Today I am writing a diary entry for my readers and subscribers, which total a whopping 300-400 people combined. Perfect! That’s a tiny amount of followers but it’s A-ok with me. Call me SANE but I have no interest in having tens of thousands of total strangers know every move I make on the internet and become privy to every thought I think out loud on a blog. So, overall, life is good out here in personal privacy land, aka the wilds of fill-in-the-blank anywhere America.
While everyone else is straining their blood pressure to the breaking point trying to become even more “internet famous” I was delighted today when I discovered that I could completely erase my entire Google Plus profile, lock stock and barrel. I loved it. One click and an extended circle of porn stars, internet weirdos and people I had never heard of and never met disappeared forever, no longer being able to follow my every move online. And oh yeah… DARPA had included me in their Google circle. I put a stop to that in a hurry. Ahhhhh.
I’ve noticed and have written before that more than half of all “social networking” is veiled surveillance by the FED in affiliation with the biggest web “powers-that-be” i.e. Google and Facebook. So that should not be news to my readers. I agree with Julian Assange. I also believe that Facebook is the most appalling public spy machine and data mining operation ever launched, right next to what Google Plus is trying to do to emulate it.
Back Story:
I was in my 30s when the internet came around. I had already lived half of my adult life without it. These days I try to emulate that “pre-internet” “pre-cell phone” life experience as much as possible, and I absolutely LOVE it.
It’s a stress free relaxed existence, truly private, [ yes this is still possible ] and uncomplicated by running to a phone or a computer screen every 30 seconds to see what someone just said about me, someone who may have “friended” me but whom I have never met or had any significant face to face encounter with whatsoever. There is at least a 50% chance that behind every good looking FB photo there is a NOT so good looking impersonator trolling the web for new victims to CATFISH. [ Funny, I always knew there was a damn good reason that I didn't want any photos of me online. My intuition from years ago has been fully vindicated. Check. ]
Thus are the times we live in, and they are STRANGE indeed.
The advent of the internet has launched an era of twisted extremes. For those who love to learn [ like me ] it has brought the super digital glorious library of the entire world into my living room, thus making research on any topic a heavenly experience. Unless my computer is on the blink, I rarely walk into a public library anymore. I have it all right at home.
But the dark side of the internet is getting darker, more bizarre and increasingly difficult for normal people to fathom. Recent breaking news about a world famous Notre Dame football player who had an “online love affair” with a faked non-existent human being invented by hostile pranksters for more than 3 years has set the nation back on it’s feet more than a little bit. That’s hard to swallow, and truly strains credulity. Even Anderson Cooper was dumbstruck. Jay Leno has had a field day with this story.
I had already watched a few episodes of MTV’s “Catfish” and had seen the original movie. I marveled at the magnitude of the stupidity of some of today’s young people. I really genuinely pity these kids. They are SO LOST that they are actually self duped into thinking that they are “having a relationship” with a mystery set of “pretty girl face” photos and Facebook responses which proceed over time.
Anyone trying to explain what “Catfishing” is to a teenager from the 1950s would be met with guffaws of mocking laughter so loud they would fill a sports stadium. Believe it or not, there was an era in the United States when teenagers and twenty somethings had some moxie, had real social cunning [ as opposed to a Facebook social life ] genuine emotional insight, and they also had a brain or two. They were more psychologically and emotionally “adults” at age fourteen in the 1950s than most of today’s young people are at age twenty-nine.
Which brings me to my next query. Aren’t todays’ sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists as alarmed at all this as I am? And if not, then WHY NOT? Our 21st century young people are Facebook brilliant but they are social idiots. Be concerned. Be VERY concerned. These are the men and women who will inherit the nation, for God’s sake.
Over and over again it turns out some handsome young guy has been having an internet relationship with a bashful closeted gay man craving male attention by pretending to be a woman online, or vice versa [ a lesbian who pretends to be a man online ] and this sick charade goes on, not for just weeks, but for months, and then for years. If I could time travel back to … ohh let’s say the late 1980s, and tell this cautionary tale to my own “20 something” self, she would refuse to believe that the future would be a world where stupidity reigns, and is celebrated by every kind of TV display imaginable. Who would want to live in that future?
Yet that is exactly the American idiocracy rising that I inhabit in the early years of the 21st century. Sitting here in this future, which my past self could have NEVER imagined, I do long for a time in America when normalcy did not include weird internet pathologies like being “catfished” online.
Is it madness? Absolutely. Is it the newest socio-psychological internet era disease unique to the second decade of the internet years? Yep. And there will be more and more new kinds of bizarre clinical pathologies which come online as the internet decades continue to unfurl. We have unleashed a powerful global medium which will only unerringly reflect the lack of spiritual maturity and the dire extent of strange new mental illnesses which the modern era continues to spawn. We are far past “fasten your safety belts.” We are entering the yawning digital unknown. I suspect our aggregate social scientists have been caught utterly unprepared for all of it.
