Blog PostsZ Social
By Brian Small at Jan 04, 2013 |
|
This could be where the line is drawn, where we can be sure that the Internet doesn't end up being as irritating as radio and TV. Radio and TV didn't have to become shallow and stupid, but business took it over and need lonely distracted people running to retail therapy and Amusing Themselves to Death, never breaking that buying mood with awareness. Did you notice how Facebook, and even windows computers are getting as tacky and stupid as TV?
I had to mess around with an Epson Printer on a Windows Computer to set my honey up for her New Year's Cards. They were constantly sending me to their site and asking me to get ink from them... It was worse that TV.
On Facebook, I blame Hello Kitty and PokeMon for certain shallow attitudes (f-ing stupidity) I see in some Japanese young people, and facebook has ads urging me to join millions of others in Hello Kitty and Pokemon fan groups. Do they want me to shoot myself in the head or something? Guns are for wimps and bullets are unsustainable - I'll have to use a sledge hammer, but before that I'll probably just my pound my cable modem into pieces and get my honey to let me put a Linux distribution on her computer. (Oh No, I'll need the internet connection for GNU software installation and updates, I guess I'll have to just do Facebook Anonymous and Anger Management)
I have a dream, that I can do social networking stuff without dealing with tacky advertisements, that I can do group chat without supplying cheap focus group info to psycopath corporations (excuse the redundancy). Let's dream. I usally keep from wanting things, it's too disappointing - I'm a sneaky little Buddha over here in the Shine of Japan. It's shiny because it's a _Toxic Archipelago_, the eye of the needle through which we can see illigetimate power ride us into our decline to extinction. Love your beautiful country with Abe Shinzo, and your employer with KeiDanRen's Mitari, Toyota and Nissan build hybrid eco-cars and don't notice that your wolves and otters are extinct, and that the Ashio Copper Mine Slime, The Minamata Mercury and the Fukushima Radiation will never go away. No matter what you buy. We have to develop attention spans and the ability to work together or it will eventually be our turn to be poisoned and scream "it hurts it hurts" until we die along with other fellow human beings.
Let's make this work, replace Facebook with Zsocial, tacky crap with some funny important stuff and then go on to replace Gmail. I sent a Chris Hedges book as a gift, thinking that someone who thinks effort is a waste of time if we're just going to go extinct anwway - with a comet or something -, would identify with some of Hedge's almost-hopeless gloom and doom. I got a nice e-mail "Thanks for the book I wanted to slit my wrists after the first couple pages." It was an exaggeration I'm sure. But I look to the right of my screen, my browser window, and Google is offering me links to suicide advice, one may have been prevention but I'm pretty sure some were for efficient, effective suicide. WTF?
Think how awesome it would be if we could make our on-line time as ad-free as the ad-busters guy that wraps up everything in his place to tastefully block out the logos. Naomi Klien is my _No Logo_ Wonder Woman. I'm American my mind is full of trivial commercial crap. I thought "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" and "Diamonds are forever" were proverbs, the wise saying people with culture have. Japan has Kotowasa proverbs, I said one to a group of Chinese students and they told me who wrote it a couple centuries ago. Spring's people Don't see the SunRise. You feel sleepy in the Spring. My mind is full of "When the going gets tough..." battery commercials. I read Chomsky and think that brain time and space could have been taken up by Humboldt and Dewey, we should have been taking apart the Constitutional Convention papers in elementary school (learning the "elements" that make up our society, so we can work with them). I read I.A. Richards and see that I should have been figuring out Plato and The Old Testament to figure out how to rework our "purposes" what we want to be as humans. I think I was watching Footloose and Fast Times at Richmond High during those critical periods. It doesn't have to be that way. We all have minds that are aching to come out and play, serious creative play. We cannot be contained in the mall, but we need help to yank ourselves out of the Gruen Transfer, tighten up our slack-jawed filmy-eyed face and loosen our minds on each other. All the materials in Znet have been helping me for the last 10 or 14 years. And we can make it better. What if I had discovered Chomsky and Znet's intellectual self-defence before college? I wouldn't have felt as lost reading Time, and US News and World Report, wondering if I was stupid for not getting how El Salvador's Duarte could be a good democratic choice and connected with Death Squads at the same time. I needed some support to see that I could play "circle the moron in this picture" on the national and global stage. Sometimes the most adamant is the most mistaken, sometimes it's you, sometimes its not, just because some guy is the President, or a journalist, doesn't mean he don't get circled when he's wrong. Kennedy is supposed to be cute and good but he almost got us all nuked, Circle! That moron. Sure he's got great press now, like Reagan and Steve Jobs, just because pundits suck up to power and corporations fluff up their representatives with exquisitely crafted propaganda doesn't mean they're decent people. It seems to be the oppossite.
