Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
We live in an era of incredible potential. And yet when I opened my news feed this morning this is what I saw:
A misogynist Op-Ed that was clearly written with malice.
A racist group causing harm and violence.
An extremist left group doing the same.
An anti-mask gym owner saying he’ll continue to pay fines to keep his gym open.
A politician calling covid a ‘hoax pandemic’.
The largest iceberg ever, that broke off in 2017 thanks to global warming, is heading to islands likely to cause an ecological disaster.
Crazy.
When I think of the potential of humanity, I think of benevolence, creativity, generosity, love, and kindness.
When I open the news I see hate and ignorance. Today these stupid headlines came (except for the iceberg) from the country south of our borders. A country that’s supposed to be about equal opportunity, liberty, and justice. A country divided into two camps so opposed to the other side that they see the other as enemies more than neighbours (or I should say neighbors).
What does it mean to be human? What potential do we have as a species? What could we accomplish if we work together? What kind of world would we live in if we focused on what’s possible?
We can be better as a species. We can be peaceful. We can be kind. We can be loving. We can be more human.
Today marks 13 years since I sent my first Tweet. Twitter has influenced me enough that I even wrote a short (free) ebook to help people get started on it.
My use of Twitter has evolved considerably. It used to play a bigger role in my life because it was a gateway to learning about using technology and social media as a means to share ideas and seek out others doing the same. Now, I find that I transmit more than I engage, and when I engage it’s usually with people I’ve developed long term digital friendships with.
I also use it for news. I hate watching news, but going to the search page (tab) and seeing the trending hashtags is enough to keep me informed without being sucked into the drama and bias of a single news source on TV. This isn’t a comprehensive way to consume news, but these days I struggle to keep from being sucked into the most recent drama that streams constantly through news headlines, and a simple hashtag summary can succinctly let me know if I should dig deeper.
I have to say 13 years after starting that I romanticize and miss the ‘old Twitter’ days of people sharing links to blog posts they wrote and the marriage between Twitter and blogging that, while still there, is far less what Twitter is about. That said, my consumption of blogs as a primary place to engage online has diminished, while ironically I have become a prolific blogger, writing daily for the past 16 months. It’s easy to romanticize something that you simultaneously aren’t likely to want to return to. And so while I miss ‘old Twitter’ I must admit that as much as Twitter has changed, I have changed too.
Watching Twitter change, I do see some positives that I hope to see continue and here is one area that impresses me:
While other social media sites are permitting widespread sharing of fake and unproven information, Twitter is putting warnings like this on prominent and influential people who are spreading false claims.
And while I’m a huge supporter of free speech, and against censorship, I do believe that bad ideas can spread easily and we have an obligation to warn people when influential people are irresponsible enough to promote bad ideas. While the balance between freedom to share and obligation to inform is a delicate one, I commend Twitter for taking the risk in being a leader in this area.
As an aside, I think there is room for a new form of social media, one where people can have public conversations with only invited guests, and everyone watching can have a separate side conversation. These closed but public conversations can have a moderator who can pull in sidebar comments and/or commenters, and so observers can be invited in and involved, if moderators choose. Or, moderators can delete or even block rude, inappropriate trolls that are disruptive to the side conversation.
Wide open conversations seem to bring out the worst in people, especially anonymous people that hide behind anonymity and say nasty things they would never say if their identity were known. A social media site that was more conversational than a blog, that allowed a healthy debate to happen in public, could be something that really helped to create open dialogue in a way that can’t seem to happen on Facebook or Twitter… without the conversation degrading into a petty, angry pissing match where trolls undermine the conversation.
Until that new social media tool comes along, I’ll just keep plugging along on Twitter, playing with how I use it so that it’s useful to me.
“The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.” ~Plato
The world I see today has many people using the word justice… but in defence of unjust ideas.
This is the crazy world we live in.
People talk about defending their freedoms by doing things that undermine the communities they live in… the very communities that offer those freedoms!
No, enforcing a mask policy isn’t an infringement of your rights, it’s preventing a lockdown that will reduce your freedoms while we take care of our community.
