Thread: Social Networking, an emulated base perception of what it is like to be a human

Stuttgart, Germany 1770



George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is born.



That very year, across the Atlantic...


English imposition met American opposition. They would remove tax on all consumer products, except for the Tea. Massachusetts had the best deals around. Governor Bernard was recalled from office and tensions between British soldiers and American workers had reached critical levels in Boston.


On March 2, local workers got into a fight with soldiers, who had previously broken into storage facilities, looking for Tea. A couple of days later, in a sort of reverse protest, British soldiers were milling about, picking at citizens, battering some, looking to incite people, within reach of the law. Fire bells rang.


Citizens took to the streets; self-absorbed soldiers clashed with discontented young men. Shots were fired adding to a list of felonies committed by oppressors, which today would be considered brutality. They were considered such, then.


Hutchinson, the dark-horse replacement of the recalled Bernard, would face Samuel Adams in the town hall. This was the beginning of an American stand against British military presence in the colonies. Motions that lead to the American revolution, gaining independence in 1776.

In 1779, 200 years before my birth, to the year, 29 year old scholar and lecturer at the University of Jena, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, would begin his work on The Phenomenology of Mind.

Hegel defines dialectic, the art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments. Humans consider three aspects when considering their respective realities. They begin by rationalizing, is something, anything. Once identified, this object or idea, makes its way into a depth of further consideration, isn't this "something" not? Stage three is a speculative comprehension, or what I would consider, a process of believing. Now you have weighed initial perception, with disbelief, until you are able to rationalize an existence, or "comprehension."

He takes this dialectic into a consideration of the master-slave relationship. So does your BIOS. When your system boots, (for the sake of argument) a primary IDE drive is considered, does it exist, isn't it not? O.k. there is a single, primary master; the BIOS then hands off to the speculatively comprehended drive.

Sometimes it freezes, you installed a new drive, you forgot to jumper the old master into a slave. The BIOS halts because in dialectic we are only confirming solitary existence. Then, logically, there are no excuses. Computers are quite possibly the most self-conscious critters on the entire planet.

Is something, it? Is it not, it? O.k... there is something which is it. So, based on a speculative comprehension, I will hand it the "boot." If you get a new screen... file is missing, etc., it was not a failed dialectic, it's more of a lying master or otherwise unfit leadership.

Hegel saw a logic that undermined the very existence of mastership. How could this resolve? Take the idea through dialectic and the system halts. A master, in an "abstract or rational form," is a fit superior to what is considered an inferior. Is this master, not, dependent of its slave base? Master over slave, unto itself, argues its very undoing.

Now consider the slave as a "rational form." Is the slave not, the dependent of its master? It is not, it wants to be free. So one cannot form a "speculative-concrete comprehension," of either a master or a slave because "the abstract or rational form,"(step 1) does not match the speculative dependence.

A masters argument of the need of such slaves, or a country holding bonds, lacks a logical self-existence because of the perceived and rational dependencies.

I think we could consider the Internet itself as the latest example of mastership. The Internet has become the British Navigation Act.

The very foundations of logic are in use on every system. These foundations are being used against democracy, hindering national and global economics and you have to question the flow of dependencies. The Internet was dependent on computing. The consumer is dependent on the Internet. The Internet crushed computing in many aspects. The business is dependent on the "Search."

Cyber-distributers crushed the storefront, cheating the government, just as one example, on state-to-state charges that every storefront and office building has had to pay to operate their business, in similar fashion, but they had an address and armed officers would come knocking down their doors. They cheated this same government that faces every one of us wondering where it all went. Cutting all the things we need, in order to live our lives, just as good as we already had it in the 90's. The Human is the "bondsman" dependent on the Internet, the "Master." People are bereft of even an "abstract or rational form" without it. There's no "negation" period because we just do it, like addicts.

The PC has been atomized, forever shrinking into a greater, or more plausible, mobility. It leads to, at least, one possible solution, the festival, something. Something that recreates the human unity we have lost through social networking, an emulated base perception of what it is like to be a (human).

We are "social beings," but we are no longer "becoming." We are hiding in a virtual reality that goes against the very idea of Democracy because we are eliminating physical presence storefronts and offices without voting. We are hoarded by the possibility of achieving self without leaving the house.

In these very networks, Americans are crying out, what is happening to our sense of value? You feel the strangulation but are forever satisfied by the possibility of richer media, delivered through advanced, application delivery networks, streamlining availability, and the notion of self-existing ahead of a calculable price equilibrium.

We have to rediscover ourselves and recreate a truer human unity. We must realize that the "Search" has humanity in bondage; having already discovered bondage, itself, is illogical.

So you blame the hammer, and not the one who swings it?

Isn't it ironic how far we've come. Against British tyranny American rebels were considered terrorists, now in the year 2012 we are Britain, we are Rome. We are the oppressors. We've become what we fought so hard to free ourselves from. Those brutalities you spoke of are being carried out on a daily basis, without regard for any law or human life, all in the guise of liberation. Hypocrisy. The oppress science of anthropology. We go to far away places with immense shows of force and tell them what they believe is wrong. After we've broken their will we install Coca-Cola machines and sweat shops.

