#polkit still in focus in "news" (esp. anti-Linux sites that call #systems something it ain't) http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/160796#comment-32653
#systems
#pfizer #pfizervaccine #albertbourla #bourla #bourlasbabyboosters #baby #booster #boostershots #boosters #boostersforever #vaccine #vaccines #vaccination #vaccinedeath #USA #UK #vaccineinjuries #vaccineinjury #deatgshots #depopulation #control #biometrics #biometricID #systems #societalcontrol #memes #meme
First of “good” news:
- Africa is NOT (yet) the dry and barren land that many in “the West” envision, when thinking about Africa
- global population growth rate is on decline
- according to UN the 10 billion inhabitants mark could be passed 2057
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ethiopia-population/
Good news is also, that there are very intelligent farmers in Africa, that try to stop the desert by Zai technique (holes + cattle dung, first plant bushes, than trees, crops can grow in the shade)
Also Africa’s population growth rate is slowing down, but it is still the highest in the world.
Non-sustainable life-styles also in Africa? Yes!
Eucalyptus forests are only natural in Australia, not in Brazil and not in Africa, they are planted by humans, because they grow fast and burn well.
Non-sustainable modes (means: it is going to end) of survival sounds like a problem of “fast-food-obese” developed western post-industrial nations and yes – there is a massive problem there.
But in this case – Africa has the same problem as USA or Europe or (increasingly) China: non sustainable ways of survival that over use of finite resources in an non-recycling non-reuse non-sustainable way.
Dr. Christof Schenck, Frankfurt is fighting an uphill, almost impossible to win, battle.
He says, that the gov of Ethiopia needs to tell the police to take this matter serious and keep illegal settlers and cattle out of the environmental protection zones.
Will they listen? Surely not. “Because they have a tough time survive the next days” says Dr Schenck, “but if they continue like this, they will destroy the basis of their own survival”
“there is no conflict man vs environment-protection, man will surely lose if we can not rescue the forests of the Bale national park” (Wiki)
“currently we lose 10% of the forests per year”
“we (the West) did not realize the dimensions of this crisis yet”
“40.000 people live illegal in the national park”
“12 million people are dependent downstream from the water of the park”
“we (the West) need to help stabilize Ethiopia”
In the worst case, it would mean: mankind is stupid and a slow learner leading to the Lorax” Problem:
That the majority only starts to realize the problems caused, when the last tree has fallen.
The destruction by exploitation of environment (+China and Russia and USA and EU induced climate change) will lead to droughts and famine, causing millions Africans to flee their home country (nobody likes to flee one’s home country) and knock knock on the barb wire fences of Europe.
What will Europe do?
- refugees: “Hurray finally cheap labor” (aka slaves)
- “What? Slavery is illegal? GO BACK TO AFRICA!”
- (or stay and work for the Italian Tomato-Mafia with sometimes pay and sometimes no pay)
- the West needs to lead by example by living more sustainable lifestyle and less like grasshoppers, eat, eat, move on
- Ethiopia exports a lot of coffee (in contrast to South America, people there drink it) so it is important to pay them a fair price (ask for fair trade coffee and where it is from)
To live sustainability with nature – is possible.
Just as the West needs to transit from fossil fuel addiction to CO2-neutrality
Africa needs to change to sustainable renewable lifestyles (do not cut more trees than grow)
Africa still #1 in Population Growth rate (+2.49% per year)
#RegionPopulation
(2020)Yearly
ChangeNet
ChangeDensity
(P/Km²)Land Area
(Km²)Migrants
(net)Fert.
RateMed.
