Tag: social media

EARWORM GARDEN // MOBY & THE VOID PACIFIC CHOIR

Today’s earworms come complete with feel-good feel-bad social awareness messages.

Watch the following if you concede to mass torture of feeling, perhaps sentient, creatures for your palatal pleasure. Yes, Moby’s promoting veganism, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Watch the following if you – wait, what I was going to write was that you should watch it if you use the Internet or own a smartphone, but if you’re here reading this, yeah, that includes you any way you cut it. It’s you, it’s me, it’s our lives now, and it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

LINK: WE LIVE IN A FUTURE WHERE OUR ATTENTION IS CHEAPLY SOLD

Intelligent article (qz.com) about how the switch from scarcity of knowledge to the scarcity of attention that has occurred since we all became connected through the internet means that the new global currency has become our attention, a resource corporations and advertising firms are currently feasting on. In fact,

Limitless access to knowledge brings limitless opportunity—but only to those who learn to manage the new currency: their attention. In the new economy, the most valuable asset you can accumulate may not be money, may not be wealth, may not even be knowledge, but rather, the ability to control your own attention, and to focus.

Because until you are able to limit your attention, until you are able to turn away, at will, from all of the shiny things and nipple slips—until you are able to consciously choose what has value to you and what does not, you and I and everyone else will continue to be served up garbage indefinitely. And it will not get better, it will get worse.

See also: FATE OF THE INTERNET

LINK: MY STRUGGLE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA AND OTHER ESSAYS

All links to High Existence:

My Struggle with Social Media: A Diatribe on Ego and Honesty

…so if I unfriend or ignore you online, I hope you understand. But if you see me go on some friending frenzy you’ll know I found something worth telling the world about. I will have found a banner I can wave that doesn’t read, “Look at me!” Rather, it might read, “Look at us. Poor, sorry, beautiful us.”

A Philosopher’s Guide to Facebook Envy

“It’s a real taboo to mention envy, but if there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy…”

– Alain de Botton

Do you ever feel negative emotions while browsing the web? If you do you’re not alone. A recent study showed 1 in 3 people feel more depressed after visiting social media sites like Facebook. Psychologists call this phenomenon as ‘Facebook envy’.

Best-selling philosopher Alain Botton has pointed out that because Facebook envy is one of the least talked about emotions, it has the power to potentially destroy your life and prevent you from achieving your dreams. To stop this from happening to you, Alain de Botton has invented what he calls the ‘envy diary technique’.

By using the envy diary technique outlined in this post you’ll be able to transform negative emotions like Facebook envy, jealously and frustration into motivation and confidence, allowing you to achieve your goals with more speed and more ease.

The Envy Diary Technique

Whenever you feel envy:

  1. Acknowledge it.
  2. Write down the cause.
  3. Repeat.
  4. Look for a pattern.

Social Media is Distorting Your Creative Vision, and You Don’t Even Know It

What drives your creative work? Money? Fame? Success? If you’re an artist, you’re probably answering “no way”— meaning drives you. Finding purpose or making your life meaningful is your deepest priority, even if it’s not the priority you act on most. (Let’s face it, if living a meaningful life consisted of following an indubitable recipe, we’d all do it. But it doesn’t.)

Whether subtly or profoundly, we all experience this drive for meaning. And though the cause of this drive seems unidentifiable, it’s by searching for it that we add meaning to our lives. Art is just one way we undertake this search. The difficulty, though, with making art is remaining honest, and often our truest desires get supplanted with the desires of others. If you’re struggling to find artistic fulfillment, it may have nothing to do with your skill set or methodology, and everything to do with unquestioned motivations.

For some time now my own work (writing) has felt polluted. I’ve struggled to achieve a sense of honesty, so I recently began exploring why. What I found is an intoxicating ideology and social media as the dominant carrier of it. Together they chloroformed me, stifling my creativity and sapping the pleasure from my work.

CONGRATULATIONS

status_update

This popped up on my FB feed today.

I played with the idea of simply posting “congratulations” as a comment under this update. I didn’t. I figured that if I’m not interested in this information, I should simply unfriend this person, not post a sarcastic comment.  But if I’m not interested in being friends with this person, what is it, I wonder, that is keeping me from expressing my disdain?

Something about Facebook makes it very hard to criticise people who are using Facebook as intended, i.e. for carefully constructing a small shrine in their name open to the public. It only allows for a very limited range of types of interaction. Your options are: 1) liking, 2) commenting, and 3) ignoring, and this is starting to reflect on real-life interactions, with the “we’re all such good friends!” taking the cake. Ever heard of “if you have nothing nice to say, better say nothing at all?” It’s an axiom way older than Facebook itself, sure, but its validity today is constantly being reinforced by the congratulatory nature of social media. Your circle exists to feed your ego, not challenge it, and if there is ever some kind of challenge placed, it’s in the passive-aggressive form of Facebook envy, that is comparing your backstage to other people’s highlight reel, as they say, which, by the way, never ever leads to any positive feelings at all.

What if I told you that whenever you post something on Facebook to show off and make others notice you, some of them secretly hate you for it because they envy you and can’t be like you? What if I told you that that number is probably the majority of your precious friends?

What the fuck went wrong?