Modern Primates

Hello Readers

Hope you all are doing well and staying home safe.

Search engines and social media are places where people enjoy bliss by giving up their privacy to the big guys! You are there in their servers forever now!

-Elon Musk a whistleblower.

I am sitting on my terrace, looking at the sky and listening to the sounds of nature it makes me feel light and contended thanks to mother nature.

The origin of humans is from apes and gibbons, so today's read about do we still carry those strains in us and also do these qualities show up in these modern civilised economies?

Let us begin, we are living in the deep ocean of people, things and technology.

Nearly two decades ago, communication was not so accessible. We were still very much dependent on the telephone, long-distance telegrams Morse code, telex and so on. Then came the worldwide web which changed this world forever a person in New-Zealand just sends an email to a person in Russia it is relayed to him momentarily no delays at all, yes the modem and the underwater internet cables across the pacific do the trick!

Even if you take these past three months when the whole world is fighting the virus, we all are still connected through virtual video applications, well this is pretty deep! Million-dollar businesses are going through virtual teleconferences, yes we all accepted the change and have got accustomed it to it pretty well I must say. But all this with the primate brain!

Why do I think so, I have seen and continue to see a few oblivious situations around me in which I see presence of these attitudes among us.

There are these profound changes this world underwent post the worldwide web. One such paradigm was the social media, I think the bubble burst from the ORKUT era, not sure how many of us still remember this social networking website which was hosted by google.

Followed by the mail group culture by yahoo, which was meant to share random jokes and pictures at various friends and family levels.

Fast-forward to Feb 2004 something important happened in this world which would change this world forever in the way it communicates.

A new company was born and called Facebook founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard College students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Project for their course this was a website created to upload and share student profiles in their college.

The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students. Still, it was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League. Gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 and older could open an account in Facebook.

Until now, Facebook was a simple website where most of the university students in and around North America could upload profiles and share their pictures. After 2006, Facebook was gradually left open to the public as stated earlier people with relevant credentials could use Facebook and in 2012, Facebook filed for an initial public offering!

The monkey and the paradigm.

People changed the way they communicate the gaps in the world have shrunk. Now you have a world beyond the one you live, and that is the world among the server farms. The network of Facebook where we try to express ourselves with all our photos and videos almost everything about our life which we decide to share it with the world, we like comment and share others posts and paint our walls with a quote and birthday wishes.

Alas, the rosy garden of Eden of social media is finally polluted!  By the monkey brain and has brought down the wrath of hatred, bias and societal selfishness into this equation. people are enraged with sharing things without thinking whether it has a meaning or not, the chest-thumping attitude against each other, the doctors call it social media psychology!

The party men use such platforms to spin-off elections by posting political posts, Oh my lord! The whirlwind of whats app groups supporting these parties throwing grenades of hatred and disrespect among people, which are now a way of living and a new way of marketing, tagged as social media marketing.

This opens up into search engines feeding the search data to these social media companies to understand and spin-off consumer behaviour with it!

So the evolution from a significantly connected world to mutual hatred and fake news promoting social media!

Whom do we blame? Zuckerberg, the creators of the internet, the creator of smartphones high-speed processor manufacturing companies or networking companies? The answer is a big no it is the monkey brain within us which has to be blamed! The attitude overthinking ad being street smart in the places where it is not required and converting an innovation given to us into something really gruesome.

courtesy google images

 

Rest assured the social media companies are getting more prosperous more vibrant by the day, yes, they are in the data selling business, and we all have given all our data to these companies and hardly care about our privacy anymore.

Let's try to change it by spreading positivity wherever and whichever way possible also try to limit ourselves in slogging on social media and spend time as productively as possible.

Thanks a lot for your time.

Helios.

Sequestration - The right to privacy

Hello Reader

Hope you are doing well.

I will ask you to respect my privacy, respect my decision and just respect my right to be myself.

-Eddie Compass

The last blog I wrote about our lost old culture and the marvellous intellect of our ancient people needs to be studied and understood in detail surely will write more blogs like those shortly. Coming back to modern times let us discuss a more recent and “in the media” subject which is data mining.

We all have heard about the above term in one or the other channels of social media, the internet the sources are almost many.

There are concerns about this term called data mining, the word was first quoted by CIA in the mid-60s where the cold war was at its peak with the Soviet Union. Data mining was carried out to know if the Russians possessed some secret advanced technology that would be a threat to the USA. Imagine they quoted the term even before the internet came into existence?