No, stricter gun laws in the US are not infringing on your constitutional amendment rights, but they will reduce easy, dangerous, and deadly weapons access to unfit people that are likely to harm your community.
No, your flat earth or QAnon conspiracies based on pseudoscience and fake facts are not counter-arguments to actual science, and don’t get equal footing in an argument.
No, right wingers are wrong to think left wing ideals are a path to a socialist controlling government that will strip away your rights. And no, left wingers, being violent against opposing views, because you disagree with them, isn’t a left wing ideal: It’s fascist and authoritarian to block free speech.
No, media outlets you should not be sensationalizing the news by polarizing ideas. You are not reporting news when you do this, you are selling out. You are sacrificing factual reporting for the price of views and clicks. You are not reporting, you are entertaining, angering, and dividing people with bias on the verge of being called propaganda.
Justice, rights, freedoms, and truth are no longer things that have the meaning they intended. They are empty words filled with polarized and rationalized meanings shared by less convincing and less reliable sources. Each ‘side’ believes these words belong to them. But words only have meaning when their definitions are shared.
Lies are soft and squishy. They can be whatever shape you want. They are convenient. [They fit into any world view.] The Truth is hard and spiky. Hard to embrace. Worth embracing.
I’m absolutely amazed at how many (smart, educated) people are sucked into conspiracy theories and exaggerated (and clearly misrepresented) statistics that fit their world view… even when the theories are debunked.
Example : A US educator that I know shared this October 25, 2019 Joe Biden Tweet, which was a response to another tweet from a Washington Post article on pandemic preparedness:
We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores. https://t.co/1qqpgayUEX
This is the top reply which has been retweeted 71 times and liked 359 times at the time of me sharing this:
It’s absolutely ridiculous that someone with such influence can spread a conspiracy theory that the pandemic was planned. But it’s convenient. It fits her world view.
The problem is that is so much easier to cherry pick lies and convenient half-truths than it is to actually embrace and meaningfully interpret facts that don’t match biased opinions.
Sometimes lies are easy and the truth is hard… it’s spiky… But we want to live in a society where the hard truth is embraced, even if it isn’t something we want to hear.
It’s really hard to avoid rage as a driving force in the news today. Article after article, video clip after video clip, there is anger, upset, and rage. There is a link between what we think and how we feel, and that used to be determined by us. Now it is determined by the headlines we read and the videos we watch.
Cognition used to drive emotion, now emotion draws us towards information and that information caries a bias that fuels anger in one of two opposing ways:
1. Disgust: How can this happen in our society today? What kind of world are we living in? This is so wrong!
2. Rebuke: This is not a crisis. This is overblown! Everything is sensationalized.
These two reactions towards the same topic fuel even greater rage. If you think something is completely unacceptable and I ask you, ‘what’s the big deal?’, how does that make you feel?
Anger does not invite clear thought. It does not invite discourse that we can learn from. It does not foster a healthy environment.
It upsets me that headlines are so geared towards rage and anger. It saddens me that I still follow the headlines, clicking links and watching videos. I’m not impervious to the emotional draw. It’s similar to slowing down on the highway to see why emergency vehicles are pulled over in the oncoming lanes… we are pulled in by the macabre.
It can not be healthy to draw our attention to the world through rage. It clouds the truth, hides it in bias based on anger. This is not how we should be learning about the going’s on in our world. This is not news.
I enjoy seeing funny quotes attributed to the wrong people. Like these two examples:
The second one is an assault to the senses of fiction and science fiction fans. When the joke is obvious, there is comedy in the creation of these fake attributions. However, we are living in an era where Truth seems more and more subjective.
What’s scary about this is that I consider myself fairly objective, but I’m finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. What I do know is that newspapers today come with tremendous bias, and something as simple as this chart from two years ago is even more exaggerated now, with papers moving further towards the extremes:
Here is an example of something that I know little about, and feel that the more I read, the further I am from having a clear understanding of where to put a value on what’s true: Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
Excerpt: THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”
Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.
Excerpt: Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients.
An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.
The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.
Of the physicians surveyed, 3,308 said they had either ordered a COVID-19 test or been involved in caring for a coronavirus patient, and 2,171 of those responded to the question asking which medications were most effective.
