I like to engage in social media because it keeps me in touch with a lot of different people from all around the world.
Be careful because social media can be like TV, sucking all your time into void.
I don’t watch TV because I’d rather spend my time reading or watching something educational.
I do indulge in the occasional movie. I did recently discover the HBO TV series “Silicon Valley” and I think it’s hilarious!
Getting back to social media – I treat it like an experiment in sociology and anthropology.
I am intrigued by how people behave.
Recently I saw a re-post (this meme is years old already) about Bruce Lee playing ping pong with a pro using only his nun-chucks.
A while back I saw a similar video, similar in the sense that people were amazed by this miraculous event. A plane losing a wing and landing safely.
And I hope you’ve seen the one where a large jet plane has a malfunction with the front landing gear and a guy in a pickup truck comes to the rescue by positioning the truck under the landing gear.
I could see some people believing Bruce Lee playing ping pong with nun-chucks, although I was suspicious as to how well he did.
I could even see some people believing that a highly trained and skilled stunt pilot could muster the courage to land his plane with one wing. The video was quite authentic-looking. I was also suspicious of this. Being an engineer and all that. Believe me, bbeing an engineer ruins most movies and TV for me.
I once had a friend say to me “A college education has ruined movies for me.” because once you learn about the laws of physics and science in general, you begin to see the holes in most action and sci-fi movies.
However I immediately knew that there was no way a several ton commercial jet airliner was going to safely land its nose gear in the back of a consumer-grade pickup truck. They land at about 100 MPH. The nose of the plane will weigh at least 5000 lbs.
But in all instances of these videos posting on social media, most if not all the people were amazed as to the feats they just saw.
I can see how most people don’t understand quantum physics or genetic engineering, but there are some simple and basic laws of nature we all should be aware of. This is akin to being literate in a modern age.
A lot of people complain about how they have no need for calculus in their day to day lives. But it scares me a little when so many people drive cars but have absolutely no idea how they work or how to fix them when they malfunction. We fly frequently but most people don’t understand aerodynamics or how jet airplanes work. And we use smartphones and computers every day but most people have no clue as to how they work or what’s inside the box.
This leads me to a conclusion, we are in an age where we have no idea how the devices work that we use. And we use these devices every day.
People don’t know where their food comes from, or how it’s prepared, or what is in it. Especially processed foods. This is scary because what if there are toxic chemicals in that food? Actually there are, in trace amounts, and we call them pesticides, fertilizers, steroids, antibiotics, etc. People are afraid of the 3 letters G-M-O, but they don’t pose nearly the threat that the aforementioned items do.
Back int he day when times were simpler, before computers and cars and anything manufactured, we knew exactly where our food came from. We knew almost everything about our environment. We knew everyone in our tribe personally, because we saw them every day of our lives and there were only 100 to 150 of them. We hunted our own game, picked our own berries. We saw the entire cycle of hunt to prepare to cooking of everything we ate. Life was simple.
In todays modern world there is so much complexity, we only have the time and resources to learn a tiny sliver of the enormous complexity. We learn a skill that is called our job and we may have a hobby or two. We learn basic modern living but this does not include our food, or many other things that impact us directly. We can’t see everything happening as a first-hand witness. We rely on others to do the work for us, and we do work for other that rely on us.
What is your perception of reality, where does it come from? In part a limited education, in part some limited experiences. In part the job we do and the friends we see. But a lot of it comes from surfing the web and watching TV and movies.
TV and movies are our surrogate lives. We live vicariously through the camera lens of a director and we watch recreated scenes that are all fictional (unless you are watching a documentary with first-hand footage).
We watch the news, and I hope you know how distorted and negative that is. I stopped watching the news because I was tired of all the negative news reporting. If it bleeds, it leads. A lot of the news reporting is biased and inaccurate.
Back in the day, I am talking for the last million or 2 years up until the last 100 years, everything we saw was real. Today almost everything we see is directed by a team of film makers, or it’s CGI and cooked up using software.
We watch a TV series set in a hospital, about the staff and the sick and injured people who come there for treatment, and we think we know all there is to know about the medical field.