Well, that was one phase of data mining, but later after the cold war was over, the CIA continued their data mining activities not any foreign spies or intelligence officers but on its citizens.

 The first whistleblower who exposed that Government agencies data mine was Mr Edward Snowden who was exiled from the USA on the grounds of conflicts of interest and not abiding by the NDAs of his workplace. He is presently living in Russia.

Question: Are we all confident on the statements released by large institutions like NASA, FBI, CIA and KGB are right to the end or is this answer a little shaky?

The truth is that there is a significant PR (public relations) department in each of these institutions which are trained and told to what to disclose to the public and what not to, the ex-employees who worked there confirmed this.

I had to go out a little bit out of the topic of data mining because it is also part of discourse and secrecy which I tried to discuss in the previous paragraph.

Data mining can be defined as the examination of an extensive database to extract new information.

An example will help you understand, imagine you have the database of 1000 employees and you are the and your company deals in the big data business which is a method business analytics which is used by Google and Facebook to understand customer behaviour and manipulate the market and make their subscribers more profitable.= by introducing only the ads relating to the most sold phones for instance.

So everyone should be aware that we are almost data mined either through our phones or our computers including our location details.

Recently I saw video which was being circulated in WhatsApp, where a person spends a day with two android phones with one of them in which he had switched off his location and another in which he had switched on the location at the end of the day when he compared the results by loading it to a software, it reported very accurate results like location, the time and date when the person visited those places.

 The kicker is that the results were almost same on both the phones the on with the location off and the second one in which the location services were on.

To conclude, modernization and technology is no doubt convenient and has taken our communication to the next level, but don’t you feel it has taken control of our privacy from us?

Why should always be glued to social media applications and websites, why can't we get stuck to books? And try to get some real knowledge; I am sure we have a lot of secrets to unearth.

Thanks for your time.

Helios.

Networking advancement a boon or a bane ? - Debate

Hello Readers

Hope you all are fine.

People are shy to talk each other, but don't mind sharing anything at all to the world on the internet!

-Social media critic.

Actually, today's topic was suggested by my friend I feel it is important and should be analyzed logically. It has also been an age-old question stuck in my mind which I will put out today.

First the question: Is advancement in the field of communication building a healthy society? Even before I answer that question let us first see how has it changed society.

Earlier, I am talking about the pre-Facebook era, the social networking market was a lame duck if I may say so, and even the motive of the social network was just you know networking in the literal sense.

But now we can see social networking has become a platform for pumping memes, countless personal pictures, and advertisements of all possible products.

Again earlier people used to talk to each other, I mean talk not face-timing or skyping, so what happened to us, why is that we feel our communities families and circles so dry and distant these days.

Well, I think of only 1 answer that is the silicon revolution! Yes, the social networking boom and silicon revolution are interlinked, as the computing power increased so did the other constituents which would help developers to build networking tools on almost any hand-held device.

The reason I am saying they are interlinked is that without the mobility and advancement which we see in technology it would not have been easy to access social networking websites in your palms!

Yes! I am of course talking about the smartphones which have changed things for good and also has a flip side.

I am not totally against social networking, but I am very much concerned about this generation Y who are totally living in a virtual world of likes, comments, and emoticons.

When was the last time we sat across a table and had a chit-chat with our grandparents and cousins, relatives?

Instead, you just create a WhatsApp group and laugh there even though you can meet everyone with little effort? or just mute those groups and being part of it for the sake of being there?

I mean what are looking at! A game of mime? I am sorry according to conventional biology T.V is considered as a passive instrument which makes you introvert and less proactive over the course of time, which earned it the name the “idiot box”.

Now I would say due to extensive social networking and online activity has made people distant and turned them into anti-social introvert people.

But there is something even scarier, we are on the verge of becoming hollow walls without any knowledge of what is happening in this world other than the memes' we read!

Please let us start reading books like older times and read as much as books as you can quit staring at screens unless you do something useful with the available technology.

My intention is not to discourage social networking but, there should be a purpose for anything we do, so it is better you find your purpose and may start weighty conversations with the people you meet on the internet instead of a monotony of hi's bye's and good mornings and good nights and what not.

If you ask me on what side of the debate you are I would say I am not totally for it, but we can 

have a nice day ahead. Thank you, Abhishek for suggesting this topic.

Helios