So, the ‘evidence’ presented in the second article came well before the the first article was printed. Which article holds more ‘Truth’?
First, if you had to guess, which of these newspapers is more Left-of-Centre – Liberal and which of these papers is more Right-of-Centre – Conservative?
Let’s have a look at the sources on MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check. (Full disclosure, I have not checked the reliability of this website.)
Take a moment to read the final, bolded comments that I clipped from this fact check website about each paper. They would suggest the Post being more reliable than the Times because of a lack of fact checking at the Times. That said, the source for the survey linked to in the Times article checked out when I looked into it. The same source, Sermo, is now toting Remdesivir use more than Hydroxychloroquine, and even then stating that, “Remdesivir Seen as Only Moderately Effective”.
I don’t have the time or mental energy to go fact-checking every article I read, but I do find myself evaluating the source of the information a lot more. However, quite honestly, even when I do that it has now become blatantly easy to read the bias of the reporter woven into almost every news article that’s based on a ‘hot’ topic. How can you look to the news for objectivity when that objectivity is blatantly disregarded?
I’ve now started reading headlines with the following ‘BS Filter’ as a lens: “Does this article headline anger me, or try to anger me? If the answer is ‘yes’, I either ignore the article, or I open it with my ‘BS detectors’ fully engaged. Click bait articles tend not to be focused on sharing any kind of ‘Truth’.
In this day and age of abundant information, I thought Truth would rise above the BS, but that hasn’t been the case. Neil Postman said,
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
It seems that there is an information war on both our capacities to think, and our capacities to seek the Truth.
I don’t watch the news, don’t listen to the radio, but I want to know what’s happening in the world. So I do two things on my phone, first I have the news App and Flipgrid set up on my phone… swipe right from my home screen and there are the headlines. Then there is always the search feature on the Twitter App with the news column.
I don’t spend a lot of time going past the headlines, but I do look a little deeper when major events happen. I also admit to metaphorically slowing down to see the accident at the side of the road, when a certain political leader tweets something outrageous, but the line between news and entertainment blurs here. It would be fully laughable if it wasn’t so unsettling.
This news-through-headlines (and trending hashtags) approach keeps me away from the painful aspects of the news that I’m fed up with, such as:
1. Headlines that belong in Tabloids such as, “This Facebook Post Almost Broke The Internet.” Or: “12 Products You Can’t Live Without.”
2. An overemphasis on Hollywood stars, musicians, and royalty.
3. An embarrassingly morbid focus on the macabre: Shootings, tragedies, and death.
But even this approach doesn’t allow me from escaping the idiocy of the news as described in this tweet:
Media outlets are pathetic!
Hackers put a propaganda/violent image onto a barely seen website and then media companies successfully distribute that propaganda all over the world. Gotta get those clicks… even if it means being accomplices or at least abetters to terrorism.
It doesn’t prevent me from seeing an onslaught of negative headlines about tragedies around the world.
Yes, some tragedies are relevant to the world, and a few need to make the headlines. But it’s time for news outlets to think of the turmoil and upset they leave behind when they use a ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ attitude. It’s time for news outlets to stop creating click bait titles. It’s time for news outlets to realize the influence they have, and to be more concerned with their influence, and less concerned about getting our attention at any cost.
In the mean time, I’ll try to do my part and avoid clicking on links that I think undermine valuable news sharing for the sake of one more view of advertising on a web page.
“Sex sells.”- We have grown used to this phrase in words and in visual form through advertising. Sexual tension and the fantasy of unreachable desire are invitations to lust… to the craving for physical intimacy that is not rooted in love.
Love is exploited in movies and television by intertwining it with lust, and making the two seem interchangeable. Storylines are fraught with sexual tension and the importance of the first physically intimate moments being consumed with lust. Plots are fast-forwarded by showing lust-filled intimacy to establish the love two people have before a plot twist. Infidelity is ‘explained’ by lack of lust and intimacy.
Action films are no better. If the action star is put into dire straits, it is likely for the love of a child, or if it is for a love interest then that person is as likely to betray the star as to find happiness. Infidelity is a plot developer, love is fleeting and easily lost.
