“What is a friend?” King asked Lanza.
“It is difficult to define — in whose culture do you
refer?’’ the boy answered, robotically.
Article by By JOSH KOVNER, DAVE ALTIMARI
DEC. 9, 2018
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-adam-lanza-sandy-hook-20181209-story.html
MY BOG:
I recently went on Google and looked for Lessons Learned
from the Sandy Hook incident. And, being an advocate for spreading the
awareness technology has on behavior, I was not surprised by the results of
what I was seeing. Most everything pointed to had little explanation for a motive with the exception of the article cited above.
And I remember hearing on sources while driving to work all
the ridiculous arguments resisting the truths behind this unfortunate foot
print on our American psyche. What is it that denies what seems so obvious to
me, that we actually breed extremism through a digital culture? Anyone who
knows and appreciates the value the military places on memory-muscle conditioning
through simulations and cyber-saturation to train knows this is a threat when it is
used without deliberate intent as entertainment. Keeping a grip on what is made real through the power of suggestion brings a new plateau to the damage competing interests take in grooming consumers. We've made a science of flirting with the bliss point so that addiction becomes part of the user experience on-line.
My first experience objecting to ways modern technology
impacts human behavior occurred while pushing back against fraudulent scammers
going after my Mother. She was quickly becoming prey as a vulnerable adult. She
had fallen when her contributions to several charitable organizations had most
likely bought her way into some kind of consumer and personal “mosaic” profile.
Digital mosaics are means to synthetically gather and build an alternate object
or reality, such as a consumer dashboard. She was targeted by the lowest scum
that inhabit the darkest corners of the planet. They could calculate her
weakness and play her, much like the tactics used for espionage. The strategy
goes, use flattery and insincerity to lure the subject in. Then after the
objective is achieved, dispose or continue to exploit to extremes.
It’s unfortunate that many of the mechanism being broadly
used now to deliver media content actually leverage this same approach and, in my
estimation breeds behaviors for extremism. And, to make it worse, local governments throw Public Service Announcements and community information updates into the blurred realities of opinion on Social Media forums creating dissention. Think about it.
If all you ever subscribe to reinforces only what you
believe and negates everything else, what is healthy and balanced about that?
Yet we have a thriving BIG TECH economy that sacrifices the most vulnerable and
garners power. The engine goes like this; the more content is channeled to the
consumer, the more emotions play the vulnerable, alliances prevent competition and
distribution of wealth is reduced to a select few. Look at our current
marketplace.
It’s called 360 degree profiling, data anonymization, and
many other things used to gather and “sanitize” data of personally identifiable
information to predict numbers, like the data sets needed to track the spread of COVID.
But often times analytics allows for the reversal of these safety guards to
protect personal consumer data and exploits vulnerabilities in those "targets" trailing
a digital wake in their path.
And to circle back around at the quote at the beginning of this
discussion, what does it mean to be a friend? And what can we infer from the
word culture in this context? I know from personal experience that alliances
are a way to monopolize. More “friends” in a digital culture increases the likelihood of an alternative reality made real by synthesis in a mind's eye. In terms of interactive media and tools, this does not
always lead to an augmented or value-added reality, but instead a tipping point with tragic ends like these.
With a unified, yet fractured American landscape, can anyone agree the rewards in how we currently market technology outweigh the costs? If we include suicide by cop into our understanding of the tipping point, like much of analytics, trends becomes
transparent when clusters of emotions and triggers rise to the surface. Our insistence that these mass or
active shooters have no common denominator is the first step we need to resolve
in keeping our promise to the Next Generation.
US Department of Health and Human Services Workshop on "Creepy Data":
Privacy and Health Research in a Data-Driven World (hhs.gov)
TED Talk on marketing digital culture extremism, marketing and emotions: