Thoughts On Life and Social Media During a Snow ‘Bomb Cyclone’ –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Thick, wet white snow covers the ground again.

The wind out of the northwest continues to howl outside, causing the RV to shake a little sometimes.

The tall pine and hardwood trees sway back and forth here in the woods between these two big cities. As the sun comes up briefly and then fades for the day, a crescent moon appears over head, and I can just hear the barred owls chatting off in the distance.

It’s going to be cold again tonight, this Saturday, March 12, 2022, the day another “bomb cyclone” hammered the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. One symptom of how climate is changing as Earth warms.

Snow covers the campground again: Glynn Wilson

For a few moments I can at least imagine what this must have felt like here before the industrial and modern ages, as historians like to call the times.

But not for long.

It’s not my intention to go about surviving “Beyond the Edge.”

Electricity is a necessity. The source could be the sun or wind. But here it is a grid powered by coal fired power plants, maybe some gas, a little hydro, maybe nuclear. It powers lights, and of course a heater, computer, television, refrigerator and the obligatory coffee pot.

Internet access is also crucial, although I still like my free broadcast TV antenna. This is a rare place for that since between Maryland, Washington and Virginia, we pick up 62 usable channels, with some duplication, after blocking the shopping channels and the TV preachers. I don’t fully understand Spanish enough to enjoy it on television either, and speak none of the Asian languages. There are nine public television channels, three from each place.

Still, 62 channels is a fair amount of fodder for time passing entertainment.

With my own little fetish for the American West, several channels carry westerns all day long and all night too. You may be amazed to know just how many westerns they made in the heyday of Hollywood, some very good ones, many mediocre and quite a few bad ones. No matter. They live on, over the airwaves, no need for a satellite or cable.

The World Wide Web opens a door to the world on this 27-inch screen. Anything you want to watch, listen to or learn is out there.

Do you use it wisely?

As I listen to and glance at an old movie on the big screen with Kurt Russell called “The Quest,” which does have a couple of brothel scenes, what I’m really thinking about is what to make of social media these days?

There’s no escaping it as a chronicler of these times. A historian might choose to ignore it, or a science fiction writer might take our fantasies way out into the future.

So I would like to take a few minutes to try to discuss some of the pros and cons of widespread social media use, especially Facebook. Twitter is for the famous and those who chase them. I honestly don’t know how Instragram harms the psyches of kids and teenagers, or why people like spending so much time watching stupid, funny videos on YouTube or TikTok.

YouTube has its uses, but it has become a vehicle for misinformation, conspiracy theories and propaganda too.

I would love your input. How do you use it? What do you get out of it? What are your frustrations?

This is just my take, documenting this life and times. Some people seem to like it.

Without going into the entire history again of how I discovered the internet in grad school in 1994, and how I took to using it for consuming news and producing it like a duck takes to water, let’s just go back to 2008-2009 and work our way up to now.

When I first took a look at Facebook back during Obama’s successful campaign for president, I figured it might be worth a try but expected to be kicked off in a week or two. The only interest I had in Facebook was using it to help build an audience for my brand of news. I figured self promotion would be considered spam.

But it turned out everyone was using it for that, whether they had anything to promote or not other than their own egos. It worked. They never did kick me off, although the bots and algorithm programers and hackers at One Hacker Way did destroy and disappear my first page, right after I hit the max of 5,000 friends the first time.

Back in 2015-2016, I almost gave up and quit Facebook. Then it looked like Donald Trump might actually have a chance of getting elected president. And we decided to take a big trip out west, 6,000 miles in 28 days. So I started a new page and began building it. It hit 5,000 friends on Halloween just before the 2020 election.

So I’ve learned a few things, as probably one of the few people to hit 5,000 twice.

While it no doubt created a huge dent in the funding for newspapers and magazines and news gathering in general, it also facilitated a way to reach out and find readers in pretty amazingly simple ways. It’s still way cheaper than ink, paper and a printing press and delivery trucks, and freer too — in what you can publish.

As Mark Zuckerberg’s dating toy grew into the traffic monster money sucking machine it has become, it also gave many people a way to reach out not just to real friends and family, but to find a family and communities of people with common interests around their towns, states, the country and the world in some cases.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit it provided a place to interact with others when it was dangerous to do that in person.

For lonely older men and women, or young people maybe stuck in a far away rural place with not much access to suitable entertainment, it offered more than the passive viewing of television and a way to interact with others and let their opinions be known too.

For political news junkies and activists of all kinds, even with all its problems, it provides a forum for interacting and reaching out.