There truly is so much irony to this history. I am in an 'Art History' class this quarter titled 'Women in Art.' We spent some time on Angelica Kauffman, who is turning out to be my favorite of the female artists we covered. She wasn't born there but, by her early adulthood, she goes to London where she becomes a founding member of the British Royal Academy of Arts. In 1774, she paints Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, depicting a scene from Homer's Odysses where, on the way to Attica, Theseus takes Ariadne to Dia Isle where he leaves her, feeding her, like an offering, to the goddess Diana. The painting shows her waking up to see Theseus ship had sailed and she has her forearm over her forehead in despair. It had to have been a political statement, more or less, of a British view of the American revolution. This stuff fascinates me.

So further Ironies, after further irony, was when I discovered Hegel was born in 1770. I started trying to link it to America and I found the story leading up to the revolution itself, that very year. I had wrote in an essay to the Women in Art class about colonialism, that Britain, who had basically saved the world from the Spanish Armada was now the perceptively evil force 200 years later. Now its 200 years later again! Well, I'm not going to say what America does because I actually don't have a complete understanding. I can just go off the news. I do know that, I don't believe Hillary is the best person to be talking, on our behalf, to .. Russia. She's no Ronald Reagan! I saw the Walmart documentary, and it's totally crazy stuff. Also, since writing this, I saw To Big To Fail which is an awesome!Documentary-Drama. Everyone should check it out.

I read that Hegel had said something about the Universal Idea. I didn't actually find it in the selection that I have, and I don't do a great job of explaining his version of Dialectic but it helped tie me into the Digital era. .. Computers, the Internet, now, what seems to be this Universal Idea, the "Search"

Now that we are in the "Search," we're doomed.

And here is where I had to "blame the Hammer and not the one who swings it."

The single most important part of any business, today, is being in the top of the search results. It's like putting every hope all around the world, on the commercials. Remember getting excited about the commercials we were gonna see on Super Bowl Sunday? Imagine if economies, globally, became reliant on Super Bowl Sunday commercials. Then, without so much as a warning, they ALL sucked.

I just feel very trapped by social networking. It's all over the news and I spent 8 years bouncing around their tech support departments and they ruined my life! They definitely didn't help it and I truly hope the world can survive their plan. They want complete reliance, so everything and everyone is on their service. I had not logged into my Writing Forums account in months! But I came back because Google + gets so crazy.

The computer is a tool. It does not control my life any more than the soldering iron and pliers I have on my workbench. The Internet is a resource. It does not control my life any more than the Corozal Town Library or the National Archives which are also resources for me to use when I need them. Both the computer and the Internet can be used to advantage, or misused.

The carpenter swings the hammer to drive a nail to build a house. The Vandal swings a hammer to destroy what someone else has built. The Internet, including Google, can be used to build and it can also be used to destroy. Do not blame the computer, the Internet, Google, or any other part of today's technology for the harm you may see in them. Blame those who misuse the tools.

Regarding Hegel, I would suggest you read less about what people say he said and more of what he did say. That is prompted by your comment 'I read that Hegel had said something about the Universal Idea.'

Social networking on the 'net is a trap best avoided altogether. My social networking centres around coffee shops and bars, meetings I attend, visits back and forth with friends, and stopping to talk with people on the street. All of this 'networking' is face to face, augmented as need be by email.

Join the real world. It's a great place to live.

Originally Posted by garza

The computer is a tool. It does not control my life any more than the soldering iron and pliers I have on my workbench. The Internet is a resource. It does not control my life any more than the Corozal Town Library or the National Archives which are also resources for me to use when I need them. Both the computer and the Internet can be used to advantage, or misused.

The carpenter swings the hammer to drive a nail to build a house. The Vandal swings a hammer to destroy what someone else has built. The Internet, including Google, can be used to build and it can also be used to destroy. Do not blame the computer, the Internet, Google, or any other part of today's technology for the harm you may see in them. Blame those who misuse the tools.

Regarding Hegel, I would suggest you read less about what people say he said and more of what he did say. That is prompted by your comment 'I read that Hegel had said something about the Universal Idea.'

Social networking on the 'net is a trap best avoided altogether. My social networking centres around coffee shops and bars, meetings I attend, visits back and forth with friends, and stopping to talk with people on the street. All of this 'networking' is face to face, augmented as need be by email.

Join the real world. It's a great place to live.

but the "real world" is quickly becoming universalized through this "search", as the OP calls it. this isn't really a "blame the hammer" scenario
when so much of real life in a civilized culture depends upon the hammer. life itself when forced to exist through this kind of abstraction can
really only deteriorate into a kind of emotionless garble where "real" itself becomes abstract. you talk about your interaction in coffee shops...
...when i walk past coffee shops in this city, i see half the people in there sitting at a table with their laptops open, absorbed in this abstraction.