AgeUrban
Pop %World
Share1Asia4,641,054,7750.86 %39,683,57715031,033,131-1,729,1122.2320 %59.5 %2Africa1,340,598,1472.49 %32,533,9524529,648,481-463,0244.4200 %17.2 %3Europe747,636,0260.06 %453,2753422,134,9001,361,0111.6430 %9.6 %4Latin America and the Caribbean653,962,3310.9 %5,841,3743220,139,378-521,4992310 %8.4 %5Northern America368,869,6470.62 %2,268,6832018,651,6601,196,4001.8390 %4.7 %6Oceania42,677,8131.31 %549,77858,486,460156,2262.4330 %0.5 %
source: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate
#money #alternative #systems #altcoopsys #alternatives #OsOfSociety #OperatingSystemsOfSociety #SystemPhilosophy #dinero #dollar #euro #yen #rubel #sustainability #resilience #complementary #complementarycurrency #cooperation #monetaryreform #financialreform #financialsystemreform #financialcrisis #mortagecrisis #debtcrisis #occupywallsreet #finance #moneysystem #financialsystem #economics #ecologicaleconomics #economy #capitalism #kapitalismus #system #africa #ethiopia #refugees #renewables #renewable #refugee #europe #eu #climatechange #environment
Originally posted at: https://altcoopsys.org/2021/12/23/example-ethiopia-why-100-millions-non-sustainability-refugees-will-flee-africa-lack-of-sustainable-non-renewable-lifestyles-globally/
#Kids. #Pffft.
So, I see kids going on and on about #Gaming #Systems; #Anime, #Manga ...
These things are considered #entertainment.
These things are also a massive drain on their cash.
Nothing is actually #achieved.
They play and then the game is over.
Or they read the comic and toss it into a pile.
I have some alternative entertainment suggestions.
Please add others that you think of as #comments.
Alternatives to games and comics.
- Learn to PROGRAM Games. You get to Play, while you create.
- Learn #Krita, #Blender, #Gimp and/or #Inkscape. You can enjoy Amime, by creating it.
- Learn to #prep (There is a lot to learn).
- Learn to #shoot.
- Learn to #hunt.
- Learn to #garden.
If you have A LOT of time on your hands, build a #Log #Cabin.
ALL OF THE ABOVE Can be entertaining, if you want it to.
Well, I can't speak to the cabin, but you get my meaning.
The bottom line:
Games and #Comic Books are merely an outflow of your cash and energy;
and a personalized Roman Colosseum (the better to distract you with).
woman giving birth to baby - maybe not everything should be run like a profit center
woman giving birth to baby – maybe not everything should be run like a profit center
#money #alternative #systems #altcoopsys #alternatives #OsOfSociety #OperatingSystemsOfSociety #SystemPhilosophy #dinero #dollar #euro #yen #rubel #sustainability #resilience #complementary #complementarycurrency #cooperation #monetaryreform #financialreform #financialsystemreform #financialcrisis #mortagecrisis #debtcrisis #occupywallsreet #finance #moneysystem #financialsystem #economics #ecologicaleconomics #economy #capitalism #kapitalismus #system #profit #catastrophe #mankind
Originally posted at: https://altcoopsys.org/2021/10/16/woman-giving-birth-to-baby-maybe-not-everything-should-be-run-like-a-profit-center/
Does this financial system work? How just is this financial system?
Q1: Does this financial system work?
A1: it works for the private banks, at least for a while, but it does not work for the rest of the world.
Q2: How just is this financial system?
A2: no not at all, just read this:
“During the COVID pandemic the interestrate on TLTRO III was lowered to -1% , which means that the ECB pays banks 1% of the value of their loan every year. This generous support has continued until the coronavirus hit and then strongly increased (see Figure 1).”
https://www.global-rates.com/en/interest-rates/central-banks/central-banks.aspx
src: http://www.positivemoney.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Green-TLTROs.pdf
Which means: if you are a bank, you even get paid by the central bank, for taking a loan.
“PLEASE! TAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS YOU WANT! WE WILL EVEN PAY YOU FOR IT!”
If someone with ideas, walks into a bank to request a loan, they will laugh at you.
The “Big” (downward) “Hit” came after 2008.
So are those low interest rates just “fresh blood” for a zombie (the current financial system) to survive a bit longer?
Has the financial system actually collapsed in 2008 and not recovered since?
Why don’t do banks their job?
The job of a bank is to: actively (!) look and engage and foster and support entrepreneurs to finance new ideas, products, jobs…
not: take the freshly printed money and put it into the stock market casino.
Then there would be no “inflation” problem.
