When Patrick Soon-Shiong said “Social Media is the cancer of our time” (https://cnb.cx/2zwgBEv), he caught my attention and led me to reflect on the real meaning behind what he said. With a steady drop in newspaper readership, the increasing use of Twitter to bypass the formal conduits of official communication, and the uncovering of the use of social media platform to influence voters, the major questions to ask should be: who do we trust and how do we stay informed? In this other article from MSN (link below), I find the comment from the ex-Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, quite alarming. On CNBC, Palihapitiya said that social media is creating a society that confuses “popularity” with “truth.” The lack of control over what is being posted on social media to respect the freedom of speech, the current system leaves the door open to doubt the information provided by the more traditional media. The question of credibility makes propaganda and manipulations much easier as we can see in several instances. As Facebook and Google mentioned in recent days, social media companies will have to increase their standards for self-regulating their platforms before regulators step-in. Not an easy task. Try asking yourself: Where do you get your daily news, and how do you trust these sources?
Even as someone who is very interested in languages, it never occurred to me that the health of languages could be so closely linked to the health of surrounding plant and animal species. I stumbled across this article from The Revelator, a news initiative for the Center for Biological Diversity, which showed how “populations of the green sea turtle, or honu, increased as the Hawaiian language made a comeback.” The article explained the theory of biocultural diversity: the link between language, knowledge and the environment.
Largely due to the regions’ colonial histories, both the Americas and Australia have large numbers of dead or endangered languages as well as many endangered animal and plant species. As I learned from this article, there is also an NGO that has been working to shed light on biocultural diversity to fight linguistic and floral/faunal homogenization for the past 20 years, Terralingua (https://terralingua.org/).
Cultural explorations have always been fascinating to me. I have enjoyed a few trips that took me to more rural areas in the world – by rural, I mean the village of Moshi in Tanzania, for example. Even though the prospect of any new trip, let’s call it exploration, is scarce in the near future I love to read about isolated parts of the world that radiate risk, adventure, and distant cultures. As a reader of the Weekend Digest, you already know that I read National Geographic often, so it comes as no surprise that this week’s Digest also includes an article from the ultimate destination for day-dreamers and “wannabe” explorers.
Peru and Brazil are countries that hold vast territories of the Amazon Jungle, home to some of the world’s last remote indigenous people. This article is brilliant in many ways, but what it does best is introducing its readers to a culture that is distant for the everyday urban-culture.
A few weeks ago we discussed digital transformation in manufacturing and Industry 4.0. With these changes happening rapidly and being so widespread, the manufacturing sector is now at a much greater cybersecurity risk. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to see these posts.