this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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humanity gone mental, influenced by influencers

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"Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments." Marshall McLuhan

This particular media environment is mostly one person's attempt to organize fragmented concepts and presentation on the very complicated topic of how the Mass Mind / educated mind of individual people relates to society they live in at the time - and how they learn and acquire new information and experiences. Topics are also likely to focus on group behaviors, conformity influences, mob mentality, trending changes and information - how this all relates to personal self-awareness, education about the persona, and how much freedom there is to swim against the stream or river.

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[–] RoundSparrow 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've come to witness and experience this in business, open source projects, news organizations, religions.... and I see this issue as core of much human conflict, clashes, experiences, history. What I find is that there is little in terms of self-awareness on the topic - as a generalized pattern of humanities and history. Further, that there are media environments for this pattern that often lead to human conflicts that are unintended, undesired, and perhaps described as self-destructive - sort of wasteland zones of a particular media environment or chain of ,choices.

'Come with me if yo want to live" time compression of the trope.

Learning takes time, experimenting takes time, organizing information takes time, proofs and peer review takes time. Often money, resources, special equipment, special access, historical steps - inclusive of mistakes that may have left scars or influence - residual media content or information of any kind... may become very significant. The leftover elements of a process may themselves become significant. Nuclear waste from attempts to build a reactor could become a bigger long-term concern than the reactor itself. How Henry F. Ruschmann started to create glitter was from trimmings of a Kodak and Ansco film processing that someone decided would make a useful holiday decoration.

Especially where people are in positions of power or influence that they have built up over time - and stand upon an unstable structure. Or maybe they have even intentionally build this unstable structure, often wealth and power, but it can be technology acceptance - having an influence network where the machine logic has accumulated power over time. ChatGPT 4 era of GPT would be an example of that, accumulated structural power by having spent time training the language model - the general availability of specialized AI hardware to do the training and run-time execution on, and the training material itself - be it text, images, video, audio, or other media. Often subject to copyright, with associated expense to license, that may not be possible to use in free or open source projects.

[–] RoundSparrow 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Repeating,,.

Learning takes time, experimenting takes time, organizing information takes time, proofs and peer review takes time.

And skill. A core of this topic of /c/mental_influenced is that it is entirely possible to have spent years developing your own mind but not have the ability to communicate or convey that.

It's probably easier to describe the opposite. "News readers", "social media influences", "actors", "politicians", often project leaders, executives in business. What they can often have is social characteristics, language, style, fashion, exclusive roles (of power or control, for example), foundation / founder positions, communication media environment tools (examples: radio, TV station, satellite phone in a remote area, printing machine, t-shirt production), technique, mannerisms, consumes or dress, stage name, on and on and on, the list is likely endless as to the persona masks people wear.

Be it described merely as a gimmick, a trope, a particular technology way of presentation (SMS length message, original Twitter length of message - vs long-form "War and Peace" 1225 page book, 3 second meme animation looping vs. 3 hour Oppenheimer IMAX film.... poetry vs. prose, complex metaphor vs. organized machine code to print 'hello world', encoding formats, typefaces, again an endless list of what people may fetish, season with, prefer, choose, be considered cool or dated, and in-fashion or annoying from over saturation.

[–] RoundSparrow 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's probably a better, more precise, trope I'm fishing for in my mind... more like where someone is doing long-term research and study.... or has gain experience over a period of time due to unique job opportunities... location of experience (often remote or exclusive)... expensive or security-restricted hardware access (like a medical virus laboratory)... and is unable to explain their concept due to their interpersonal abilities or time-compression of documenting the experience and information itself.

At the moment I can't come up with a solid example and haven't dug in for a TV Trope link...

Information system dynamic, experience, even diseases of humanities often present this pattern. Even on a massive scale. "The Spanish governor of Cuba, Diego Velazquez, then sent a larger force under Hernán Cortés, with instructions to trade with the inhabitants. Cortés had more ambitious plans, however, and after landing on the coast of Veracruz, in 1521, made his way to Tenochtitlán." They not only introduced new weapon technology, methods of combat, travel technology of ships, diseases such as smallpox... there was of introduction of new languages, eating customs, religious beliefs and faith systems, new methods of media - printed books from the newly invented printing press.