What are the stories of lust, of unrealistic desires, of sensual intimacy, and of sexual passion that we are exposed to in story plots, magazines, and social media? How does that contrast with stories of love? For even stories of love suggest loss (think Romeo & Juliet) or betrayal (think Indecent Proposal or Fatal Attraction).
Sex sells. Lust sells. Romantic love is reserved for comedies and for overcoming the pain caused by lust. Romance, heartfelt caring, and devotion to a loved one are things to be destroyed and devoured in modern day stories.
Our media outlets and movie plots may not share this, it does not sell in the same way, but in the end, lust leaves one feeling empty and alone, while love prevails.
I don’t listen to the radio in my car anymore, and I only listen to music when I’m with other people. If I’m alone in the car, even on my very short commute to work, I’m either listening to an audio book or I’m listening to a long format podcast.
What’s the appeal of the long format?
I have gotten very tired of the typical news-style interview format. That format is designed to work in one of two ways:
1. Three to seven minute interviews that focuses on one key idea, one good, quotable sound byte (and glosses over many other interesting and big ideas).
2. A panel discussion where discourse is trumped by arguments from the extremes with blatant disregard for anyone with a centrist view.
On the other hand, a long format discussion can go deep. It can meander to different topics. It can invite you in as if you are in the room with the interviewer and interviewee.
No one does this better than Joe Rogan. He has become a master interviewer! He is skilled at interviewing people smarter than us, and asking the right clarifying question for us to take the journey along with him.
I don’t listen to all his interviews (too many, and I focus on the interviewees I can learn a lot from), but I’m currently listening to his interview with Edward Snowden. At the time of writing this, the YouTube version has 7.4 million views, and several million more people listen to an audio version like me. As an aside, Joe Rogan is changing the way people listen to media. His podcasts routinely get more views than television shows and newscasts. And his unbiased reporting, not having to pander to broadcast networks, and advertisers that are restrictive, are exactly why he could get 3-hours of Edward Snowden’s time that the networks would never get.
What I like about his podcasts is that he can get guests like Peter Attia or Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and while they both have podcasts, when I listen to their podcasts, they get too technical and go over my head. Whereas, Joe will ask clarifying questions and help me take the journey with them.
Here are a few more longer format interviews/podcasts that are worth listening to:
The long format podcast is an engaging way to learn, and to pass time normally consumed with talk radio and annoying commercial interruptions. Give them a try!
I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking today. I recalled my sister telling me about a Japanese Scientist who froze either pure or distilled water drops to examine the ice crystals… except that first he treated the water in a special way. He would ‘apply’ thoughts, and words, to the water containers first: things like ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’ or ‘sorry’ and ‘anger’. The results were remarkable! Beautiful patterns with positive thoughts & words, and patternless, blocks or ‘broken’ patterns with negative thoughts & words.
It makes me wonder about all this talk I hear about broken schools and our ‘failure’ to prepare our students for the future?
It makes me wonder about all the negative self-talk our media perpetuates… We aren’t pretty enough, we are too fat, we look too old, we aren’t rich enough, we can buy happiness, our future is bleak!
How much of this is real, and how much of it is unintentionally willed by our own (weak?) thoughts?
If we could accumulate a day’s worth of thoughts and place that on a frozen water sample, what shapes would we get? Beautiful patterns or broken formations?
What if we did this for our family, community, city, nation or world?
I know what it would look like for every newspaper & news media stream that exists, and find this disturbing… a reason why I avoid the news altogether!
There are some amazing things happening in this world. Kindness, generosity and love can be powerful and potent catalysts in changing what our daily thoughts accumulate to.
At the end of today, think of what the crystallized accumulation of your daily thoughts would look like. If you see something beautiful, congratulate yourself! If you see something less than beautiful, know that you have the power to change that, and also know that begins with acceptance, not blame… with forgiveness, not anger… with love, not self-loathing.
Gandhi was right, we really do need to be the change we want to see in this world. And that starts with our thoughts that drive us.
Think good thoughts, Say good words, Do good deeds.
