On set today, I learned that one of my co-workers had been attacked on\u00a0his way to work.\u00a0 Apparently an “emotionally disturbed person,” naked, was walking the bridge as\u00a0my\u00a0co-worker\u00a0biked along it.\u00a0 My co-worker was attacked–hit by a bat or punched, I’m not sure–left with knocked-out teeth and a broken jaw.\u00a0 The assailant fortunately was caught.<\/p>\n
I hit Google News for the facts on the story.\u00a0 I had missed the announcements on set about his injury and was only hearing bits and pieces and wanted to get up to speed.\u00a0 I found one article and read it.\u00a0 I also read about 8 comments that were posted on it.\u00a0 The first one read quite despicably: The commenter essentially said that it was bizarre stories like these that motivate him or her\u00a0to get up in the morning.\u00a0 I passed my smartphone onto another co-worker for her to read the story.\u00a0 She too read the comments and she too took offense to their despicable nature.<\/p>\n
There were but a few of us sitting around and a conversation began about the nature of the internet and how it leads to such removal from stories.\u00a0 Obviously, we were quite affected by the story of this person in this strange story because he was someone we knew.\u00a0 The commenters, mostly likely, had no idea who this person was.\u00a0 Their dissociation from our feelings and his feelings left them disaffected–or at least disaffected relative to our feelings and his feelings.\u00a0 We agreed that something about the internet brings out this disaffect; likely, the relative anonymity provided by the internet encourages the utterance of less polite, more thoughtless, and more impolite communications.\u00a0 Had these commenters had identifiable personas we could address directly, likely many of these sorts of comments they would not make.<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t just that the internet is a land of anonymity that was the problem.\u00a0 I argued that we currently generally have a value system that encourages instantaneous and immediate reaction.\u00a0 We have Facebook which encourages continual status updates.\u00a0 We have Twitter which encourages the same, albeit a bit more immediately.\u00a0 Social networking seems to be mostly about connecting now with people it would take years to track down, and commuicating with them now rather than via letter, or phone call.\u00a0 Texting also pressures immediacy; a text that goes unreplied can set up in the current culture greater demand for response and a compulsion for immediate reaction, more so than a phonecall or voicemail would demand.<\/p>\n
The combination of an anonymous internet and a value in immediacy breeds what those of us in this conversation agreed wasn’t what we wanted: Bullshit.<\/em><\/p>\n We didn’t say it, but that’s what we were talking about.\u00a0 There was bullshit being hocked online in the\u00a0comments about my co-worker.\u00a0 There was a lack of filter.\u00a0 There was reactivity and perhaps hyper-reactivity exhibited in the commenters’ behavior.\u00a0 We weren’t talking about bullshit as much as we were talking about immediacy of reaction, the lack of consideration for the consequences of immediate reactions, and (this is where general semantics comes right in) the lack of the ability to delay one’s reactions.<\/p>\n Signal reactions–that is, immediate reactions–contribute to a whole lotta bullshit.\u00a0 Symbol reactions–that is, delayed reactions–may be the most effective combatant toward reducing a whole lotta bullshit.\u00a0 Bullshit will still reside and slip through, but it won’t pollute the internet as much as it does now and is on course to do.<\/p>\n Are we talking about social maintenance?\u00a0 Yes, I suppose we are.\u00a0 But we had here a collection of people who all pretty much exhibited agreement that there was something wrong in the despicable behavior.\u00a0 Perhaps this value judgment is similar to the judgment passed against murder, that there’s something wrong in that behavior, too.\u00a0 Or rape.\u00a0 Or fraud.\u00a0 There are particular behaviors as a culture we promote, and there are particular behaviors as a culture we demote, even ban, and it is the promotion of immediate reaction that is going to dirty up, clog, etc., our\u00a0virtual world\u00a0as the promotion of fossil fuels for transport and heat might dirty up our actual world.<\/p>\n I didn’t get to make the point because then we started rolling on set and had to be quiet.\u00a0 But the point I was about to make was in answer to the question, How do we get our kids away from this kind of behavior?\u00a0 My thought was this: Get them to become scientists.\u00a0 Get them to become journalists.\u00a0 In both professions, the value is on delayed reaction.\u00a0 Perhaps delayed reactions are more valued in science than in journalism.\u00a0 Whatever the profession, both teach that instantaneous judgment often does not tell the story.\u00a0 More information is needed.\u00a0 More data must be collected.\u00a0 Even then, the story is not done.\u00a0 While an experiment may be finished or a news story published, there is still more of the story to tell, information left out, data to collect, and so on.