I'd say that the grammar of "being a victim" is somewhat like a musical scale, or maybe a tense, like the past and future are tenses, in some languages anyway. We shift in and out of this victim tense, kind of in the same way we get to invent an evil "them" where convenient, the "them" that controls everything, through clickbait and targeted advertising.
Experiments with social media have been interesting and for the most part legal by default. The Internet Research Agency was well within its rights, doing research on what this brave new world might portend. No law of the jungle prevents posting such and such political content, just some critter might take it into its head to counter your thoughts. Said critter might seek to get some new laws passed, upholding banning and/or deplatforming those considered "bad actors" (defined how again?).
I'm sure there was fine print forbidding sharing personality test scores with Cambridge Analytica, if that really happened (it made a good story), but engineers of a pragmatic frame of mind just see data, big data. Of course it makes sense to aggregate it. Get those OCEAN scores and pretend we know how to use ML to flip elections (we talk a good game anyway). Or maybe we do know how, and just got caught, so we deflected the story onto Facebook and the Russians.
I was myself in the medical data aggregation business for quite awhile. Yes, in the medical field, confidentiality is a big deal. What if social media were seen as extensions of mental health services... what a science fiction world that could be. We might have more privacy at least. Or would we have less?
In any case, our clinical data resulting from heart procedures was scrubbed of any identifying information, so statisticians could still see which age group and weight combination were having the most heart attacks, if that was even the question (I wasn't an analyst, just a harvester of this data), without needing to pry into anyone's private life as a patient. The focus was actually more on the treatments and which were proving the most effective over time (which required follow-up; "outcomes research" we call it).
Sure, I was cleared to see patient names in order to perform my role in the institution, which was to provide software running on monitors during a procedure, albeit off to the side. I wrote applications for both the cath lab (CLAIR) and operating room (CORIS), but I had no incentive, financial or otherwise, to do anything but withhold and eventually erase any personal data. The hospital itself kept the medical records, not me the lowly consultant (on nobody's payroll) and application developer (the hospital system was always one of several clients).
Our conversation this evening (Thirsters) was about taking control, and who was taking it.
What controls were missing that should be imposed? What about TikTok? What about X? A lot of people like to vent about TikTok without ever spending a few hours checking it out, taking in the experience. Find out what it is before you condemn it like the bot that you are.
Is using YouTube shorts or Facebook reels really a "bad" way to let the news filter in? It's all chopped up for sure, but you get a lot of the same segments. TV shows work their way in, with today's news.
How different is YouTube from television? Different but not that different. Physically, it's likely the same device. In both cases, the human capacity to take in, through a screen, remains finite.
I took the line, somewhat for debating purposes, to keep the conversation going, that everything was fine as it is. But "as it is" includes all the change vectors i.e. "as it is" is not now, and never was, something static. There's no static "status quo" where "social media" is concerned -- especially once you throw in broadcast media (still social) like radio and television, not forgetting the telephone, with both party and private lines.
The line between a government and the private sector is always wavering, in part because there's no agreement on what measurement we're even talking about. What line? How does one separate public from private? I'm not saying it can't be done.
Which brings me to the title of this blog post: Babel Syndrome.
There's something intrinsic in language that keeps us from all being on the same page, and frustrating though that be, there's the implication this is how God ordained it oughta be. Why?
The alternative was to embark on some hopeless and endless sysiphysian project: to build a towering space elevator to the exalted realm of the Almighty, a stairway to heaven in other words. Our resources would get poured into this endeavor and we'd be done for, fooled by our own mirage of eventual success, when in actuality there was never a victory in store down that road.
Our salvation from all this silliness was precisely our confusion and mutual unintelligibility. Genesis teaches this was a feature, not a bug.
Humanity escaped from having a hive mind, harmonious and uniform, with this courageous (on God's part) injection of a little chaos, just enough, like a kind of antifreeze. Perfect conformity is the kiss of death in a wondrous world.
Were we to all freeze into the same Matrix, the loss in diversity would make us moribund.
Instead, we're provided with incommensurability, irrationality, the unsettling, the insoluble.
The chaos is enough to jar us awake and make us aware of own programming, whatever it may be. We appreciate how mechanical "it all" is, and without recoil or judgement. It's an experience that may prove rattling, perhaps a tad eerie, but maybe comforting as well, given our magnificent capabilities.
