Wednesday 21st January at 17:00 CET
Are we still free-thinkers or have we lost our agency?
Episode 19 of the SWISSUES Podcast considered how:
Social media reaches directly into the primitive parts of our brains;
We suffer from the cognitive load from being ‘always on’;
Tribalism is weaponised; and
Mandatory ‘fast-thinking’ crowds out deliberation.
Join this SWISSUES Forvm (formerly OpenMeet) to have your say and hear what others think.
Forvms are open, online meetings with no formal presentations and no record. Anyone can join and anyone can speak.
Registration is not required but it is nice to know how many will be in the room. You can show your intention to attend in this poll
Which leads us to the announcement that SWISSUES is now on Substack, in company with the world’s leading statesmen, journalists and philosophers. Subscribe to join the conversation.
The follow-up discussion on this on January 21st was very interesting. I had a thought and I don't know if it is helpful but I'll put it out here in case it is. It seems to me that the tendency is for people engaged in social media to either end up in confrontational situations (aggressive arguments) or to just "go with the flow" - conforming to whatever seems to be the general direction that society is going at a particular time. So mostly what we get are either communications that become more extreme, and the parties get further apart - a "vicious circle" - or people just "go with the flow", and keep their thoughts to themselves for an easy life.
But we are in a dangerous world in dangerous times. there are a lot of major business, political and social problems that need to be sorted.
It seems to me that one of the most important skills that the the upcoming generation needs to develop is collaborations - finding a way to resolve differences and move forward to what (in my view) needs to be a more moral and supportive global society.
We need to move from vicious circles to virtuous circles! And that's not easy! It circularly cannot be done by arguing.
Howard Price
just now
The podcast discussion made me think of this quote from R. D. Laing:
"They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
They are not having fun. I can’t have fun if they don’t.
If I get them to have fun, then I can have fun with them.
Getting them to have fun is not fun. It is hard work.
Maybe it's just me, but that's how I sometimes feel when participating in Social Media (including linkedin). It's fundamentally just an algorithm deciding who can talk to whom, and in some platforms it decides who gets a job and who doesn't. It replaces what used to be genuine social interaction with "rules."
We know it's a "game" but we have to "play the game", and "pretend it's not a game."
Otherwise it will punish us by excluding us, then we can't make business connections or get a job.
RD Laing studied "pyschopathology", and that was what he was trying to describe....
I think that in doing so he captured the key problem associated with social media.
"It's not fun. It's hard work"