♪♫ My Girl ♫♪
Do you hear some music in your head? What about the chorus from a very specific song? I know you can hear it. Perhaps you’re seeing an iconic scene from a film. Or I could be making horribly wrong assumptions and simultaneously showing my age. Unfortunately, I am not here to discuss the song but the phrase; it is a fascinating grouping of two words to review. For the longest time the term: “my girl/boy/guy/lady/wife/husband/significant other” has fascinated me. The reason is simple, it is a possessive statement. The word my implies ownership or possession.
Give me my pencil back. In that sentence, we know who owns the pencil and that they want to have physical ownership of it again. Yet, we prescribe the same language in our communication about human beings. We cannot own human beings (anymore, thank god we sorted that mess out), but we can still be possessive of them. I dislike the concept of imposing my will on others, but I find it incredibly difficult to vocalize or write about a significant other without utilizing possessive terms. So let’s break down some alternative options:
Read MoreAntibiotics? Hell No, Grab Some Garlic
I have had the pleasure of being raised by a skeptical mother. Throughout my life, I have been told to question what I see on television and never believe what I read on the internet (so don’t trust or believe this post). Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that being skeptical doesn’t mean you disregard everything that is around you. Being skeptical is questioning the asymmetrical knowledge that permeates all of our lives. To be a true skeptic, you should even question or validate your own knowledge on a regular basis (something most forget to do, including myself).
But with all this questioning, when will I have time to chow on some sausages? Simple, never, but I will give you a quick hint… it is possible to have time for fun without believing everything you see. If it sounds batshit crazy, odds are it is batshit crazy. If you are on a social media site and see something that is wholly unbelievable, don’t believe it (one because it is a social media site and getting you engaged pays their bills, and nothing will engage you more than: Garlicman appears and destroys Godzilla with breath attack). If you go to a blog that is promoting the healing powers of garlic and there are advertisements everywhere for GarlAxe (An axe made out of garlic that you can munch on) you are probably on a website that is promoting garlic to help sell more GarlAxes – they are either lying to you or inflating the results of studies on garlic. [more hidden, click “Read More” for super secret access]
Read MoreWeaponizing the Internet
When I created my website years ago, I made a simple promise to everyone who ever visited it. That promise is on the About the Website page and it is about advertising and it simply states: No Advertising. I take that seriously, to the degree that I don’t promote anything in my blogs on purpose. Sometimes, I have to use the names of companies but they are not advertisements. Furthermore, I make it clear that I am footing the bill for this website and I own all of the content. Why would I not monetize (weaponize) my website and generate income from it?
Simple, I hate advertising on the web. Perhaps I am remembering the past with rose tinted glasses, but I think many of you would agree with me – the internet has gotten out of control. [There is a lot more below, click read more for my full analysis]
Read MoreVariety in Consumption
Technology has exploded in my life time. I went from playing an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) as a child to being able to know about obscure issues in foreign lands. My family in Italy can now participate in my life with three button clicks. We are growing more connected every day and that is a good thing. However, with this renaissance of communication in our era, there are some troubling issues.
The main one is the lack of diversity in our consumption. When it comes to information, we have entered into a positive feedback loop. Each click, each like, and every time we click next on a slideshow, we move further into a stagnant worldview. Even if you read ten articles from ten different websites, you are probably consuming the same information structured slightly different. The reason is simple, in order to make money with free content, you must generate analytics to show the advertisers that their website is providing their ads with sufficient viewership.
Which means, if you are on a social media website like Facebook, and it is your portal into the internet, they know what you like and are likely to click on. They have your demographic information, what posts you linger on the most (may not click but where you stopped scrolling), which ones you click, and because you can block content from your newsfeed, what you don’t enjoy reading. With that information, they are able to generate a personalized advertisement string with articles, products, and pictures that would allow you to become more dependent on them. Like a drug, you type “f-a-c [enter]” into the address the second the browser loads.
Even if your portal into the world isn’t through social media, the odds are you have certain websites you enjoy visiting. Perhaps these are institutions that exist in print and/or are trustworthy, each time you go to that website and read through an entire article, you provide them valuable data. Each time you click a link, if the website is well designed, they will know what article you read, where you stopped reading or if you read the whole article, and how much time you spent on that page. If the website isn’t very well designed, they will provide you with a [Read More] button, and the second you press that, they know you continued to read (a more cost effective solution). Same thing happens with the slide shows you keep clicking in order to read the next blurb or see the next picture. But I digressed, the important thing is that each webpage has some structure to provide analytics to the business in order to make decisions.