Btw: the “independent” central banks failed at their core job: to not do, what “experts” feared the state would do with the privilege of money printing:
print as much money as you like and cause massive dysfunctional financial system and inflation
#money #alternative #systems #altcoopsys #alternatives #OsOfSociety #OperatingSystemsOfSociety #SystemPhilosophy #dinero #dollar #euro #yen #rubel #sustainability #resilience #complementary #complementarycurrency #cooperation #monetaryreform #financialreform #financialsystemreform #financialcrisis #mortagecrisis #debtcrisis #occupywallsreet #finance #moneysystem #financialsystem #economics #ecologicaleconomics #economy #capitalism #kapitalismus #system #bank #banks #ecb #fed #inflation #state #states #crisis
Originally posted at: https://altcoopsys.org/2021/09/28/does-this-financial-system-work-how-just-is-this-financial-system/
Jiddu Krishnamurti ~ 1968
Talks in #Europe #1968 #Rome 3rd #Public #Talk 17th March 1968
http://jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/1968/1968-03-17-jiddu-krishnamurti-3rd-public-talk
http://jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/1968/1968-07-11-jiddu-krishnamurti-3rd
The importance of #working #together
"We were saying, the importance of working together, the importance of #co-operation, because most of us live in a world that is completely broken, fragmented, a world in which there is constant struggle, one group against another group, one ideology against another, one nation against another, one class and so on. And technologically we are enormously in advance but there is more fragmentation than ever before. And as one observes factually what is going on, it is absolutely essential that man, that is, each one of us, learn how to co-operate. We cannot possibly work together about anything - it doesn't matter if it is about the new school, or the relationship with one another, or to end the monstrous wars that have been going on. If each individual, if each human being is isolating himself in an ideology, his life based on a principle, a discipline, a belief, a dogma, when there is such basis there cannot be co-operation. That seems to me so eminently obvious, there needs to be no discussion about it even. And we were saying, whether it is at all possible to break down all these values that one has deliberately built against others, whether it is at all possible for man to be free. That's what we were going to go into during these talks and discussions."
#jiddu #krishnamurti #freedom #systems #order #truth #humility #beauty #meditation
https://rumble.com/vma83d-the-matrix-resurrections-trailer-full.html
My goodness. The end is the beginning is the end you could say. So much has changed since the first, and yet, so much closer we are to many of the things it projects.
#matrix #thematrix #matrixresurrections #thematrixresurrections #movies #movie #films #film #trailers #trailer #movietrailer #upcoming #nostalgia #bluepill #redpill #tech #virtualreality #manifestation #society #evolution #neo #constructs #narratives #systems #ai #virtual #reddress #limits #limitations #nolimits #limitless
Tags: #dandelíon
via dandelion* client (Source)
Okay round 2- do you know of any x86_64 operating systems for desktops, laptops, etc, that aren’t;
Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, ReactOS, Haiku, SerenityOS, Debian-Hurd, and Redox?
I’d like to expand my knowledge even further, please inform me if you know, or if I've missed anything!
#x86_64 #operatingsystems #operating #systems #64bit #desktop #laptop #desktops #laptops #computers #computing #windows #mac #linux #bsd #reactos #haiku #question #OS #knowledge #information #tech
Marianne Williamson, Peter Joseph ~ The Zeitgeist of this Moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DacbQDV3o-s
https://mariannewilliamson.substack.com/p/the-zeitgeist-of-this-moment
' #Williamson and #Joseph discuss the #economic and #social #systems prevailing in the #world today and what is needed to #heal #society, and some ideas from his #book, The New HumanRights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression.'
#mariannewilliamson #peterjoseph #zeitgeist #conversation #transcript #capitalism #neoliberalism #oppression #socioeconomics #free-market #growth #consumption #economy #ethics #morality #ecosystems #ecological #balance #humanity #compassion #cultural #equity #efficiency #harmony #demarketize #movement #humanrights
Hello- do you know of any x86_64 operating systems for desktops, laptops, etc, that aren't, Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, ReactOS, and Haiku? I'd like to expand my knowledge, please inform me of such!
#x86_64 #operatingsystems #operating #systems #64bit #desktop #laptop #desktops #laptops #computers #computing #windows #mac #linux #bsd #reactos #haiku #question #OS #knowledge #information #tech
"my problem with systemd today is that it has turned into a kind of Trojan horse. It is an attempt by Red Hat to change the world of Linux in order to better serve their corporate interests." https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html #redhat #ibm #systems #swpats #monopoly
The weekend read: PV resilience under fire
The Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is embracing solar energy as a reliable local energy source. However, its 2 million residents still only have access to electricity for just a few hours per day. Amjad Khashmann reports on damages to installed PV systems and the urgent need for new installations to support education, water, and health care.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/24/the-weekend-read-pv-resilience-under-fire/
#markets, #gaza, #solar, #pv, #energy, #undp, #highlights, #systems, #strip
Mobilising Against the Corporate Hijack of Agriculture and the UN Food Systems Summit
#Mobilising #Against the #Corporate #Hijack of #Agriculture and the #UN #Food #Systems #Summit #UNFSS #politics
...
