Quote:
Originally Posted by Toy Soldier
Isn't that the quandary of the modern human though, Ammi? Our hard-baked instincts, honed over millions of years, don't always match up with the modern world we've created very recently, and in quite self-destructive ways. We evolved to seek out high-energy foods to keep us going because such food was scarce; sweet things, fatty things... But now those foods are abundant... But we're still driven to eat them. We still instinctually find them delicious. And they're right there on the shelf! For most people, it takes significant self control and understanding the consequences of overeating high-energy-content food to say "no I'll have a salad".
The same applies socially. We're highly social animals, us humans, so we're driven to embrace social situations but we evolved sociological in tribes and villages of a few hundred, maybe at most clans of a few thousand. We were certainly never equipped to be operating on platforms of millions of people like social media.
I think TiBB serves as a good example really. We're a small community, people often disagree, people often come out with things that are ill thought through or even quite awful, but for the most part we get on with things... We still chat away in other threads... We are aware of people "by (user)name" and know what to expect of them and roughly where they're coming from... We peacefully co-exist with major flare ups being pretty rare.
You don't really get that on a huge platform like Twitter. A fleeting back-and-forth with usually a complete stranger who is more of "a viewpoint" than "a person". I mean... Not only is it a completely bizarre (in historical context) form of communication;we're actually instinctually DRIVEN to be wary of strangers, for obvious reasons.
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...we’ve created social media because of the obvious need for it ...the world has become so vast and families, friends etc don’t live so much in close, immediate contact, communication is everything, really...so to keep close contact, it’s an amazing thing...how would any of us have survived through lockdown etc and schools with online classes...and businesses without virtual meetings etc...without the magnificence of social media...a world with no social media is a world of true isolation...and something so huge, I mean anything so huge is always going to be open to the not so magnificent as well...I’m not sure that consequences are any more, they’re just entirely different and ‘living and adapting within the space and time that we’re also living and adapting in’...etc...I know that I can often say that social media can be a nightmare because it can, so many things can in their negative forms...and in TiBB we tend to discuss negative forms a lot in the nature of news stories etc...but on the whole, social is media is a great and wonderful thing, I feel...