Filter Bubbles

::wipes dust off of blog::

Wow, sorry for the absence. I keep feeling like I want to write, but don't. I've been too busy working (12 days straight!), plus two classes and in my off-time, just consuming too much media to produce any of my own; a serious problem, but the product of low energy. Part of it, too, is a sort of depression. I think I may be having inklings of a midlife crisis here. Nothing full blown, but it's there.

One thing is that I'm getting to the age where I'm beginning to realize that my life is not going to be some epic thing, I'm probably not going to change the world, write the next great novel, do anything seriously earth shattering. Youth has that boundless optimism, but experience comes along and proves it wrong. I am an ordinary man, not some maverick, not likely to be a creative genius or do anything too amazing. I am likely to be one of the nameless massmen of the dustbin of history, who did nothing more noteworthy than to simply struggle to stay alive until he died, forgotten. It's kind of a disturbing notion to accept.

Plus, I'm starting to realize just how self-centered my life is. I've been stressing for more than a decade about what I'm to do with myself, both big stuff and little stuff. What to study, what career to choose, which trail to hike, which book to read, TV show to watch, etc etc. I've talked plenty about ego on here, but it's becoming distressingly clear just how caught up I am in myself. My life has become a sort of monument to my self. Here I read all these books, trying to learn things that have no actual application except to aggrandize my own self-image as a know-it-all. I live for myself, which is to live for nothing at all, yet I don't know how to get out of it. I feel I've gone too far that I've forgotten how to get back.

Partly, the problem is that my love of knowledge has become a sort of addiction to information. I remember back in the day, between 18 and 21, discovering Eastern religions, waking up to the political world (9/11 was my coming of age in that respect), learning about Peak Oil, inklings of cultural collapse, and all that stuff. It was like a punch in the face, everything seemed to open up and be illuminated. But the glow has worn off. I keep hoping that the next beautiful idea will change my life. Yet, it has largely devolved into a pointless addiction. The internet is especially bad for this. I can lose hours on Wikipedia without realizing it, following links. It is no different with books, though. And it's all a reflection of my own selfish interests.

I recently watched a debate on PBS, a show called Intelligence Squared, debating this proposition: The internet is closing our minds (podcast here). Interesting debate. I fell toward the "pro" position, though with some reservations. It seems to me (and those arguing the "pro" position) that often the internet becomes sort of a hall of mirrors, a giant narcissistic image of the self. Do we not more often search out things we agree with? I never go to FOX news website, but have often gone to places such as CommonDreams, alternative news and information. People filter their own information intake in this way.

Furthermore, there are filter bubbles (a TED video, whose speaker was also in the I2 debate), thanks to the "personalization" of Google and social media. Google tracks the sort of stuff you search, builds up a sort of database or rubric, then when you search something new, guesses at the sorts of websites you want to see. A liberal and a conservative will get different results when they search "Obama," the latter getting more stuff slanted towards the birther "debate" and Obamacare. Up to 60% of first-page links on a Google search will be personalized this way. Yet it is not generally known among internet users that this is going on, because you have to put two computers side by side to see the differences.

Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter can be bad in this way too, or worse. They are watching what you're watching, and helping tailor your internet experience. But basing the future on the past, so to speak, is idiotic. It is probably more important that we don't just keep plodding down the tracks of our old ideologies, but that we are exposed to new ideas.

Of course, you can still find anything on the internet, read any viewpoint you want, and expose yourself to all kinds of new ideas. And it is a wonderful way for people to connect. Atheists used to be all alone, usually; but now, they can get online, meet whole forums full of other atheists, and not feel so isolated. People into paleo-skills can find people with like interests and tons of resources to further their skill set. It's pretty amazing, really.

But this was my reservation against being on the "pro" side; basically the internet isn't closing the American mind, certain web companies are. Filter bubbles do exist, yet they aren't absolute. This is my experience. I've learned tons from the internet, though I also admit that I tend to gloss over dissenting viewpoints, often dismissing them out of hand as closed-minded conservative shills for big business. I read some of them, and enjoy a good debate, but I don't always have the time or inclination. And like any human, I prefer to have agreement than dissent. And with all the trolls and flamers out there on the interwebs, a good serious debate can be hard to come by, and the comment threads under an article are not conducive to anything but making quick sniping comments. It's just not the right format.

In the end, the "pro" position won. It was an good debate, proven by the fact that at the end I was less sure of my position than at the beginning; but I'm not sure it deserves the status of being called "Oxford style" debate. I feel that at Oxford, the debaters would present more clearly, define the question and their terms more strictly and explicitly, and be less informal. But it would be great to see political candidates debate that way.

Censorship

Sucka say what!?

I was watching Pillars of the Earth last night, a mini-series being shown on REELS channel, based on the Ken Follet novel of the same name. Besides noticing that the truth of "the book was better than the movie" yet holds true, I couldn't help but notice something else as well.

Isn't it weird the way we censor things? Here you have violent scenes, including main, likable characters being violently murdered, battle scenes with blood splashing everywhere, and so forth... but the brief glimpse of a woman's nipple during a love scene is fuzzed out. That's television; movies are different, yet, the same rule holds true in principle. In whatever medium, the showing of sex and/or the body always lags behind what they show of violence and death.

Look at Braveheart-- you have two people get their throats cut open in full view with blood flowing and everything, you have people getting limbs cut off, or a pick-axe slammed into his head, or an dagger stuck in his eye, or his face crushed with a mace... this graphic violence gets an R rating. Graphic sex, though, gets an X rating; they didn't actually show William Wallace screwing Murron. I mean, you'll never see a penis in an R rated movie, at least no more than a very quick flash in a non-sexual scene. In fact, the only time I can remember such a thing occurring was in Eastern Promises, in the very bloody fight scene in the Russian sauna. Viggo Mortensen's character was naked, attacked, and there was the moment's flash of his groin as he was thrown across the room. As for the nether regions of a woman in an R movie? Forget about it; I bet it's never been done.

Doesn't it seem odd that it's far more acceptable to show ugly acts of violence, but not beautiful acts of love-making? Personally I'd rather children saw the latter, instead of the former; yet the taboo goes the other way, for what would the action movie be without a ten minute gunfight, the severed limbs, the splashes of blood? Even just the sight of a nipple requires a pixellated blur, or an uproar on the Super Bowl. But is this really more harmful for a child to see than the thousands of enacted murders a kid sees by the time he's ten?

We as a civilization are really freaky weird about our bodies. Here's another example, I can only think of two instances of people sitting on the toilet on TV or the movies: one of the Lethal Weapons movies, where Danny Glover is on the shitter when he realizes there's a bomb attached, and once on Two and a Half Men. I feel like there may have been a couple more, but the point stands: something we all do several times a day is almost never shown on the screen. It's okay to ruin the body, but not to celebrate it in the act of love or as a beautiful thing in itself, or even to use it in it's normal functions.

It's not that I really want to watch people taking a shit on TV, but I'm just saying it's weird the taboo we have about our bodies. I know where it comes from, sort of; in general a Christian thing. The Romans had communal toilets in their public baths-- a row of shitters without stalls or walls, and instead of toilet paper, had a sponge on a stick, one for each latrine, used by all comers, washed in water trough after each time. Imagine that, eh? Lord knows they were violent, with their gladiator games and such, and they also had their orgies, their feasts (where they'd often intentionally vomit so they could go and eat even more). I guess the Christians reacted to this vulgar sensuality and hedonism, and took it too far the other way.

I also find it irritating how they censor cuss words. If someone says "God dammit," they bleep the God and leave the dammit! That's pretty weird. I recognize the hierarchy of badness for words, from ass and hell being weak, to shit and fuck, on up to cunt and nigger (dependant on context). But I'm beginning to notice they're sometimes not bleeping shit anymore, which is promising. I'm pretty much against censorship as a rule, especially when the issue is "protecting the children" from stuff they already know and words they already say.