Aye, dale, but the fault lies not with the laptops nor with the wi-fi, but with those engaged in a new form of intense belly-button observation. This abstraction in which they are absorbed leads them to dis-engage from the real world. That abstraction is like the world of Ferris Bueler. It's an imaginary world filled with imaginary playmates And that world produces nothing but reflections of itself.

The technology is a blessing. My netbook goes with me on the road. I open it in the National Archives and in libraries where I'm doing research. I use it to take notes during interviews and in the gathering of oral history, though there is also a pair of digital voice recorders running at the same time. When I talk with an alcalde in a remote Mayan village or interview the head of some government department I'm face to face with that person. That's real-world.

Look at how rapidly elements in that abstraction bloom and fade. How many social networking sites have there been, and how many have either disappeared or are on the way out? Even the ubiquitous Facebook is showing signs of late Summer droop. Is Google+ the next biggie? My money is on some as-yet-unknown whizkid waiting in the wings with an all new concept that will sweep everything before it, at least for a season.

Use the technology as an augmentation of the real world, not as its replacement. Or else pay attention to the sign over the gateway to obsessive social networking: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Originally Posted by garza

Use the technology as an augmentation of the real world, not as its replacement. Or else pay attention to the sign over the gateway to obsessive social networking: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate.

It may be a stretch to compare social networking to the sign above the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno, but I for one understand your argument. I've seen first-hand the perils of sites like Facebook, and I wouldn't entertain being a part of them were it not for the publication advantages they have for new authors. They're also a good place to find friends who have emigrated. Aside from that, they're a den of gossip and self-aggrandisement. Everywhere I look, pointless status reports of "In Wexford for the weekend" and so on are all that greet me. I don't incline to this new fad of airing every part of your life on a social networking site. For one, it really does come across as self-important. For another, telling the entire cyber world that your house is going to be vacant for a weekend is not exactly the smartest move in the book.

Facebook will fade; just like MySpace and the seldom-mentioned Bebo did before it. Something will come along to take its place. Whether that 'something' will be better or worse remains to be seen.

Originally Posted by garza

Look at how rapidly elements in that abstraction bloom and fade. How many social networking sites have there been, and how many have either disappeared or are on the way out? Even the ubiquitous Facebook is showing signs of late Summer droop.

Precisely.

They don't realize that these sites were designed by teenage, bbs hacks from the 80's, who are dismantling global economies; uprooting the same country that rejected them when they had to "fight for the right to party."

Google is being honored at Cannes! And its not Aesthetics. But Google employs, literally, near or over 100,000 people. Facebook has like 1 or 2 thousand.

It's not the online experience that bugs me, its the crash and burn economics, it's the East Coast, watching these computer companies out here in California take away the very foundation of all that was America and one day saying f-this... California companies that over complicate and embellish their standards of employment while changing every other invention and market into DIY.

Now that's honorable advertising? Discolored BBCode frames (and a Botnet, algorithmically randomized with hop jumping, scaled over time, mathematically, based on evolving data, that updates, that clicks these ads, for revenue)

I'm really not getting the point of this article. It's attributing motives to an inanimate object. Computers are glorified calculators programmed to respond in a particular manner. As our technology advances the responses grow in their complexity, but we have yet to design any self-willed machines.

Your BIOS does a number of things, all of them being preprogrammed responses to actions from the very first second power is provided. There is no transition of leadership, as that would imply any of the hardware has actually initiated some self-willed action. Even the transition from the BIOS to the OS on the master drive is simply a series of responses moving seamlessly from one piece of interconnected hardware to the next. Without will there is no true master/slave relationship as humans have historically experienced it.

"Slave" drives are not beholden to the "master" as humans would be. Where a human has to subjugate another's will to enforce the relationship, slave drives merely respond as they have been programmed to do. Any sort of personification of the process is good storytelling at best.

As for "We are hiding in a virtual reality that goes against the very idea of Democracy because we are eliminating physical presence storefronts and offices without voting": the marketplace is one of the truest democracies on the planet because shoppers "vote" with their dollars with every purchase. If the physical storefronts and offices are closing due to lack of business, they have lost the vote. To step in and try to sustain them through some artificial form is the true death of democracy.

Originally Posted by Capulet

There is no transition of leadership, as that would imply any of the hardware has actually initiated some self-willed action. Even the transition from the BIOS to the OS on the master drive is simply a series of responses moving seamlessly from one piece of interconnected hardware to the next. Without will there is no true master/slave relationship as humans have historically experienced it.

"Slave" drives are not beholden to the "master" as humans would be.

Granted, it was a weak analogy. That is an area that's cry's out for revision. What I meant is the programming in the Bios looks for the OS in a dialectic pattern. A Bios can't run an OS, what it finds is the main drive to hand-off too, what it detects is not even an OS itself, just a speculatively reasonable environment or you couldn't have (x) number of different OS's or (x) number of new OS versions.

And I don't think a human slave is beholden. Which is the reasoning against slavery through dialectic, dependency doesn't hold true which is best illustrated by certain situations in the south after emancipation when some slaves stayed and became employed by their pre-emancipation owners. Others ran like hell through treacherous tunnels to escape choke chains and cattle prodding.