Did you ever notice how relaxed you feel in the woods? Or when you go to some little hamlet that has too few people to make advertising worthwhile it's blissful. That might be the better air, or the phytoncides that the trees put out. I'm guessing that some of that stress-relief results from getting away from all the ad-manipulation. It's getting harder and harder to ignore the ads on Facebook, Gmail and Google is bound to go the same way if they can't get enough money selling all our most private texts to psychologists and anthroplogists that craft mind-screwing commercials. Sure, for now, ZSocial requires a tad more effort that facebook or Groupme. But effort is good for you. Try dealing with a kid that's been laying around playing DS under the covers all morning. They're useless, in need of shock therapy just to put the screen down and get a plate of food, you have to be Hercules to push them through the Herculean effort they need to make them to get changed and go out the door.
Like weeds and organic vegetable we need the right sort of stress in our lives, needing to make a bit of an effort for your living makes you more nutritious, more wholesome and vivacious. Let's put in some effort. Maybe I'll be better off if Bill Gates, the FB guy and Apple take over the internet and computer, so I banish them from my house and do more reading and outdoor activity. But I've met some great people, and learned a lot of worthwile substance on the net. Days spent reading ZInstructionals probably gave me more brain power than an attempt at dealing with graduate school would have. Let's get together and create technology with good "bias"(Douglad Rushkoff _Program or Be Programmed_) Let's figure out what we're doing by making it work, like the Zapatista's say "make the road by walking", Let's figure out how to make the Ends and Means(Goals and Ways, South End Press - Liberating Theory) work together making sense. Let's get the "How" and the "Why" informing each other(I.A. Richards). Let's Jump In and start chatting, bullshitting, exchanging, whatever floats your boat. I'll put up with your style, if you'll put up with mine. Let's meet too, I hear I come off a lot differently through mailing lists(in Japanese anyway) than in person. I'm hoping I get a chance to meet at least one other Znetter this year, I met my first one in person this year, we had some great conversations.. Thanks to IOPS(and then facebook -sorry! I was using an iPhone and in a rush) I'm pretty sure I'll meet another fellow foreigner down here in Kyushu..
We might be missing out on each other's comments and things right now on ZSpace, it may seem cold, off-putting at first. Work through it. Cut people some slack, they might surprise you in a pleasant way at some point. If not, you'll have moved on to other things and won't care by then anyway. Please help me avoid kicking my cable modem through the window, the window is innocent, and probably expensive. I need you people. Make this ad-free social space work. I'm not sure what the issues with Open Source are as far as ZSocial, but Michael Albert and the Zpeople(Lydia Sargent, Cynthia Peters, Stephen Shalom...) have been walking their talk for decades, I'm guessing the people putting the most brain and othe sweat into the project will work all that out...
The SNS format makes it easy to jump in and start writing, everything is dialogue and there's always something to bounce off with Social Networking Sites. Let's fill each other's minds with worthwhile things. There's only so much time for reading and being on-line, I'd rather not waste it by hearing about Charmin commercials getting kids to pressure their mothers into buying different toilet paper( _Consuming Kids_ and _Born To Buy_ are right we need a "Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood" but we need a commercial free environment for ourselves too) or what kind of razors somebody uses. I don't want people (individuals - natural persons that are converting to "legal person"(poclad.org) attitudes like Rushkoff warns) selling me. But I like chatting. Conversation is fun, you discover a lot about people, about yourself. Let's keep this delightful human activity human. With decent people contributing and running it ZSocial should end up being a great example, you don't need a corporation to supply your needs, a bunch of regular people with different values can get together and make something different, better... Make it work. Please.
