Clickbait

There: gotcha! Except there is no monetisation here in these pages, although a bit of extra spending money wouldn't go amiss, I have to admit; but I don't intend - especially at my relaxed time of life - to start another business, with all the work that would entail. The discipline of writing this blog and my daily journal is enough in itself to help me focus on at least one or two things for some of the day, leaving the rest of the time for my butterfly mind to do whatever it wants. Clickbait is rapidly and worryingly becoming the modus operandi of more and more news gatherers, mainstream as well the more outré providers of 'truth'. The proclivity of so many to go along with the first 'fact' that is thrust before them unchecked is no new thing: the tabloids have traded in click-baited [before we actually 'clicked' on anything] 'news' offerings for as long as newspapers and periodicals have been printed.

But the issue now is that the constant push feed of algorithmically-curated content via YouTube shorts, TikTok, X, etc., etc. is methodologically spilling over into the mainstream, and into otherwise reasonably objective news sources, in order for their funding streams and continued existence to be maintained. The resultant self-referential feedback loop is gradually easing out thought in favour of reflex; bypassing reflection and consolidation in favour of reaction to immediate stimulus: replacing the consideration and debate of intellect with the endorphin rush of metaphorically pulling the trigger to ease the artificially induced stress of the thing being reacted to. In an echo chamber, everyone can hear you scream, and in these virtual shouting/shooting spaces, each stressful stimulus is immediately replaced and amplified by the next, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum. With no actual, real, shared common experiences to fall back on, just the last-reacted-to spike of virtual stimulus, a death spiral of needless, unrelenting stress ensues, adrenalin followed by crash, followed by more of the same. It's no wonder the world is in the state it's in. 

Anyhow, somewhat tangentially but relevant; and perhaps on the face of it rather oddly, we attended the funeral today of someone we actually didn't know, except by distant association: the sister-in-law of our friend Irene, widow of Al Moores, late of this parish [blog posts passim], to whom we gave a lift to attend. During the rather long, humanist service at Stockport, I was minded that although the subject of the service was obviously a much-loved woman who had lived a very full and rich life, Jane & I were party to none of the memories and experiences shared in common by the rest of the gathering; their own personal internal worlds intersecting via the medium of the late woman in shared experience.

We all have our own Venn diagrams of experience and memory: from the personal to the shared and back, bounded by social connections large and small. Not so much Plato's Cave as Plato's Multiplex: lives crossing over each other and connecting the rooms of each individual existence, in part, to each and all others, a practically infinite web of experiential vectors and interstices, stretching back in time, but moving ever forward as one generation gives way to the next, each carrying the social freight of shared memory, and adding its own cargo to the totality for the ones to come. How so very different to the 'social connections' of so-called 'social' media, n'est ce pas? Where human interactions are absented from these artificial, mediated transactions and false, one-dimensional and empty dialogues are substituted in their place. A revolution of thought is so badly needed and the 'radicalism' of true society needs to be reinstated to its proper status. We need to throw off the shackles of false society and re-engage with the truth of human society: '... you have nothing to lose but your chains.'