Peers of. Social Media

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Head Notes

Four regular (not fake) news stories:

BBC news: Coronavirus Doctor’s Diary: “Fake news makes people think we want them to die.” (link)

Abc news: Due to social media “news,” people are attacking 5G communication masts (towers) across Europe, so then sometimes loved ones cannot speak to dying relatives in isolation in hospital. (link)

Sun news UK, with photographs: celebrities are advising followers that 5G towers are dangerous, as of 18 April social media followers have attacked 53 masts. (link)

Aljazeera news: Yes, it’s a Russian conspiracy: SOMEONE wants us to believe that masts cause corona. (link)

Hello Reader,

Got social peers?

Everybody likes having peers, everybody. A man once told me he bought a heavy metal concert T-shirt so that other fans of metal would find him. Not all peers are so obvious. It was E.M. Forster, in his oft-reprinted essay Two Cheers for Democracy, (link) who said that he belonged to an unspoken society of people who silently recognize each other. I suppose we can belong to overlapping groups, some vast and public, some small and quiet. 

As for those who are unthinking, unreflective, and reflexively trying always to conform as much they can, I wonder if they feel special, perhaps comforting themselves that by being so much in the majority they are so much more special than nerds and folks less classy. I really don’t know. 

A computer nerd, Paul Graham, once wrote that if you find yourself agreeing with absolutely everything believed by your surrounding culture, then you might want to think about that… I’ve read every one of Paul’s essays on the web. Read them without commenting, that is, as I don’t like his commenting peers. (On sites like Reddit and Ycombinator)

Yet I often comment for musician and computer programmer Derek Sivers, another original web writer. His peers I like. On one of Derek’s comment threads someone complimented him by saying Derek had done like Cameron in the teen movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Derek replied, “Huh?” (link to blog) So I joined in. I said I didn’t get the compliment either, but at least I enjoyed the excuse to watch the movie, on DVD, and I provided a link for everyone to a review by critic Roger Ebert, a review with a thread of eight comments. (link to review)   

I reflected on how (except maybe once on VHS with a few university students) 

I hadn’t seen the movie since I had first caught it in the theatre. Around that time, speaking of conformity, I had noticed that folks would rush out the instant the credits started. So I would tell my movie companion that if we had a good reason to rush, such as to get to a car park, then OK, but let’s not rush blindly for no reason. So I saw the end of the Ferris credits. This would have been back when only funny guys like Peter Sellers or Jackie Chan added anything at the end, decades before Marvel started adding treats. 

It was on the Web, on some thread I’ve long forgotten, that I found several people saying that Ferris comes out of the bathroom at the end of the credits. How distasteful. I privately thought, “No way, the movie is not that low!” But who was I to disagree with social Internet media?

Now I’ve rewatched it. My memory has been right all along, the “several people” who are not my peers are not correct. Who are these people? I will tell you what I imagine: They are the sort who forward social media. Who write social media. Whose peers are each other, a low sort who carelessly play the stereo louder than they know their neighbors would like, drive with a fuzzy regard for the two second rule, cheat at solitaire and murmur vague obscenities. (Janis Ian) They are people who innocently pass on social fake news as truth, innocently get alarmed at what’s on social media, and then tell folks right away about the COVID social news they just read… while seeing their peers, with self-satisfaction, as being worldly.

I wonder: Do these guys mean to lie about the ending of Ferris Bueller? I can’t say, but I can say they don’t mean to take pains to be honest about everything they say or write. I get it: As long as many people are most comfortable around peers who believe in “careless, fuzzy truth” there will always be a place for fake social media.

Meanwhile, in the regular, traditional media where any reporter’s peers, including her editor, demand “journalism ethics,” comes this COVID story: According to a hospital doctor in the UK, social media fake news is causing people to avoid hospitals. (see the first link at the head notes) I can sympathize with the doctor. 

I’m sure it’s hard to explain to a patient’s distraught wife “the theory and practise of social media” with only a quick sound bite—better to try to discredit a specific falsehood— hard to explain that her beloved brother-in-law, meaning no disrespect to him, is mistaken when he endorses and forwards something on social media. 

In everyday life? Perhaps a good compromise is to say to your brother-in-law: If the social media story is true, and if we can wait for a day, then ethical journalists will pounce on the story and report to us in detail. 

Furthermore, if real media does not show 5G towers causing any COVID, then please don’t attack the towers! Don’t attack based on social media. Let’s remember that real journalists practise “real journalism,” while many people cannot even define proper journalism. 

My not-so-common sense is: If from social media you hear something such as electrical towers causing a virus, or white vinegar curing COVID, or alien flying saucers have just landed on the Washington Mall, and if you wait just one day… and then all you hear from the eager capitalist reporters is crickets… then you might want to think about that…

In my own life—where “I don’t do Facebook,” because I despise the ethically-challenged company director, Mark Zuckerberg— …my secret peers remain homely everyday folk who would act, speak and write with the same self-respect as a journalist.

