, in his mind, Drupal. He had all of us join even though we were way too busy to be goofing off on social media.

Later on, I began using Facebook to connect with people I had not been in contact with for a while. Later, I would try to use it to share stuff I was writing, though I had friends who were very good at liking things I wrote but were not quite compelled to use the share button. Maybe my writing sucked. Maybe my friends didn’t understand social media. I’m leaning toward the latter given I did get good conversations, but people didn’t understand sharing.

Time progressed, and people stopped seeing less of each other on timelines. Algorithms, “we think you want to see”, etc – which all but took what I thought was interesting away from Facebook. It got worse, so I tried that ‘paid advertising’, and for the most part, it doesn’t make sense spending money on Facebook either unless you’re willing to really go big. In essence, you’re paying them to undo the stuff that shares what you post on your timeline. Quite a racket, really, but that’s Facebook.

Lately, since I’ve been supporting Ukraine on social media, Facebook has taken a new twist – restricting my account over what were clear parodies. I tweeted about it a few times, the account restrictions went away a few times, and then I tried uploading the Hitler movie excerpt with subtitles that made fun of Putin. You know. That one video that was quite popular for a while.

This got my account restricted again, for something that was clear parody. Facebook lacks a sense of parody. In chatting with a few other people, the problem is pretty consistent. Facebook is not for humor. I’m not even sure humans work there. You can’t speak with a human on a network of humans about issues you have. It’s insane.

birdshit_fb_webSo Facebook, which was once interesting, is just a place where I glance in now and again as I use other social media. Sure, there’s a RealityFragments page on Facebook, but I think that’s a matter of time as well since I’m being punished for having a sense of humor.

I mean, we all can’t be Mark Zuckerberg.

Incidentally, always hold on to picture of animals taking a poo. They come in handy.