What you can do today
By Lynch, Damon at Jan 10, 2013 20:16 PM
Reply this comment
Re: What you can do today
By Small, Brian at Jan 11, 2013 08:00 AM
Even if we can hack away the ads, there's still providing the grist for mind-screwing commercial memes.. Susan Linn's Consuming Kids, I think had a line about how guilty the people that do that work feel. I imagine some end up with adbusters.. One quote was a guy who felt the he was "sucking satan's" c-worder.. I'm pretty sure it was in _Consuming Kids_ I was surprised to see it there. Imagine how much easier it is to get all the personal communications from e-mails and chats to figure out how people feel about warm, cozy family interaction, and then work on transferring that to product placement. "Reach out and touch someone", "Ring around the collar"... What sore to created wants can we instill on top of insecurities and support...
Reply this comment
Thank you!
By S, W at Jan 10, 2013 18:35 PM
Again, thank you so much. I think I need more time to come up with a more thoughtful, longer answer.
Reply this comment
Re: Thank you!
By Small, Brian at Jan 11, 2013 08:06 AM
I end up writing much longer "status" comments on ZSocial, and explain my picture a bit more too. Since there are poeple on facebook that show interest too I paste the longer things in there when it makes sense, but a lot of the time the longer, more substantive stuff doesn't seem appropriate for facebook. Then again, I ended up having a good conversation by mistakenly posting only "Japanese Toilets" on ZSocial. I hope to see you over(in?) there.
I have trouble keeping track of people on Zspace - I never figured out how to make rss feeds(or whatever) work. I'm hoping Zsocial will make it easier for us to be supportive, write to each other without worrying so much if it's polished enough for Znet. There must be a constructive way to get collaborative that gets beyond Tweeting, Flitting, and social ad campaigns. I think we can make ZSocial an opportunity to explore ways of doing that... Even if it's not as flashy and developed as FB og G+ or other SNS's, a dedicated community should be able to overcome those issues. Every once in a while I get interested in computer langauges, it's hard to figure out which one to learn. One comment that stuck in my mind was that although Perl may be an "inferior" language (compared to Python and Ruby) their humorous, lively community makes up for that. I worked through Randal Schwartz's _Learning Perl_ and it was fun, reading Larry Wall's tome was interesting even if I didn't get half of it. I got Perl to do some useful things for me at one point. Now, I realize I'm pretty much and end user but I delve into Lisp/Scheme/Racket becaust I feel that it trains my brain in interesting ways. Dr. Racket is a a lot of fun, as is Schemers.org. I finally got my head wrapped around recursion after a couple years of just eing on the edge of it...
If beginning computer languages can be used to teach "big ideas" (_The Schemer's Guide_, _Simply Scheme_ ,the MIT on-line Lisp class for some company's engineers "Computer Science" isn't about science or computers, it's about managing complexity. Like back when Egypt was figuring out how to parcel out farm land again after regular Nile flooding, they weren't measuring land, they were creating geometry and math....) maybe SNS style interaction can be used to figure out collaboration and community - how to get our act together and not go extinct with fossil fuels and nuclear radiation. Let's see if we can keep the play going. "The Show Must Go On." I can't find where I quoted Pink Floyd for a Zsocial contributor that posted Michael Moore on supporting the troops. He said that Pink Floyd wasn't his speed but he liked Propaghandi. I have to figure out how to go back, find him, and excuse myself explaining that my musical tastes pretty much stopped developing during some sort of critical period decades around 1980. Maybe the ears were just working better during those years.. But if the music is worth it, like RATM and Ozomatli (and the Texas Tornados, and maybe A3?) I'll have to give it a try.
Reply this comment