Black Mirror Violence - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Language, bias, ownership, influence; all media related topics.
Forum rules: No one line posts please.
By RhetoricThug
#14765577
Oh look, the 60s called and they want their protest back.


"Violence in its many forms is an involuntary quest for identity..." -Marshall McLuhan

Stoic notice
Broken Brain Boy
Broken Brain Boy,
why must thou bubble & boil
over bogus hocus pocus?

Perhaps that dumb-phone made you lose thy focus? Poor Broken Brain Boy typing on his brain toy, stoically replies through the scrying screen.


What is disturbing about manufactured discontent: It justifies the police state (for all the wrong reasons). This new era of black mirror violence (social media madness) may be the end result of people living the television myth. If you speed up the fractured and framed identities which appear on television, you get black mirror violence, where average people mobilize around trending information that moves at the speed of light through the computer screen. The mainstream (corporate information guard) perspective may be juxtaposed against the user-generated message creating dialectical conflict that appears in the stream and streets as tribal passion.

Information abundance and the rapid succession of ideas reinforce rudimentary pattern recognition, as the human intellect grapples with the wave of algorithmic thought. Nonetheless, the stream's current may be flowing so fast that humans end up coping with their noospheric conditions (milieu), implementing and role playing each real-time reaction. The problem with our real-time calculations, Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov established our cognitive limit. In other words, the computer (by design) will always be a few steps ahead of human calculation and therefore we are at the mercy of the algorithm. In the stream or in the street, protestors primed by identity become primitive entertainment continuously obsolesced by the next wave of information.

Design the future, release the past, control the present.
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 20 Jan 2017 23:34, edited 1 time in total.
#14765606
The virtual world, the noosphere, does not displace everyday reality. It exists as a virtual overlay on top of it. The dissonance between these realities is a characteristic of the technology itself.

The lack of effort (passivity) required to access information degrades intellectual and other skills that depend heavily on repetition and intense participatory training. This is a recognized hazard. For example, a factor in airline crashes is the "de-skilling" that results from computer-controlled flight programs. Inevitably, rare and unpredictable black swan events occur - these automated systems do fail catastrophically when confronted by challenges outside their normal operating parameters. The operators lack the 'feel and intuition' of pilots who constantly control their aircraft, and who are constantly exposed to its tactile feedback. Similar hazards exist in automated production facilities.

My feeling is that the same de-skilling effect is affecting the general population. The passivity of their interaction with electronic devices conditions them to passively accept stimuli offered to them.

Consider, by way of contrast, the educational technology of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare would have attended a town grammar school, and would have learned hundreds of templates (figures of speech) utilizing techniques of irony, extended metaphor, etc. These figures constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. The paucity of Trump's intellectual world partially reflects the paucity of contemporary pedagogy (Not to pick on Trump, necessarily. HRC's rhetoric is just as barren, in a somewhat more extended fashion.)

The plasticity of the human brain requires intense repetition to achieve a skill set. Elizabethan grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar - Latin grammar. The schooling was intensive: ten hours a day, six days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.

The amount of repetition was staggering: Every single hour of instruction required, according to one sixteenth-century schoolmaster, six or more hours of exercises to apply the lesson to both speaking and writing. Much of the curriculum was rhetoric since the Elizabethans saw eloquence as the greatest skill to be acquired and rhetoric as the key to the Bible and literature. The teaching strategy was systematic: “First learn the figures, secondly identify them in whatever you read, thirdly use them yourself.” Hour after hour after hour, identifying every figure in Ovid or Cicero, then creating your own versions.

Even as recently as the American Civil War, some remnant of this rigor remained. Burns could not have put together a five part documentary featuring the letters of everyday foot soldiers had there not been an ordinary eloquence and respect for language.

In the new reality, we have become hunter-gatherers processing a limited sensorium - barely conscious at all. Moreover, the sensorium is not the plains or the steppes, but a pre-filtered reality reality fed to them via an instrumentality.