Sean Crawford, 

as COVID fake “news” infects social media, 

Spring, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~A Texan who has a “bachelor of science degree in mass communications” was arrested and lost his job after his fake COVID news on social media. He is now out on bail. (link)

~Mark Manson on his blog says something similar to me, and he even provides a URL for you to re-post it on social media.

~My recent social media piece is archived March 25.

~I documented how Russian Trolls Meet Social Media, archived December 2019.

~Gordon Corera, BBC News Security Consultant, recently recently reported on an EU report:

The authors also say there is "significant evidence of covert Chinese operations on social media", citing reports of networks on Twitter with ties to the Chinese government.

The report also singles out Russia for spreading disinformation, saying pro-Kremlin sources and Russian state media were continuing to run a coordinated campaign with the aim of undermining the EU and its crisis response and sowing confusion about the origins and health implications of Coronavirus.

~Janis Ian sang At Seventeen back in the seventies. I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a remake of her piece. Some songs, like Mac the Knife, and some movies, like Casablanca and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, just can’t be remade.

Warm Fuzzy Comments

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got warm fuzzy comment?

Just as modern readers may enjoy a two page “flash fiction” as much as a normal short story, so too may I offer a careful web comment as if it were a “flash essay.” Hence my best writing is often my comments on other people’s blogs. Queerly, I never make copies for myself as souvenirs, instead, I let all my darlings rush away like sparkling salmon in the stream.

Recently another-commenter replied to my comment. This time with a difference: He took my words and made a poem!

The blog was by novelist John Scalzi, called Whatever. Scalzi’s post was entitled Behold My Drinks Fridge (August 29, 2019) It included a photograph of his second refrigerator being turned into a “beer cooler.” There were—get this—scores and scores of comments in the thread. My first comment is below. My second comment was a short one: “As of Saturday midmorning…” and then just before I hit the “post” button, I hit the “return” key to add:

“Strange: Nobody’s written a poem yet.”

As for ‘no poem,’ a couple comments later were my own words, sent back to me:

QUOTE

Kevin McLeod Bailey says:

AUGUST 31, 2019 AT 12:56 PM

Sean:

Are you sure?

As of

Saturday midmorning

I count

125 comments

about

a humble refrigerator

With all

due respect to world peace

sometimes

the simple pleasures

are what

we talk about.

UNQUOTE

Now, that’s a warm fuzzy.

Say, dear reader, as salmon swim away in the stream, in case you’re curious, my first comment was: 

QUOTE

Sean Crawford says:

AUGUST 29, 2019 AT 8:25 PM

Nostalgia: Only a few years ago, as a tourist, I visited a regional dump serving three towns, it was just like the dump of my childhood (In the city we use garbage cans) Chatting with the old gate shack guy, he explained that a fellow comes around with a rod to suck out the (R-14?) from all the refrigerators, as an environmental thing, protecting the ozone layer.

In my own big city dump, the young guy at the gate won’t let you in unless your vehicle has a load to drop off. Those are his orders.

As for refrigerators, sometimes, like Philip K. Dick reaching for a light bulb string that isn’t there, I wait for my refrigerator to go click when I close the door. But no, it’s all magnets now. As a boy our fridge had a round plastic handle on the inside, (cool!) so a trapped child could get back out.

Here on the Great Plains, nearly all my city’s streets were laid down after ice boxes were no longer needed. A fellow in my toastmasters club did a speech explaining the new fangled technology behind his modern “beer cooler.”

UNQUOTE

EPILOGUE 

Regarding comments being read, and being Noticed:

Recently (September 2019) I sent an e-mail to a world famous blogger, Derek Sivers.

You may wonder: 

If Derek gets hundreds of comments for most of his posts, (sometimes six or seven hundred) 

then is there any use in commenting? Would he ever notice little-old-me or you?

Sure he would. I e-mailed Derek, to warn that his mass mail out wasn’t reaching everyone. Part of his reply included:

“…Good to hear from you. Thanks again for your comments on the blog. I see and appreciate them all. :-)”

I guess the overall lesson for today’s post, coming from a poet-commenter and a big blogger, is that everything we do gets noticed, at some level. 

Sean Crawford

On the romantic rolling prairie,

September 2019,

Posted April 2020

Atheism on Mars, Imperialism in Canada

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got love of creatures?

(Got distaste for imperialism?)

Love of Creatures

War of the Worlds Poem

...Pause for Blog Identification

Bonus material

Epilogue

Love of Creatures

There’s a church hymn, a “Doxology.” You may have read it or heard it. I have the words in my annotated copy of The Secret Garden.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,

Praise Him all creatures here below

Praise him above ye Heavenly Host 

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Amen

Here is a link to some singers; they repeat the lines.