"And these processes are accelerating: the high-tech/data conglomerates, including #Amazon, #Microsoft, #Facebook and #Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants in a quest to impose a one size fits all type of agriculture and food production on the world. Digitalisation, artificial intelligence and other technologies are serving to promote a new wave of resource grabbing and the restructuring of food systems towards a total concentration of power."
[...]
Nation has experienced 8 billion-dollar disasters so far this year
https://www.noaa.gov/news/june-2021-was-hottest-june-on-record-for-us
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1413561337465032709
‘ #Firenados in northern #California. #Ocean #fires in the #GulfofMexico. #Subway #waterfalls in #NewYorkCity. A #heat #dome in the #Northwest #melting #power #cables, killing hundreds and #frying #marine #animals. I have been told that combatting #climatechange is #expensive. Compared to what?’
‘If we do not act #boldly and #radically to combat the #climate #crisis, and significantly invest in #transforming our #energy #systems now, #future #generations will never #forgive us.’
Public – Like · Comment
After a pointed exchange, Hawaii regulators revise conditions for a $500m energy storage project
Both Hawaiian Electric and its regulators expressed frustration over a decision approving an energy storage system that will be critical to retiring a coal-fired power plant by September 2022.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/05/24/after-a-pointed-exchange-hawaii-regulators-revise-conditions-for-a-500m-energy-storage-project/
#storage, #hawaiian, #systems, #battery, #electric, #policy, #energy
Treating systemic problems as moral failings ... is why California is on fire
Over the past decade or so as I try to make sense of the world, themes and patterns appearand suddenly start popping up all over the place.
Reading just now, moralising, or more specifically, moralising pathology, is a large part of why California is on fire:
Bernhard Eduard Fernow, a Prussian forestry official who married an American, came to the United States in 1876, and was soon naturalized. He headed the Bureau of Forestry, which was a small agency in the Department of Agriculture. When America’s National Forests were actually transferred to its jurisdiction, it was renamed the Forest Service and headed by Gifford Pinchot, an American who trained in forestry in Europe. But Fernow also brought with him his Central European convictions. The problem was that the place he grew up in is a temperate climate. It's very unusual in the world because it does not have wet and dry periods regularly. So, the only fires that occur in your part of the world are ones set by people. So, fire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.” Well, that’s a great phrase. But it was totally inappropriate.
"California Is Built To Burn""
On Moralising Pathology
This piece showed up after discussing the problem earlier today with @John Hummel, on his post Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. In comments, John observes:
I view the Trump-followers as victims. Incredibly dangerous victims, but victims nonetheless.
This reads tomme as a rejection of moralising pathology, a practice which failed for infectious disease and physical medicine. It fails for mental health and psychiatry. I suspect it fails at social levels as well: crime, politics, economics, culture. Not that bad things don’t happen (they do: they’re pathologies). But that treating them as moral failings ... fails. Four thousand years of ethical medicine achieved little. Two hundred years of germ theory --- and most of that by the very early 20th century --- much. Public health measures account for about 85% of all longevity increase since 1850: solid waste disposal, sewage systems, clean water supplies, food purity laws, early vaccinations, and rudimentary safety practices. Antibiotics, imaging, organ transplants, cancer therapies, and other advanced treatments, comparatively little --- expensive ineffectuality is the great shame of modern medicine.
(Not to get lost in the weeds of another argument over efficacy and complexity of interventiions.)
John asked for clarification, wondering whether or not we were agreeing (we do), and adding:
On my perspective, the question of “morals”, as an objective/normative truth philosophers can discover, is a fiction. I think our “morals” – or moral intuitions – derive from the evolutionary constraints imposed upon us as a social species. Morals, in this way, are utterly unlike mathematical logic, about which “objective” truths can be proven.
The Moralising Error
So I responded in more length, hopefully clarifying more than obscuring.
