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30/12/2017

Sir Ringo Star? I mean - really?

Maybe he's spent the last (what, decades?) doing astonishingly good stuff for charities, I don't know.

Ringo Star might have just been sitting about.
 
(Mind you, if I did nothing else, and lived on Royalties all my life for being a third-rate drummer - I think I'D DO ASTONISHING THINGS FOR CHARITY).

It just seems impossibly WRONG somehow.  Sir Ringo Star.
Eulogize the mediocre so idiots like me can type about, THINK about this stuff . . .

12/12/2017

Facebook

“Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed,” he said. “It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re going to give up, how much of your intellectual independence.

I guess that headline looks a bit dramatic doesn't it? 

It came from today's Guardian - citing Chamath Palihapitiya (former vice-present for user growth - facebook) - the whole piece is HERE.

The topic obviously chimes (hits dead-on) with my own decision to ditch that platform a few months back.
I then started to realise that I have been sub-consciously charting this behaviour, for years and years - as I teach 16 to 18 year olds, and 20-somethings, for hours every week, every day of the week.

I've witnessed (the majority of) these young people change in their reactions to events (and their knowledge of, or accuracy of), speech patterns, attention span, shallowness of concerns, narrowness of their vision, inability to empathise  - at such an accelerated rate, it can only be down to some outside influence.
It's not 'them' and 'me'.  It's not age.  It's all happened too quickly, and mirrors too accurately what they're seeing, how they're seeing it, on their screens.

Not just FB, mind you.  Even the online version of our local rag (Dorset Echo - surely the worst website for user experience, load speed etc - ever developed in the entire history of the world wide web) is peppered liberally with some truly awful click-bait type stuff - on a news website?  We really have hit the crap here, I can tell you.

So where's it going?

Like so much of what we call 'freedom' or 'choice' - to me it's going toward that thing we all state we don't want.
Regulation.  The trouble is, in the 21st century, just who do we trust to regulate?