<\/p>\n I wonder how many readers of online tabloids believe without question the captions put around the photographs of their\u00a0beloved-to-gawk-at stars.\u00a0 You get the sense based on commenters’ posts underneath those photos that many of them eat up every word.<\/p>\n I remember working on a film with an A-List star, and tabloid information that was blatantly false would come out in articles.\u00a0 Tabloids would feast off of other tabloid stories, creating more bullshit.\u00a0 As a result, there’s a whole bullshit story built online about the A-Lister.\u00a0 Then, a day or so later,\u00a0tabloids in other countries would pass on the bullshit to their readers.\u00a0 By week’s end, people in Mumbai<\/em> were reading bullshit about the A-List star.\u00a0 Did the Mumbai newspaper check the facts, delay\u00a0its reactions?\u00a0 And furthermore, did their readers in reading the story?\u00a0 You get the sense, Probably not …<\/em><\/p>\n A child who becomes a scientist will likely be a scientist at his or her work, but will not necessarily be a scientist about his or\u00a0her personal life.\u00a0 A scientist may exercise a cautious uncertainty when making a determination after performing an experiment, but that same scientist may exhibit a reckless certainty when making a determination about whether his wife has been faithful.\u00a0 That’s the facts, and my hope is that the scientist can take his work home with him, so to speak.<\/p>\n And that was the interest of one Alfred Korzybski.\u00a0 Alfred Korzbyski hoped the same for scientists.\u00a0 Furthermore, he hoped that we, too, would apply scientific practices in our own lives.\u00a0 He hoped we’d observe.\u00a0 He hoped we’d delay our reactions.\u00a0 He hoped we’d take in data.\u00a0 He hoped we would reject the desire to express certainty and tend toward a more uncertain perspective.\u00a0 He wanted us to bring scientific practice into our everyday behavior: our thinking, our language, our transactions and interactions with others and with reality, and so on.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 To reduce delusion.\u00a0 I’ll put it differently: To reduce bullshit.\u00a0 It was bullshit that was clouding our perceptions of reality, making more problematic our problems.\u00a0 Clearing the bullshit allowed us to see our problems more clearly, and to advance finally toward their solutions.<\/p>\n Alfred Korzybski’s teachings were largely teachings in becoming scientific in our orientation.\u00a0 He was teaching us to move our mindsets out of the classical, “aristotelian” mindsets developed in the past.\u00a0 He encouraged us to take on more modern, “non-aristotelian” mindsets, developed and honed as scientific understandings of the material world developed and honed.\u00a0\u00a0 His teachings were called “general semantics.”\u00a0 They might as well have been called “new sense.”<\/p>\n The social media revolution begets a value system of immediacy, and with that value system comes pollution of social media with bullshit.\u00a0 An education in scientific practice–an education in Alfred Korzybski’s teachings–an education in general semantics<\/em>–an education in new sense<\/em>–runs contrary to the value system of immediacy.\u00a0 With an education in general semantics comes a value of delayed reaction, which affords time to consider the consequences of one’s behavior, whether in writing a despicable comment or judging a story as true.\u00a0 In that delay howsoever short, the desire to contribute to the heaps of present bullshit may be diminished.\u00a0 With repeated delays by populations of social media users, social media may start to contribute less noise and more music.<\/p>\n General semantics had a heyday in the 1940s, when propagandistic bullshit abounded.\u00a0 It helped people to screen out bullshit in a period of warfare and insanity.\u00a0 General semantics has a new opportunity in targeting the insanity brought out by the social media revolution and its value of immediacy.\u00a0 It too can help people screen out bullshit’s resurgence.<\/p>\n In short, teach general semantics.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On set today, I learned that one of my co-workers had been attacked on\u00a0his way to work.\u00a0 Apparently an “emotionally disturbed person,” naked, was walking the bridge as\u00a0my\u00a0co-worker\u00a0biked along it.\u00a0 My co-worker was attacked–hit by a bat or punched, I’m not sure–left with knocked-out teeth and a broken jaw.\u00a0 The assailant fortunately was caught. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[94,143,134,103,139,325,78,136,142,140,81,135,137,144,104,138,141],"class_list":["post-804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-alfred-korzybski","tag-anonymity","tag-bullshit","tag-delayed-reactions","tag-facebook","tag-general-semantics","tag-general-principle-of-uncertainty","tag-immediacy","tag-internet","tag-new-sense","tag-science","tag-signal-reactions","tag-social-media","tag-status-updates","tag-symbol-reactions","tag-twitter","tag-uncertainty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}