Sunday, July 22, 2012

Social Media: Meaning or Madness?


© Charles D. Hayes

A radio news broadcast recently reported that we are using up natural resources at a pace that exceeds our planet's largesse by half; if we continue, by 2050, we will require three planets to cover the deficit. This was followed by a discussion about our enormous budget deficit and political gridlock. These are formidable issues, although the evidence is overwhelming that few people are paying close attention.

Albert Einstein was quick to argue that the thinking required to solve problems needs to be greater in substance than the thinking that allowed them to occur. And yet today, at a time when deep reading and critical thinking are desperately needed, more and more people are devoting time to 140-character hot-button discussions, leaving too little time for serious analysis. Nietzsche's herd mentality comes to mind, and I can imagine Emerson spinning in his grave at the very notion of a world consumed by chit-chat. He was so incensed by small talk that I can picture him summing up today's chatter with something like "twits tweet." Nietzsche, I suspect, would have burst a blood vessel at the thought of millions of people following one another for 140-character tidbits, when 140 pages of serious study would barely get the job done.  

Now I am not a luddite. I love technology. I'm not blind to the positive effects of a world connected by broadband. There are too many upsides to list. But there are also downsides. Increasingly I see young people (and some not so young) spending their days flitting this way and that, like subatomic particles being moved by unseen forces, while focused on a hand-held gadget. An alarming number of teenagers spend their days in a frenzy of texting that goes on into the night, sleeping with their phone at the ready. This flurry of activity makes David Riesman's notion of "other directedness" in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd seem quaint and the very idea of inner-directedness historically irrelevant.

In Hamlet's Black Berry William Powers puts it succinctly: "Digital busyness is the enemy of depth." He even suggests that in today's world deep reading sometimes "feels subversive."  

I retired from Alaska's North Slope oil field in the fall of 2011. In the camp, it was not unusual to dine in the evening with people holding a fork in one hand and a gadget in the other, seldom taking their eyes off the latter. Many of these same people, even during work hours, could not seem to go but a few minutes without checking or sending text messages in dialogue so trivial in content as to amount to an inappropriate distraction and an egregious waste of company time.

Consider the public fascination with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. No doubt, there are positive things that can and are being accomplished with these kinds of media, but right now polarization seems to be a major benefit. Political echo chambers abound as group members share email assaults on out-groups, relentlessly making fun of their opposition while continuously upping their levels of contempt. It's hot buttons 24/7. Us, us, them, them. Then we wonder why we have become politically dysfunctional.

Beneath the surface of all of this frenzy of nonsensical communication is the underlying reality that there are literally millions of people subtly coming on to us under the pretense of friendship with the covert motivation to sell us something. I, too, have books and essays for sale on Amazon and other vendors, and like many authors I figure that if people like my web posts they might be interested in reading my books. I'm not by any means against commerce, but I can't help but think that something is deeply disturbing about a market growing exponentially for books promising to tell sellers how to come on to customers without seeming to, so the seller can set the hook before the buyer recognizes the artificial pretense. So much purposeful deception is as disappointing as it is disingenuous.

Add the scams and data phishing going on in cyberspace to the insincere dialogue and the vicious partisan politics underway, and it makes one wonder where we are headed. Today's gadgets are going to become obsolete and give way tomorrow to new ones. No telling how we will use them exactly or whether they will compensate for our Stone Age minds or add further to the venomous political contempt we are witnessing as our current technology exacerbates our primitive political predispositions.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes our human condition as a rider/elephant predicament in which the rider represents our conscious ability to reason (with emotion) while the elephant represents our emotions, which operate to a large extent at an unconscious level. I would add a self and a robot to this analogy. The self, which is a fuzzy concept neurologically, is home to both the rider and elephant, while the robot represents our tools.

Long before the creation of cyberspace Marshall McLuhan warned us that what enthralls us about technology is that it represents a narcissistic extension of ourselves. The existential danger in our enthusiasm for the latest in gadgetry is in becoming so distracted that we let the robot take over, thus becoming lost in a maelstrom of confusion and subservient to our tools.
KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:
A Novella
Alaska Short Fiction Series for Kindle
KINDLE Essays on Amazon:
NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble
Websites
Blog Sites

