Anti-Social Media

As someone always interested in new technology, I set up a Facebook account first -then LinkedIn, then Twitter and then Instagram and Pinterest over the last twelve years.  I still visit the first from time to time and Twitter even less often, and the others hardly ever.  Distant family members draw me to the first two.  My followers are modest in number.  As places for either information or stimulation, the word for these sites that comes to mind in my personal experience is bland.  Canadians offer the odd “tut-tut” comment about life within and beyond their borders but few comments there affect my blood pressure – because, of course, I agree with them.

 I still read one newspaper on a tablet in the morning and scan the headlines of two leading American ones every day. I switch between two Canadian news networks, CNN and PBS in the evening.  Am I in a bubble?  Of course.  Do I know what is going on in other bubbles?  Only what my existing sources tell me.  I have a colleague whom I have talked to for years – who told me recently that he refuses to follow any traditional sources for his news.  He recently joined Facebook – and by linking up with his alternate news sources he now is pleased to have 2300 “friends”. While I am one of them, the algorithms never allow his posts to reach me.  It’s just as well, perhaps, since he says Facebook occasionally shuts down his account for a  few days.

 I came across an article by Charles Warzel, an opinion writer for the Washington Post, who has followed the divisions within social media for years.  He recently decided on an interesting way to experience the divided worlds firsthand. He asked two people to give him the passwords to their Facebook accounts for three weeks leading up to and immediately following the US election. He wanted them to be typical older Americans - not conspiracy theorists - who nevertheless received more news via Facebook than they did in the past.  Both had been mildly conservative but were drifting toward more progressive politics and both voted for Biden because they thought he had more capacity to reach across the aisle.

 The 62- year -old male first saw a picture of grandparents admiring the new baby. Next was a picture of Joe Biden with a For Sale sign photoshopped on top. Then an image of a Democrat wearing a tutu giving the viewer a middle finger, Then images of a dingy hospital, an inner city store with empty shelves, a politician’s palatial residence – all labeled “ SOCIALISM”.  These continued with no context and were interspersed with the usual feed items of the dogs and cooking prowess of friends.

Like many of us, this viewer joined FaceBook some years ago to keep in touch with friends. He took early retirement and when the Covid pandemic struck he found himself with even more spare time and glued to his phone. It started harmlessly but soon he found himself arguing with friends he hadn’t seen for years, whose political views now shocked him. While it started with mild expressions of disagreements and attempts to fact-check sources, he became more involved and addicted to the discourse. He discovered that the anger expressed actually scared him. Post-election claims of fraud were even more frequent and without sources. There were accusations that one should not trust fact checkers. Democrats were linked with Satan.

 The feed of the other baby boomer, a 55 year old woman, was different. She never questioned anything political and consequently had far fewer political entries. Most simply endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket.  Even so, she was distressed by the issues that were debated and the polarization expressed. While Warzel saw little of this on her news feed, she explained that she had left Facebook after it started. She shared how she felt disturbed in the same way that the male viewer was, by seeing old friends and acquaintances espousing conspiracy theories full of hate and meanness.

 Warzel came out of the experience with some learning:

• The worst part of social media is in the comments section. That’s where the infighting is most intense with no attention to content and where the vitriol flies. These are what often get shared and go viral.  Comments are not subject to either moderation or fact checking. One of his colleagues terms it the “Town Hall for Fighting”. 

• We don’t think often about the people whom we admitted into our lives as digital “friends”. At the beginning we are pleased to discover people at a distance or people we knew from past contexts, but they are acquaintances at best. We are often invited to add friends of friends – and suddenly we are part of a network of people who are communicating with us in ways we have never intended.

 Warzel quotes Joan Donovan of Harvards’s Kennedy school describing this as an “economy of engagement’.  We are giving our time and emotional energy to those on our self-created platform.  The cost in some cases may be watching our friends lose touch with reality.  This is not my personal experience of the social platforms I follow but it is easier after hearing these stories, to understand the experience of my American contemporaries.

 But in a recent experience, just through Email, I saw a similar pattern.  People in one of my communities received news that they initially responded to with shock and anger. The immediate response to shoot the messenger, and to scapegoat the perceived henchpersons was remarkable – and reinforced by the ease of sharing gut feelings.  Few perceived that this was perhaps enhanced by our being locked down in a pandemic and giving it more energy and time than we could normally afford.  When a requested public meeting online was set, and when the agenda became a different one, it was not at all unreasonable for some participants to be even more upset, but the result was very much like a social media name calling which now involved bystanders who watched members and long term friends within the community turn on one another.

 How do we recover socially in poisoned environments?  A wise counselor in that situation suggested two ways in a parting address.  He told the story of his own background of participation in a world body with thousands in attendance, where views were so deeply divided that some participants would not even attend. It affected him deeply enough that he proposed a small forum of participants from around the world to meet in person following the gathering.  

The large body met again ten years later, and the difference was palpable.  Some of those taking part in the small discussions had listened to other views with respect and realized that they could hear other perspectives without having to accept them.  The processes followed the South African one called Indaba. Indaba is an African Zulu cultural process for engaging different points of view on a shared concern. It involves listening to the stories and experiences of others and how they came to be where they are.

Over time those who participated in Indaba process became more knowledgeable of others’ views.  It did not result in a melting pot, where everyone now felt the same way. The difference was respect for the reality that we don’t all think the same way. As another wise counselor commented brightly when dealing with two strong opposing views in another situation, “Isn’t it interesting how different we are”.