Where disease, illness, injury, etc., were moralised, they were seen not only as God’s (or the gods’) will, but as their judgement. Bad things not only wouldn’t, but could not happen unless Divine Providence wished it so, and Providence is good, omnipotent, just, etc., etc.
Where we take an empirical, mechanistic, systems, holistic, probabalistic / stochastic, or comparable view, things happen due to some mixture of causal mechanisms and random chance. There are differences amongst these views, and I’m not claiming they’re all identical or even necessarily similar (though there are a set of broadly-shared dimensions). Rather, what they largely exclude is some sense of theological agency. A person gets sick because of a bacterium, or virus, or prion, or radiation-induced mutation, through transmission, propogation, susceptibility, hygiene, risk fsctors, etc. But not because they are a “bad person”.
The case of individual behaviour is harder to tease out, and the questions of agency and free will remain. (I’d argue more the former than the latter.) I’d argue that at the least, stastically over a population, it becomes likely that if a set of prior conditions are met, then a set of outcomes is highly likely. Modern theories of marketing, governance, and economics are predicated on this.
A question is whether or not there is even agency at the level of major influencing agents --- governments, firms, industries, institutions, and the sort. There are certainly stereotypical behaviours which arise again and again, enough so that suggestions of a controlling conspiracy seem highly implausible. A.H.M. Jones’s description of the political scene at the dawn of the Roman Empire in his 1970 biography Augustus remains the most poignant illustration of this I’m aware of. The platforms and constituencies of the optimates and populares could be ripped from today’s headlines.
This isn’t to say behaviours are fully deterministic. Though over longer timeframes they become more so.
What a scientific understanding, in the sense of structural and causal knowledge does is to provide insights as to mechanisms, linkages, relationships, and influences. The list of non-moralistic, non-mythical systems I gave above mostly forms a continuum of complexity. Mechanistic systems have few inputs and outputs, holistic ones evade simple description. Feedback, variation, inheritance, and selection are often present (the latter three give evolutionary systems).
Infectious disease made its breakthrough on the realisation that some infectious agent is transmitted via a vector to individuals exhibiting susceptibility within a population subject to therapies (there’s a great book coming out in the US this fall, The Rules of Contagion, by Adam Kucharski, addressing this). Each italicised term becomes a potential point of control and intervention. We can disrupt disease reservoirs, break chains of transmission, remove vectors, increase resistance (immunisation, nutrition, risk factors), provide supportive or immunological therapies (antibiotics, antivirals). Neither causes nor interventions are morally based.
Similar stories can be made for industrial hygiene, environmental regulation, weather forecasting, earthquakes, floods, climate, personal safety, or online security.
Or of mental health, group dynamics, corporate culture, religious movements, political shifts.
And, to a large extent, crime, racism, nationalism, and genocide.
Where the may be some remnant of the moral argument is in the question of immunity and impunity. A belief, well-founded or otherwise, that behaviour might be beyond sanction can reduce inhibitions. A punitive feedback may help remedy this, though bigger picture we’re back in the realm of systems and selection mechanisms. Disinhibition may come from many causes: structural cognitive defect, chemical, cultural, circumstantial, etc. It’s possible that isolation might be a reasonable intervention. It’s almost certainly not the only or mosteffective option in many circumstances.
But again: moralising seems more likely to impair effective intervention or mitigation
What role remains for morality?
The question of what roles remain for morality is a profound one that concerns me greatly.
I don’t have a good answer, though I’m inclined to say it might be in selecting and assessing values rather than in defining actions and persons.
And mind: I’m not sure that’s quite right though it seems a slight improvement. For pathology is the study of pathos, of suffering, of dis-function. Morality should apply to defining the dis, not in redressing the function.
#moralising #MoralisingPathology #ethics #morals #wildfire #systems #pathology
Was soll denn der #Scheiß?
Da kommt man nach Hause, macht ein #Update seines #Systems und plötzlich tut es der #Kalender von #Thunderbird nicht mehr. #Lightning ist nicht mehr kompatibel zur aktuellen Thunderbirdversion!
Mal eben so, ein funktionierendes #System torpedieren ist nun nicht gerade die feine englische Art.
Die #Alternativen sehen alle nach #Google aus und das will ich nun bestimmt nicht!