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Preparing Not To Forget


© Charles D. Hayes
One of my greatest fears about aging is that of becoming lost in the corridors of my own mind. I find the threat of dementia more terrifying than heart disease or cancer. Recently the World Health Organization published a report estimating that by 2030, the number of people with some form of dementia is expected to double and reach 65.7 million worldwide; 115.4 million people by 2050. The financial burden will be so staggering as to threaten the very stability of the economy, but that will pale in comparison to the emotional angst among individuals afflicted and the families who care for them.
As a nation, America is clearly not prepared for such an onslaught of helpless human beings. With each passing year, I am more and more aware of the use-it-or-lose-it slogan with regard to one's intellectual ability, and yet the science associated with this claim is vague and uncertain. While it appears there are some things that may stave off dementia, there is no proof that if you do this or that you can be certain to escape the onset.
A scientist I’m not, but in my own life experience I have witnessed individuals who seemed especially vulnerable to dementia simply because they lost interest in living long before they lost their intellectual capacity for strenuous thinking. The gradual slide into dementia that my own parents experienced serves as a constant reminder about what can happen when one gives up rigorous thinking. At least that's the way it appears in hindsight.
For these reasons, and because of the sheer enjoyment that an ever-expanding perspective offers us as aging individuals, I believe September University is the apt metaphor for the last few chapters of one's life. One of the most encouraging examples of aging and staying intellectually active I've come across lately is Edward O. Wilson. His new book The Social Conquest of the Earth, is one of his best works, in my view, and it represents the cutting edge of some very contentious and controversial subjects in evolutionary social science, namely individual versus group selection. Wilson has been kicking up a fuss with his peers for decades, and the fact that he is still at it at age 82 is inspiring.
Some recent studies suggest that exercise may help keep dementia at bay, but so far there is no encouraging news about the prevention of Alzheimer's. Progress seems stalled, even though the stakes are so high that nothing short of a Manhattan Project level of research would seem adequate to meet the challenge and government funding is being increased substantially.
September University, the book, was eight years in the making and has been in print for a couple of years, but we’re still early in what I have argued will be a visible awakening of senior activists who are bent on leaving the world a better place for future generations. Indeed, they’re at it already; they’re just not getting much media attention. Near the end of this decade, however, I'm betting their actions will eclipse the media depictions of senior citizens shouting Tea Party slogans and pushing inarticulate political solutions to problems that haven't been thought through in depth.
Aristotle argued that the ultimate value of life depends upon contemplation and that happiness is experienced in large part as a form of contemplation and reflection. I've always thought that a great opportunity was missed in America's Declaration of Independence in that, if it had endorsed the pursuit of wisdom instead of the pursuit of happiness, the path to happiness for everyone would have been shorter and with better results. Overt attempts to find happiness often amount to a fool’s journey, because true happiness results from noble purposes without regard to rewards.
My learning suggests that perspective is to aging as good health is to one's sense of well-being. The good news is that, with many years of experience at our back, we have a lot to think about and a lot of comparisons to make between theory and practice. So making sense of one's life can be thought of as a rational method of preparing not to forget.
Apart from the value of human social relationships as we age, nothing save intellectual perspective gives us what we need in order to find and experience a sense of meaning that puts our final chapters of life in context. That framework inevitably brings us back existentially to the worth of human relationships that may have remained hidden by the busyness of life circumstance. Perspective represents life's most exhilarating punctuation mark. Better to leave the world with an exclamation point than a comma.
 
KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher
The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning
Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in
Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees
Training Yourself: The 21st Century Credential
Self-University: The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life
Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel
A Novella
Pansy: Bovine Genius in Wild Alaska

Alaska Short Fiction Series for Kindle
Moose Hunter Homicide
KINDLE Essays on Amazon:
Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life
America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance
Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand
Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials
Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters
Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy
Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous
NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble
Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel
Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life
America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance
Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand
Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials
Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters
Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy
Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous
Websites
Autodidactic Press Website
September University.org Website

Blog Sites
Self-University Blog
September University Blog

Saturday, March 10, 2012

An Open Letter to Richard Cordray




Mr. Richard Cordray, Director
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
1500 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
(Attn: 1801 L St.)
Washington DC 20220
info@consumerfinance.gov

Dear Mr. Cordray:

Congratulations on your recent appointment to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I'm confident I speak for millions of people when I say it's about time for this kind of effort on behalf of American citizens.

I have one simple suggestion that won't cost much, but it could have a lasting positive effect on our democracy. Please rename your agency. Stop calling us consumers. We are Citizens with a capital C. In addition, please lead an effort to ask all kinds of media to follow suit.

Nothing captures the contemporary dilemma of political disengagement more than the commercial reality of consumer versus citizen. So many people view the government not as us but as them. “We the people” means that we are the government, because we are citizens, not because we are consumers. Citizens are responsible; consumers just devour.

Citizen versus consumer is an issue that transcends political affiliation. Arguments about inequality aside, I don’t think it’s that hard to convince the political left, right, or center, that a return to the ubiquitous use of the word citizen, while scrapping the word consumer, would have a positive effect for democracy. It seems like such a small thing, and some will no doubt think it silly, but it would likely result in a paradigm shift in democratic expectations.

Sincerely,

Charles D. Hayes
          Wasilla, Alaska
          autodidactic.com
          septemberuniversity.org

KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher
The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning
Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in
Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees
Training Yourself: The 21st Century Credential
Self-University: The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life
Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel
Alaska Short Fiction Series for Kindle
Moose Hunter Homicide
KINDLE Essays on Amazon:
Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life
America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance
Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand
Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials
Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters
Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy
Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous
NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble
Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel
Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life
America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance
Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand
Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials
Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters
Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy
Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous
Websites
Autodidactic Press Website
September University.org Website

Blog Sites
Self-University Blog
September University Blog