This decision making structure is what concerns me the most (not the data collection) and is the nugget of this philosophical diatribe. When an analytics report is placed in front of a committee, manager, or editor, they look at it and have a difficult decision to make. In order to generate income for their business, they need to sell advertisements (very few are willing to pay for a subscription in this day and age). At this point, the person sees that articles focusing on topic 1 are viewed more by their readership, while articles on topic 2 are less viewed. When it comes time to allocate resources (money, people, travel, all of the things needed to generate a story) they have to decide how to split up what they have available to them. Depending on pressure, ethics, and desires, the decision will be tough, but often it will be to allocate more to items like topic 1. Which means, we end up with a consolidated set of information on that website. Now, I know the decision is not as easy as I am portraying it but this is a philosophical diatribe and not a thesis.
Now, I know I am being all doom and gloom, but someone once told me to offer a solution to the problems I see, and I try to do just that. However, by showing you the beginnings of this issue, I assume you can come to your own constructive conclusion. As for how I solved my consolidation of information, I moved to print and subscription based content and buy books with cash without a membership card.
By having magazines, newspapers, and other formats delivered to my door, I have cut off the analytics that come from a website. Each day, week, or month, content arrives at my doorstep and the editors/managers/advertisers only know I am willing to keep paying for the information they produce. They don’t know which articles I skip, what fiction I chose to read, or what advertising structure works best to grab my eye. All they know is that I keep subscribing so they must be doing something right, and too keep me, they shouldn’t change their scope of work. So get back into physical paper, let your eyes rest from the warm glow of the LCD panel, pay for the hard work of others, and enjoy an article without having to worry that you are being spied on.
Read MoreCrazy Coincidence
Often when I am writing, I can hear the voice of a distant and faraway asshole: “That’s way too coincidental.” I know other writers have wrestled with events in their book being too specific and spectacular to have probably happened and knowing that someone would point that out. Yet, we all know that crazy coincidences happen. Most of the time, when you aren’t looking. However, we have entered a state… nay a need, to have all of our entertainment be realistic. So we rail against coincidences when they appear even though they happen often and surround our best real life stories.
For example, I was walking into work a while ago and I have four possible routes into the building. These possible avenues to my cubical are on a spectrum, the closest to my parking spot forces me to walk to my desk mostly indoors and the farthest from my parking spot forces me to walk the most outdoors. From here there are four primary routes, of those four, there are three possible doorways I can enter. Two of the paths lead to one door and both keep me outside the most. Depending on where you park, you can cut through the cars to get to one of the paths or just take a pathway that is the same distance but setup for those parking at the back of the lot – total distance is the same, but one forces you to weave through parked vehicles. Now, I have four choices throughout my walk – watch the sunrise, look at my phone, stare straight ahead at the doorway, or look down. Prior to this day, I received a new prescription and I’ve been dealing with a wonky eyesight where I feel a foot shorter due to my eyes adjusting to my new lenses in my glasses. So, I had been looking down a lot more to help gain experience with the lenses. At the moment I took a glance down, I caught a leather glove blending in with the woodchips. It was the same make, brand, and color of my gloves. So I stopped for a moment, laughed at the fact (literally laughed because I am unaware of what I look like in public), figured the owner would come looking for it and continued walking. Then, I wondered, is that my glove? So I checked my pocket and noticed I only had one glove, the right one. I backpedaled, grabbed the glove, noticed it was the left hand glove, and the same size as my other glove. Then, I had an OJ moment and put the glove on, unlike OJ, it fit. So, in that one walk I found something I hadn’t lost yet. I had lost it, but my perception hadn’t known that it was gone, so, it was a surprise when I came across it. So many things came together in that one moment to let me find a glove I had lost but had not lost – it was Schrodinger’s Glove.
Isn’t that amazing? It is boring but it shows so many things coming together to place me on the path to find the glove. Insane things happen in a similar way, and the people who are involved in those events create a historical progression to make sense of how it came to be – those are coincidences.
What I like about my example is the simple fact that if I asked a series of questions about that event with the glove, most people would answer them opposite of what I have written. They would believe, more than likely, that I noticed the glove, that I chose the path to retrace my path to work, to scour the ground to find the glove, but I didn’t. Instead, I saw a random glove and build the history of losing the glove to make sense of the past.
Read MoreOdd Solution
When people notice I am down, they tend to think something has happened in my life that has led to my current demeanor at that time. What most people don’t realize, is I am like the Hulk, I am always down (but I don’t always show it). Sometimes, I screw up and let it show when in public, but I try to keep my cynical stance away from those around me so I don’t invariably cause them discomfort. Yet, I will discuss through jokes what has me down as laughter is needed when looking at our bleak outlook.
The most recent thing that has caused me to enter a state of distress: coral reefs. You see, I love documentaries. Arguably, I watch more documentaries than theatrical movies. I also tend to read long form non-fiction articles. I like these two mediums because they give me a great insight into the world that I don’t have time to enter or visit (yet). For example, today I have been to see the Great Barrier Reef, speak with a former Westboro Baptist Church’s spokeswoman, and learn about artificial superintelligence. It has been a busy day of traveling. What are the outcomes of these travels: a short story involving artificial superintelligence done in purely dialogue and this post.
So what is this post really going to be about? Well an odd solution that David Attenborough discussed.
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