Intro to some future topics in no particular order:
- Software Suckage. I find it amazing that Twitter doesn't work any better than it does for how little it does. Or am I missing something? It basically has to handle a whole lot of small interactions at once. And it's been doing this with varying success for years. Meanwhile both Facebook and Google have put together interfaces that are far more complicated and (I would guess) have to handle as much if not more traffic (at least in bytes). What Twitter has going for it is (relative) simplicity and yet the interface which has hardly changed is still buggy, laggy and just generally unreliable. They acquired Tweetdeck and froze it as far as I can tell. I've noticed a lot of "At least it's not Google", but Google works (more often) and can support far more data. Hey, as long as all of your data, no matter how it originates, is going to the NSA, what difference does it make? *Holds upturned palms to both sides*.
- Sock Accounts AKA Sock Puppet. I had to look this up. According to the Urban Dictionary: "An account made on an internet message board, by a person who already has an account, for the purpose of posting more-or-less anonymously." OK, this be one of those. But then, nothing I've ever done on the Internet exposed my name (at least intentionally). I have what I think are good reasons for keeping the two accounts separate, but I'm not posing to the same places with both accounts or using them to fake out "followers", "likes" or other things that social media likes to count. In fact I have multiple (mostly e-mail) accounts for business purposes as well as different aspects of my personal life. Should I feel guilty?
- Tribalism. Also a definition first from Wikipedia is handy: "Tribalism is the state of being organized in, or advocating for, a tribe or tribes. In terms of conformity, tribalism may also refer to a way of thinking or behaving in which people are more loyal to their tribe than to their friends, their country, or any other social group.
The social structure of a tribe can vary greatly from case to case, but, due to the small size of tribes, it is always a relatively simple role structure, with few (if any) significant social distinctions between individuals.Tribalism implies the possession of a strong cultural or ethnic identity that separates one member of a group from the members of another group. It is a precondition for members of a tribe to possess a strong feeling of identity for a true tribal society to form. The distinction between these two definitions for tribalism is an important one because, while tribal society no longer strictly exists in the western world, tribalism, by this second definition, is arguably undiminished. People have postulated that the human brain is hard-wired towards tribalism due to its evolutionary advantages."
But check this out from the Ayn Rand Lexicon: "A symptom of the tribal mentality’s self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribalists’ position on language.Language is a conceptual tool—a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him, the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning. He would kill and die for the privilege of printing on every postage stamp the word “postage” for the English-speaking and the word “postes” for the French-speaking citizens of his bilingual Canada. Since most of the ethnic languages are not full languages, but merely dialects or local corruptions of a country’s language, the distinctions which the tribalists fight for are not even as big as that. But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders."
[emphasis added by me]. It is "Tribalism" that I think disturbs me about the abbreviated (by necessity of the interface) "debates" that I am seeing online now. Who would want all of this hostility to enter into your everyday life? Social media is a thing one can either escape to, or escape from. Is it not possible for humans to engage in civil intercourse? Are we hardwired for tribalism?
These items are all based on "current events" in my life. So I figure I had better speak now, or forget all about them as the interrupts of modern life continue to occur. Let's see, which one first, eeny, meeny, miney mo...