Hat jemand hier ähnliche Probleme? Oder eine #Alternative zu lightning, denn dies hat bei mir hervorragend die letzten 10 Jahre seinen Dienst getan.
Das Selbe gilt im Übrigen auch für #MoreFunctionsForAddressBook!
#mozille #email #Kalender #Calendar #Add-on
P.S.
Ich habe auch immer mal wieder #Evolutiion ausprobiert, aber das war alles ein Krampf, wie ich finde!
Social networks (not in the Silicon Valley sense) ARE society
Society is a social network. Or more accurately, a social system, manifested through a network, with feedbacks, heuristics, sensing, learning (and forgetting), and interactions both with its external environment and internal components.
(I've been thinking this to death over the past few years.)
There are a lot of things that you can do to change a system, but if you change how it receives, processes, stores, retrieves, and most of all, transmits information, you change how it functions.
Want to cripple a man? You don't need to destroy his muscle or his brain, but only cut, or disable, or disrupt the nerve connecting the two.
Our information-technological social networks -- Facebook and Twitter, but also the telephone system, mail, radio and television, publishing, books, billboards, etc. -- have a whole slew of different characteristics, as I mentioned in my earlier post. And their impacts and influences on society are a direct consequence of those characteristics.
I haven't built out the comparison matrix yet, but I can think of a few elements.
Where communications are slow and analogue -- a messenger on foot or horseback, with a message committed to memory, and for which it might take days, or months, to traverse a territory -- the role of moral and behavioural frameworks is huge. I've been thinking for a while that it's no coincidence that every large pre-industrial empire had a major religious component to it. The forms of those religions varied massively (polytheistic/animistic, monotheistic, meditative, ancestor-worship, ritualistic), but the end result was largely similar: social behaviours as a whole were predictable.
As communications increased in speed, or in reliability, there's a shift. Written messages, which don't fade or forget, printed, which are reliably reproduced in mass, high-speed printing, enabling rapid dissemination of new development -- news. Visual reproduction or capture, woodcuts, etchings, photography, cinema, and audio in the form of phonograph, telephone, radio, tape, and digital records, create the ability for someone remote to receive a detailed record (or the appearance of one) of what is elsewhere.
Of mass reproduction, the three most-reproduced works in history are the Bible, the Sayings of Chairman Mao, and the Koran. Reproductions number in the billions. All are propaganda pieces. I find this significant.
Facebook dwarfs each of them, daily. The most viewed icon in world history is a blue F. Or, possibly, the Google Chrome symbol.
I'm coming to believe that increases in communications technologies result in decreased societal trust. If you cannot check up on somebody or some thing, you have to rely on trust that it is behaving as intended. If you can check on it, either periodically or in real time, you are freed from that reliance on trust, but in response, social institutions no longer need to foster and build that trust, and over time, begin to decay.
Information, Signals, Recordings, Space, and Time
Claud Shannon in his paper on information theory I think (need to re-read that) distinguishes between two forms of message propagation. There are signals which move through space, and there are recordings which move through time.
("Information theory" is really a misnomer, I think, the field should be called "signal theory", to distinguish the transmission of encodings of meaning (information) for meaning itself.)
So we get one major division of communications systems: those which transmit signals and those which store recordings. There's some overlap, but you can usually find a fairly sharp and clear distinction between these.
Speech is a signal, writing is a recording. Telephony is a signal technology, phonography is a recording technology. There are cases in which the two elements are closely married: cinema combines recording (sequential film capture) with transmission (projection onto a screen), similarly television (video to tape recording, transmitter to receiver transmission), radio (via audio tape or other media), etc. In computers, the switch between in-flight and stored information happens extremely rapidly, with signals moving across wires, ports, cables, wireless media, etc., between disk, memory, cache, buffer, tape, optical, and other storage systems, but the two modes are still present if you look hard enough.
Sender-Receiver Relations
At the social level, you can divide many information technologies also by the sender-receiver relations:
- 1:1 One-on-one
- 1:n One to many
- n:1 Many to one
- n:m Many to many
For completeness, there are also null cases: 0:0, 0:1, 1:0, n:0, 0:n. These exist, and can be interesting, though they're largely not highly significant to this discussion.
We can also classify n and m as small, medium, or large, or perhaps by log(10) scales, at least roughly, with some fairly sharp transition points. 1, 10, 100, 1,000, ... 1,000,000 ... 1,000,000,000 ...