This instrumentality is powerful, but it is not liberating. It is confining, by design. At some level people realize this. The dissonance between the ease of the virtual world and the privation of the real is a continuing source of unconscious tension. This tension, from the point of view of social control, is dangerous. It requires a high degree of manipulation to remain in a dormant state.
#14765637
quetzalcoatl wrote:The virtual world, the noosphere, does not displace everyday reality. It exists as a virtual overlay on top of it. The dissonance between these realities is a characteristic of the technology itself.

The lack of effort (passivity) required to access information degrades intellectual and other skills that depend heavily on repetition and intense participatory training. This is a recognized hazard. For example, a factor in airline crashes is the "de-skilling" that results from computer-controlled flight programs. Inevitably, rare and unpredictable black swan events occur - these automated systems do fail catastrophically when confronted by challenges outside their normal operating parameters. The operators lack the 'feel and intuition' of pilots who constantly control their aircraft, and who are constantly exposed to its tactile feedback. Similar hazards exist in automated production facilities.
Wonderful post! :up:

"On the telephone, or on the air, man is is every sense discarnate, existing as an abstract figure a 'figure' without body. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland is a kind of parallel to our state. When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort." -Marshall McLuhan

The virtual simulation = a figure without body, because the body of the REAL environment trains the figure's perception. Also, this is why people troll, the anonymity of the internet dislocates the whole person, allowing them to act without consideration for REAL people and REAL situations.

T.S. Eliot has a line which seems to indicate awareness of the discarnate state of electric man: 'We all go into the silent funeral; nobody's funeral, for there is nobody to bury.' -Marshall McLuhan

See, technological narcosis is the virtual drug overlapping reality; while plugged in, we're under its influence.



My feeling is that the same de-skilling effect is affecting the general population. The passivity of their interaction with electronic devices conditions them to passively accept stimuli offered to them.

Consider, by way of contrast, the educational technology of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare would have attended a town grammar school, and would have learned hundreds of templates (figures of speech) utilizing techniques of irony, extended metaphor, etc. These figures constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. The paucity of Trump's intellectual world partially reflects the paucity of contemporary pedagogy (Not to pick on Trump, necessarily. HRC's rhetoric is just as barren, in a somewhat more extended fashion.)

The plasticity of the human brain requires intense repetition to achieve a skill set. Elizabethan grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar - Latin grammar. The schooling was intensive: ten hours a day, six days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.

The amount of repetition was staggering: Every single hour of instruction required, according to one sixteenth-century schoolmaster, six or more hours of exercises to apply the lesson to both speaking and writing. Much of the curriculum was rhetoric since the Elizabethans saw eloquence as the greatest skill to be acquired and rhetoric as the key to the Bible and literature. The teaching strategy was systematic: “First learn the figures, secondly identify them in whatever you read, thirdly use them yourself.” Hour after hour after hour, identifying every figure in Ovid or Cicero, then creating your own versions.

Even as recently as the American Civil War, some remnant of this rigor remained. Burns could not have put together a five part documentary featuring the letters of everyday foot soldiers had there not been an ordinary eloquence and respect for language.

In the new reality, we have become hunter-gatherers processing a limited sensorium - barely conscious at all. Moreover, the sensorium is not the plains or the steppes, but a pre-filtered reality reality fed to them via an instrumentality.

This instrumentality is powerful, but it is not liberating. It is confining, by design. At some level people realize this. The dissonance between the ease of the virtual world and the privation of the real is a continuing source of unconscious tension. This tension, from the point of view of social control, is dangerous. It requires a high degree of manipulation to remain in a dormant state.
:up: Indeed, this is the danger of somnambulism. If left unchecked, the computer will automate and normalize unconsciousness activity, augmenting or crippling biological evolution.

The reason I called it black mirror violence:

The people walking around filming create the virtual body.

Isn't oil and electricity bought and sold like ev[…]

@Potemkin I heard this song in the Plaza Grande […]

Russia-Ukraine War 2022

The "Russian empire" story line is inve[…]

I (still) have a dream

Even with those millions though. I will not be ab[…]