Servants, Masters and Manipulation

            I had graduated from high school in 1980 and had signed up for college the following year.  I did not have the internet or Google to help me with assignments.  I used whatever reference books I could find at the library.  It wasn’t until after Corey returned home from his mission that we purchased our first computer and added AOL dial-up.  It wasn’t much longer before the Google search engine was introduced.   

            I marveled at how quickly Corey could find references without ever having to leave the room.  Before that he had been a whiz at searching the card catalogues and familiarizing himself with the library as though it were his profession.  Google seemed to make life so much easier in some ways.

            I had not familiarized myself with the search engines or internet as quickly as he had.  I’m still not nearly as advanced or well rounded as he, but I have learned a lot more about how to navigate than I had just ten years ago.

            I went back to college and got my degree in accounting.  My courses were online and I was required to provide references for not only my assignments, but discussions as well. I spent more time on the internet than ever before.  I would normally turn to Google or YouTube to assist with my research.  I did not feel manipulated so much as annoyed with advertisements and pop-ups and YouTube’s suggestions of 60-minute videos on how to start my own business.  Okay, maybe they weren’t 60 minutes.  It just felt like they were as the demonstrators would prattle on and on before I had the option of clicking “skip.”

            Advertising, marketing - I didn’t even realize that whatever I might be Googling would also be advertised in my facebook newsfeed.  That was because I rarely ever looked at my newsfeed.  I would look at notifications and sometimes I would look at individual walls.  I did not make the connections until this pandemic.  I have discovered quite a lot during this pandemic—not all of it pleasant either.

            The Facebook novelty wore off about two months after I opened my account.  There was more than one time I thought about deactivating my account and had even attempted to do so at one time, but could not figure it out.  I remained on Facebook mostly to keep in touch with family members living in a different state than I.  Both Corey and my youngest son deactivated their accounts.  My sister is rarely on and my middle son is never on. 

In the beginning of the pandemic there seemed to be more posts created than what gets posted now.  That is a good thing that others have gotten on with their lives by abandoning Facebook or rely on values that cause them to realize that being on Facebook is not good for them.  There are pros and cons to the technology that we use.  One pro that I really love about Facebook is creating groups which allow sharing information with several people at once (such as church activities or family events—depending on the group).

Netflix’s Social Dilemma provides a huge amount of cons (see trailer here).  Those with ethics relate information about how things are.  They went into more detail than what I had already observed.  Good and bad, but most of it seemed to focus on the market manipulation and provided ways that we as users might protect ourselves. MIGHT.

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t know the truth.  Posts get shared and reshared and sources aren’t being checked.  Trump is itching for another civil war (which has already taken place on social media) pitting the red states against the blue.  What the hell?  We are NOT in a marriage contract.  We DON’T have to vote for a certain party.  We are allowed to vote for (or against) the issues at hand.  We even have the option of voting for a third party as I had four years ago.  The mascots of each party are the elephant (Republican) and the donkey (Democrat) as that is how someone had referred to Andrew Jackson (according to this article) and Jackson ran with it.  I think it’s now more appropriate to use for the Republicans as Donald Trump is the biggest jackass the nation has ever had in office.  Still don’t know who is responsible for having elected him in the first place.  He’s a monster who is interested only in himself—and actually so are many of his followers.

I apologize for not finding the original source

original facebook share posted by Ron Olesko