Then there's the question of bidirectionality (true or false), and interactivity or latency.
Applying this.
Speech is interactive and low-latency, but doesn't extend far (without amplification, channelling, or other means). It operates in 1:1 to 1:n and n:m modes, for small values of n and m. Conversations as such scale poorly past about 4 members, after which you start getting to a broadcast format, with varying levels of interaction between speaker (or speakers) and audience.
Writing is noninteractive and high latency but durable. It can be carried far, in both time and space. It is reproducible, and can be reproduced with high accuracy. It trades fidelity (tone of voice, accent, pauses, inflection, non-verbal cues) for compactness and transmissibility.
Printing is an amplification of writing. It tends to operate in broadcast modes, though you can have smaller-scale elements.
Writing and printing both rely on a social infrastructure of literacy or barring that readers or presenters who can express or encode from and to written form: scribes. (The original modems.)
Telegraphy, a store-and-forward system, combines both transmission and storage (the original telegraph patent required a message-recording capability). Other than a very few exceptionally low-bandwidth visual signalling systems (signal fires, optical telegraphs, semaphores) and lightweight messaging protocols (passenger pigeons), this was the first time any message could travel more than a few words or miles per hour beyond immediate audible or visual range. Within a few years of its invention (1835), telegraphs crossed countries and continents, within a few decades, oceans. Information had never moved further, faster, and it was absolutely revolutionary.
It changed how people wrote and talked. If you look at writing, personal or business, BT and AT (before and after telegraph), they are completely different. BT writing is ornate, flowery, deferential, ornate, obsequious. AT writing is terse, direct, blunt, and structured. I suspect two reasons:
Volume cost too much, literally. A telegram could cost several dollars for ten words, when a dollar was 10-20x its value today.
The volume of messages was increasing to the point that readers simply didn't have the time to plough through, and decode, the ornate speech of earlier times. Get to the point, and stick to the format.
Mark Twain, the first modern American writer, was a former newspaperman with much familiarity of telegraphs and wire copy.
There's a literature of this, particularly JoAnne Yates and James Beniger, on the evolution of business writing and communications.
The telephone offered person-to-person long-distance communication (where "long distance" meant beyond the walls of one's own house or office). The first p2p realtime network. Again, expensive, but revolutionary.
Phonography and cinema allowed a large listenership to hear, or see, performances, on demand. They functioned much as books do, but with the fidelity of audio and visual channels.
Radio and television broadcast an identical message to a large audience -- an entire city, later across countries and continents. It was possible to instill a mass message in realtime, but in a one-way transmission. Initially this was live -- what the audience heard over their radio or saw on television was being performed in a studio simultaneously. The invention of high-fidelity audio tape by Germany during WWII was a military-grade secret technology, and bamboozled Allied signals intelligence as it enabled Adolf Hitler to give speeches of apparently live-quality across all of Germany, or at times when he was located elsewhere. Development of the hi-fi industry in the U.S. after the war was supported in large part by military and intelligence agencies.
And broadcast media played a huge role in the emergence of fascism in Italy and Germany, as well as similar developments in the US -- Father Caughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and other demagogues, including those of the present time.
Following the invention of television itself, we've seen further developments which (OK, I've written way too much already), I'll just list out briefly: Color television, cable networks, FM radio, ham and citizens-band radio, talk radio, 800 WATS lines, dial-up remote computer systems, BBS systems, terminal-based computing, email / Usenet, increasing digital storage capacities, the Internet, Web, and mobile computing, high-definition video.
I'd break these into categories of fidelity, distribution, access, interactivity, storage, capacity, cost, bandwidth, latency, and total availability, with advances affording one or more of these.
Each changed behaviours, some more than others. And you can point to each of these and identify an age (TV age, radio age, ...), culture, commercial development, or political development, associated with them. Media and culture are interdependent and each influences the other.
(Also, to be clear, this is not stuff I studied in school, though I increasingly wish I had. This has been my ongoing research of the past few years.)