The only antidote for these emerging modern online pathologies is:
1) raw visceral native intelligence which doesn’t come from book learning,
2) true spiritual discernment, or
3) Limit one’s time online
So if you lack those first two qualities, and refuse to practice the third you may be out of luck. Wisdom can’t be purchased for any price anywhere. And one can only hope that by the experience of living one might be so fortunate over time to acquire a few morsels of same.
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As for me, I am more than a little bit fine these days. Life is tranquil and loaded with insights. As I observe all the twisting and gnashing of the early 21st century, I am less inclined to want to write about much of it, for I see it as detritus, not unlike hyper-stressed animal droppings. The world is straining under the weight of it’s own foolishness, just as Jesus said it would in the end. Nothing surprises me now. Whereas two or three years ago I would have ranted to no end on one of my blogs upon learning that young American couples were voluntarily agreeing to be RFID micro-chipped for the silliest of reasons [ maybe just so they could appear on the evening news, as that is often considered reason enough ] today in early 2013 I just make a note of such news items as one more up-tick in the flood tide of news which indicates the rise of the coming Beast Era, brief as it will be.
I steel my soul for what comes in each day’s newscasts, and the evening news is often so gory that I turn away from dinner and can’t eat while watching it. Television offerings are filled with macabre serial killer crime shows and shows about witches vampires witchcraft and explicitly portrayed murder of every type and variety. Yet media executives bristle with defiance when it’s pointed out that young people take lives with the reckless abandon of popping a can of Red Bull. Our so called leaders in Congress and the Senate lack the moral spine to stand up to the horror masters in Hollywood who fill American TV airwaves and movie theaters with the most hideous and heinously explicit portrayals of deviance. Every soul who is participating in the creation of media portrayals of explicit horror that mar the soul of an innocent American young person will have to answer to their maker one day for what they are doing, which is the graphic advertising of ever more horrific ways to kill another human being.
All a visiting guest from another world would need to do to ascertain the level of abject depravity to which American society has now sunk, is to peruse the evening TV shows for about 4 minutes. That snapshot records a sharp and lurid “slice of American life” which truly turns the stomach. A day of reckoning will come in the future where the souls who agreed to participate in the degradation of the American TV airwaves will have to answer for their misuse of the God given gift of creativity. They will have to answer to their Creator for how they used this gift. I hope a Hollywood movie executive or TV producer reads this diary entry. You are not off the hook.
As for me, I screen my TV viewing carefully and I am fine. But a little four year old child lacks the ability to do this. And an impressionable and depressed teen aged male also lacks the discernment to comprehend that it’s probably not the smartest choice to get addicted to “The Following” which is TV’s newest slide into graphic depravity served up as entertainment for the nation.
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I’ll resume periodic blogging gradually as the year opens up, but frankly it’s often just as pleasant NOT to write about what my spiritual eyes behold, as there’s not a whole lot of it that is encouraging. Recent events have horrified and saddened us all. Yet I do race to embrace any good news where I find it.
I still believe very much in the heart and soul of the American people, but her leaders are failing her and her media and video game moguls are trying to literally corrupt her actual soul by advertising horror, murder, death and carnage nonstop. Only the blind refuse to see this. Only the deaf refuse to hear it. And those who choose to remain mute by not speaking out about it will suffer the eventual consequences of allowing it to go on unabated and escalate unchecked. It has already come to the point where children and teens are not safe to attend public schools or visit malls and movie theaters. How much worse will the massacres become before Congress acts to legislate the graphic movie, video game, and TV violence out of existence? How far will the madness go before the men and women who profess to lead America finally act?
We now never know as a nation when the next young person is going to snap and gun down his own family, or a room full of strangers, or a room full of children. But we MUST try to legally and methodically clean up the sordid American media landscape so that the entertainment industry will be forced to STOP providing the macabre how-to scenarios for personal killing sprees, and then stoop so low as to routinely broadcast those twisted formulas to the masses as “family entertainment.”
Related articles
- Catfishing in spotlight after Te’o (toledoblade.com)
- Young girls use a diary not Facebook to log their most intimate thoughts (mirror.co.uk)
- Sue Scheff: Catfish: Why Parents Need To Discuss It With Their Teens (huffingtonpost.com)
- What Is Catfishing? Watch Out For Online Deception (americanlivewire.com)
- Don’t Get Caught In The Net: 9 Signs You’re Being Catfished (madamenoire.com)
- ‘Catfishing’ reels in unsuspecting folks (triblive.com)
- Facebook Live to cover Data Privacy Day 2013 kick-off (examiner.com)
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