Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Whom Do You Believe - Mark Zuckerberg Or George Orwell ???

I saw this gibberish about Facebook a few days ago:

Back when humans were first grappling with the impact of a new, global forum for communication, Clay Shirky, a prominent thinker in the digital sphere, made the persuasive argument that the internet made us more creative - even if only in a small way.

Indeed, Facebook has arguably made us all writers, since it has become the medium of choice for millions to share their views and life experiences. But in five years that creativity may look very different. Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform.

In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London this morning. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.

“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”

You can read the rest @
http://qz.com/706461/facebook-is-predicting-the-end-of-the-written-word/

("A prominent thinker"? Who decided that?)

Let's contrast the above Facebook approach to what George Orwell predicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

’Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ’Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

Considering what is happening to our language, will eliminating the written word and replacing it with images expand or further limit our ability to think and communicate?

The answer can be found in the only type of images most people now produce and "communicate" to each other - SELFIES. The only concepts being communicated are "self or non-self" and "like or unlike".

If that isn't the ultimate limiting of the ability to think and communicate, then I don't know what is.

By the way, this is what Orwell meant by "Ingsoc":

Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania ... Ingsoc is a masterfully complex system of psychological control that compels confession to imagined crimes and the forgetting of rebellious thought in order to love Big Brother and the Party over oneself. The purpose of Ingsoc is political control, power per se ...

Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc

The sort of incorporation into and submission to social groups that is being promoted by Facebook is the modern equivalent of Ingsoc. As Zuckerberg has said, within 50 years we will all be plugged into the matrix:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/techandscience/1287163/mark-zuckerberg-says-well-be-plugged-into-the-matrix-within-50-years/

How can anyone think this man's ideas are not malignant?

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