Preexisting Social Analogues to Digital Social Networks
The question was asked "what already existing social institution is the closest analogy to digital social network platforms". I think you're right to think of transportation systems, and a dense set of roadways between a closely-spaced set of cities is probably a good analogy. There is lot of commerce and interchange, there is commercial, individual, institutional, and governmental traffic. There is positive and negative activity. There are unintended consequences. Roads bring plauges as well as commerce. Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome explores the co-evolution of disease and the Roman empire, shaped by its cities, geography, culture, and very, very much its transport and commerce systems, fascinating read.
You might also want to look at nonhuman systems -- interactions between different species in ecosystems, for example. Information traveling within and between different populations, at different speeds, again, sometimes to mutual benefit, or with predator-prey, host-parasite, symbiotic, and other relationships.
The biggest differences of digital networks are scale and speed. There's more information, moving faster. This in itself is disruptive, and dominates much else. The limiting factor is no longer bandwidth or storage capacity but attention and individual and social processing ability.
(Again: not new ideas -- Herbert Simon had realised this by the 1960s, Arthur Toffler's Future Shock explores the concept in depth as of 1974. But I've only just been realising the absolutely massive impacts.)
Grief and Worldview Failure
I'll toss one other bit into the mix: grief is not about loss, at least not in the sense that we're used to thinking about it, but of a challenge or destruction of our worldview. That is, it's when our model of the world is disrupted, we grieve.
The loss of a loved one, or news of our own impending death from a terminal illness (the subject from which the Kübler-Ross model was derived) fits this because the world to which we'd become accustomed has suddenly changed. A loved one -- parent, partner, child -- dying affects us deeply because there is so much attached to them in our worldview.
The loss of a job, or relationship, or a pet, affects us similarly.
But there are other ways for worldviews to be challenged.
We may lose (or gain) a faith in religion or God. We may find a long-held scientific belief is invalid. We may find some ideological construct -- the efficiency of free markets, the goodness of strangers, the badness of some other -- race, religion, other side of the tracks -- is invalid. Our worldview is changed.
There are less drastic forms of this as well. A favourite coffee cup breaks, we need to give up a car. We encounter somebody in a space we thought was empty. Being surprised, startled, disappointed, or even amused, by something unexpected, is, I think, an example of an emotional response at the low end of the grief continuum. Sadness, anger, annoyance, and irritation may fit in there as well.
These are all individual responses.
And we go through these at various points in life, sometimes at well-established points, sometimes not. We have rituals for major life events: birth, baptism, starting or graduating from school, marriage. All are hugely disruptive, but the ceremonies involved help carry us through the transitions.
There are unscheduled events as well, some have institutional support, others don't. Death offers funerals, but there's no established social ritual for divorce, or job loss, or macular degeneration, or a parent going senile. "They suffer alone" is the common refrain. Or in small groups.
Those can be bitter personal tragedies.
But what happens when societies grieve?
Again, there are some cases which are well-supported. A royal funeral or coronation. Elections, with their winners and losers. Inaugurations.
But what of a society which discovers as a whole that its beliefs, institutions, myths, are hollow? That its gods, or God, has died?
The tragedy of the RMS Titanic created a fantastic film. No, not David Cameron's, but a 1950s version, A Night to Remember. I'd heard of it long ago but only saw it within the past few years. One way of viewing it was the propagation of an understanding that a worldview had failed, through the crew and passengers of what's now an archetypal doomed ship. The first to realise are the ship's own architect and captain, not only that Titanic will sink, but that at least a thousand souls will die, despite anything they do. As the film progresses, others of the crew and passengers are faced with the reality. Some accept it, some deny it, some ignore it. But reality has a way of imposing itself, and eventually does.
What scares me about the present, is that I think we're going through two huge transitions. One is the information revolution I'd been talking about for ... the first way-too-long part of this post. The second is a breakdown of ... damned near everything. Our political systems, our economic beliefs, our understanding of humanity's place and role in the world and ecosystem, our 250 year myth of unlimited growth, of technology, of perfectibility.
And whilst we're not all realising this at precisely the same moment, it seems we're becoming increasingly aware of these breakdowns, and grieving, at the same time the sensing, feedback, storage, processing, and communications component of our social system is being completely rewired. Literally.
And that scares me a little.
Adapted from a G+ comment. There's a bit on information systems and platforms that it's referring to, though most of this should stand on its own. I'm planning on publishing the parent post after cleaning it up a bit.
#longform
#information
#systems
#media
#grief
#worldview
#socialNetworks
#society