But like any system that is not well designed or smartly run, and goes mostly unregulated and is not well moderated, it breaks down in many ways and has negative and unintended consequences.

For some it helps with the loneliness. For others it just makes matters worse.

Some thrive on it. Some literally die because of it.

The biggest problem I see is how it can be misused. To promote and consume misinformation, conspiracy theories and propaganda. Access to information at your fingertips is great when it’s accurate. When it’s not, it is poison.

Even the people who are supposed to be the smart ones seem to waste massive amounts of time and bandwidth sharing silly nonsense. That’s their right, and I know for some it’s fun and entertaining.

But here we are facing an uncertain future, existential crises like nothing we have ever seen. I wish I could say something to get everyone to understand and get onboard. It just seems impossible. The genie is out of the bottle, and the wishes are not all granted. Nor are they all good for people, communities or the planet.

Clearly the creator of this monster has lost interest in it, now calling his company Meta. Mark Zuckerberg is consumed with virtual toys he can play with along with his kids. Good for him. He cashed in. Where does that leave the rest of us?

Ask the people of Ukraine. Invaded and bombarded by a tyrannical dictator. Did social media help them?

We could be next. Trump used Twitter and YouTube as well as TV to ascend to power and then abuse the hell out of our White House, nearly crashing American Democracy in the act.

How we use the media and social media going forward will play an important part in what our future will look like — to the extent we have a future.

If we don’t all get busy using this power for good, and soon, all hope may be lost.

I’m trying to decide now whether to remain in Washington somehow through November, to see what happens in the election, or living my dream of going out west all the way to California and the Pacific Ocean. I’ve never been to Yosemite, or seen sequoias and redwood trees.

I’ve never seen the inside of a brothel either. But those days are probably long gone anyway.

What do you think I should do, we should do?

I want to Protect Democracy, Preserve the Earth, and Savor Life — for as long as I possibly can.

What a balancing act.

After writing this Saturday night, I woke up Sunday morning to the sun shining on the snow and reading Maureen Dowd’s column in The New York Times.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed Britain’s Parliament by video call on Tuesday: Jessica Taylor/U.K. Parliament

WASHINGTON — For actors, it is the most gripping, feared line ever written.

“It is the Mona Lisa of literature,” said Simon Godwin, the director of the Shakespeare Theater Company here. “It is something we’re so deeply familiar with, it is hard to bring new context to, and to make it live again.”

So it was stunning when an actor not known for classical performance spoke the opening of Hamlet’s soliloquy with more dramatic weight than Gielgud, Burton, Olivier or Cumberbatch.

“The question for us now is to be or not to be,” Volodymyr Zelensky told the British Parliament in a video call on Tuesday, speaking in Ukrainian. “This is the Shakespearean question. For 13 days, this question could have been asked. But now I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be.”

As Godwin noted of the TV sitcom actor turned Ukrainian wartime president, “He has become, in a way, the world’s greatest actor engaged with the world’s deepest truth, using a piece of poetry to express this truth in a forceful context.”

Shakespeare, who knew that character is revealed when the stakes are high, would have approved. Zelensky has taken up arms against “a sea of troubles.”

As Drew Lichtenberg, resident dramaturge at the Shakespeare Theater Company, points out, Hamlet’s disquiet about suicide and dying has a resonance in the part of the world now bearing the slings and arrows of a demented dictator.

“There’s a long tradition in Central European countries, such as Poland or Ukraine, of embracing Shakespeare and especially Hamlet as a kind of metaphor for the broader political situation,” he said. “Poland and Ukraine both have had periods where they didn’t exist, where their language was erased and replaced by either German or Russian as the official language and culture of the state. They know what it is ‘not to be.’”

What made the Ukrainian president’s delivery so powerful was that the world is caught up in the existential questions raised by the moody prince of Denmark.

Will Zelensky live or die when Russian forces bear down? Will Ukraine exist as a sovereign nation? What does this crisis mean for the identity of America and the West — who will we be when this is over? Will the planet even survive?

(more)

Zelensky Answers Hamlet

The question is not: “Will the planet even survive?”

The planet will survive. The ants and cockroaches will be around long after we’re gone.

The American experiment in government by the people has only been around coming up on 250 years.

A question is, will democracy survive?

The other question is: Will humans survive on planet Earth?

Neanderthals survived for 400,000 years on this planet. When Homo sapiens took over, the development of human societies took off. We’ve now been here just 50,000 years.

Is our time about over?

Either we need to get busy trying to protect democracy and preserve the Earth, or we might as well savor what life we have left — and party like it’s 1999.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question…”

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