The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire, the same region where years later a famous veterinarian, who also wrote It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, cribbed from another hymn for his book title, All Creatures Great and Small. Link to pictures as kids off camera are singing.

I must confess that after reading the doxology, my own poem seems dull. 

I composed in the shadow of the London Museum of Natural History, featuring respectful exhibits for Darwin and the balance of nature. The British even put Darwin’s ship on their five pound note: I think that’s because the British are, as a Columbian engineer told me, so empirical. They also had a coin (which I never saw) of Darwin facing an ape: I think that’s because they are “just saying no” to having Yankee imperialism from powerful Christians in the city of Washington and the state of Tennessee. 

Yes Virginia, the Yanks imperialize. 

Luckily, the United Kingdom is a “have nation,” as the U.S. federal government, in the name of "the people," denies aide funding to any nation where "the people" allow abortion. 

The republic of Ireland, 

(a catholic nation with an openly homosexual before-he-was-elected prime minister) 

last I heard, was about to “just say no” to the U.S. on that one, rather than have their innocent lonely girls going over to the U.K. for their (legal-in-the-UK) medical procedure) 

In my favorite “have nation,” Canada, according to the most recent Conservative party prime minister, abortion is legal and remains legal, with no opposing bills to be raised by the Conservatives in parliament, because the Canadian people do not want that can of worms opened. He did not, of course, apologize to our U.S. neighbours for our differing views on everyday life.

As for life far, far away from Earth, you may recall the sinister Martians of H.G. Wells were evolving into creatures with simplified digestive tracts (they only took in fluids) and great round heads.

War of the Worlds Poem

God’s Creatures

Camouflage meets eye

Stout armor meets teeth

Toxin dances with anti-toxin

Day mice dare the sky birds

Nocturnal mice meet the owl

A feather floats on currents of air

Centipede legs are fleet

Millipede legs will ram

Creatures circle and gyre

Island dodos grow larger

Across time dodos grow

Across space Martians grow

Heads grow as limbs shrink

Grow and increase and drink blood

Without God

...Pause for Blog Identification 

You are reading

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2020 

Bonus Material

Distasteful Yankee imperialism: 

During Obama’s administration, the U.S. built enough oil pipelines (according to someone I overheard) to reach to the moon. The only pipeline that was opposed? The one that would have reached over the U.S. to almost meet tidewater in Texas, to almost break the U.S. world monopoly on buying Canadian oil. (It stops at a refinery) Meanwhile, both Europe and the U.S. have oodles of pipelines, but Canada, with the longest coastline in the free world, somehow has no room for either of the three—count ‘em, three—pipelines that would have gotten the oil out to Canada’s tidal coasts, escaping American clutches. Two were killed, the last survivor has been on life support for a few years: We will see what happens. 

As for the one that stops in Texas, at least this week our province invested heavily to get that pipeline finally built. We'll see.

In Canada, when someone proposed to “follow the money” to see who was funding anti-pipeline efforts, it was the communists and other leftists who were opposed, and were quoted saying so in the newspaper. Sure, the leftists like transparency for others, but communism is an ideology, and as with any ideology, their reality is stone, transparency is opposed. 

Decades ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, was supposed to give Canadians permission to legally have their own culture. But I read once in the paper that U.S.capitalists keep winning every time they oppose Canadian culture in court, such as, for example, a Canadian country and western magazine, so that Yankees can make money selling their own music magazine across the border. 

Well, maybe instead of country and western, young Canadian guitarists can sing the blues. A pity, for I had always thought it was charming how Canadian western culture did not mean “wildness” or six-guns being worn. Truly the CBC would never make a violent TV show about Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel “…a knight without armour in a savage land”)

Incidentally, here’s a link to that Paladin song the kids sing in the Stephen King movie Stand By Me. I used to sing it 

For my U.S. readers, if you are pleased with having your plausible denial, then OK, but if any of you wish to take a grownup interest in what your government is doing to imperialize in your name, then I think you might painlessly start with the arthouse feature film State of Siege. 

Here is a link to Roger Ebert’s movie review, at the very end of which some U.S. companies are mentioned, including (“but not limited to,” adds my Yankee lawyer) the United Fruit Company.  

(As it happens, a business executive in my toastmaster club did a seven minute speech on the imperialism of the United Fruit Company) 

Or view ( link to Ebert’s review) view the mainstream feature film Missing starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek. 

Or view (link to) the comprehensive-to-a-fault C.I.A. documentary On Company Business.

You may wonder:

By my posting this essay, am I hurting the feelings of, offending, my dear longhaired leftist fellow Canadians? No, I’m sorry to say. No, because those imperialist leftists, according to my blog research, won’t read my site.

Epilogue

Speaking of church music, in these COVID days you may wish to have a virtual choir, like this Youtube (three minute) spiritual, which has how to make one at the top of the comments. 

This song is on the Odyssey-inspired 1930’s movie with George Clooney, Brother Where Art Thou?