 The engaging American Episcopal presiding bishop Michael Curry who recently spoke at my College’s annual Larkin-Stewart lecture, perhaps has the last word.

 “We will either live together as brother and sisters (Siblings) or we will perish together as fools – either community or chaos – the choice is ours.”

An elder comments.

If there was ever a person worthy of being called an Elder of the environmental movement it is Bill McKibben, who I heard speak at the Bader Theatre in Toronto more than a year ago to a packed house.  In his 60th year he has been writing about climate change for thirty of them. As well as teaching at Middlebury College in New York, he writes regularly for the New Yorker Newsletter and here are some excerpts leading up to the US Election.  Did people listen?

 “Authorities told all forty million people in California to be prepared to evacuate—indeed, they told them to park their cars facing out of the driveway, in case they had to leave in seconds. But the pandemic has made evacuation more complicated, because heading to a shelter might carry its own dangers, and it has left California’s firefighting force depleted, because the state relies on prison inmates, a group that has been hit especially hard by covid-19, to fill out its ranks. And that’s just California. The flooding crisis in China intensified again last week, as record amounts of water poured into the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam.”    (August 28, 2020)

 “. . . we need people fully committed to the task of building out solar and wind power as fast as possible. Those technologies are much cheaper now than they were thirty years ago, which helps change the game. (Indeed, news came last week that ExxonMobil, not long ago the most valuable corporation in the world, now had a market cap smaller than a big solar-and-wind company.) As the credit-rating agency Moody’s pointed out in an analysis released last week, natural-gas pipelines are now an unwise financial bet, partly because activists have become adept at blocking them. The pincers created by the confluence of cheap clean tech and a stronger environmental movement should give Biden the opportunity to move far more nimbly than any President before him. “  (October 7, 2020)

 “Heat waves widen the achievement gap between students of color and white students, mostly because the latter are far more likely to be in buildings with air-conditioning.” (Oct 14, 2020)

 “It is clear, first, that regulation is going to be essential to bring greenhouse gases under control, and, second, that it’s going to have to happen fast. The world’s climate scientists have stated plainly that the next decade represents the critical time frame: without fundamental transformation by 2030, the chances of meeting the Paris accord’s climate targets are nil. Given Barrett’s performance at her hearings, it seems doubtful that she’ll let America play its role—if you’re not even clear that climate change is real, how much latitude will you give government agencies to attack it? As with so many things about climate change, the problem is ultimately mathematical. Joe Biden, should he be elected, acting not out of anger but out of sorrow at Republican gamesmanship, could make sure that the will of the people, not just the will of Charles Koch, is represented on the bench. The composition of the Supreme Court has varied over time from five Justices to ten; eleven seems like the right number for 2021. Or maybe thirteen.”  (October 21, 2020)

“In 1959, when humans began measuring the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, there was still some margin. That first instrument, set up on the side of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, showed that the air contained about three hundred and fifteen parts per million of CO2, up from two hundred and eighty p.p.m. before the Industrial Revolution. Worrisome, but not yet critical. In 1988, when the nasa scientist James Hansen first alerted the public to the climate crisis, that number had grown to three hundred and fifty p.p.m., which we’ve since learned is about the upper safe limit. Even then, though, we had a little margin, at least of time: the full effects of the heating had not yet begun to manifest in ways that altered our lives. If we’d acted swiftly, we could have limited the damage dramatically.

 We didn’t, of course, and we have poured more carbon into the atmosphere since 1988 than in all the years before. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has topped four hundred and fifteen p.p.m.—that’s much too high, something that we know from a thousand indicators.

 . . . . If November 3rd doesn’t mark the start of a mighty effort at transformation, subsequent November Tuesdays will be less important, not more—our leverage will shrink, our chance at really affecting the outcome will diminish. This is it. Climate change “is the No. 1 issue facing humanity, and it’s the No. 1 issue for me,” Biden said in an interview on Saturday. With luck, we’ll get a chance to find out if the second half of that statement is true. The first half is already clear.”  (October 28, 2020)

Airborne - Revisiting the Black Death Now

As we settle into a marathon rather than a sprint of Covid-19, the word “plague” is on the rebound. Jill Lepore outlines several in her New Yorker article “Don’t’ Come Any Closer”. She notes that in 1666 people weren’t very different from us as they examined their bodies for possible changes. They prayed, raged and poured over “books that frighted them terribly”. While journalists wonder today whether they should cover the meandering utterances of the president, the British government then thought that banning books would help. People in Britain fled to Hampton Court rather than the Hamptons, and shortages of horses for travel parallel our empty shelves of toilet paper. Instead of Zooming, some people in Italy fled to quieter realms and told the stories of the Boccaccio’s Decameron while in hiding from the Black Death.

It reminded me to look at what Thomas Berry said about that same Black Death in his article, “A New Story”, written in 1978 — the first of many works that influenced a rethinking of theology in many quarters. Berry saw the Black Death as a turning point in human understanding.

The Christian world up to that point, he observed, had been predictable. Seasons arrived and passed in the mediaeval world and it was not without hardship and suffering, but there appeared to be balance and renewal. But in a Europe where a third to a half of the population was wiped out, things changed forever. To many, the Black Death was a punishment from God. That perception enhanced a need for redemption and emphasized personal salvation through repentance. This change in emphasis from reliance on the original creation story happened long before the Protestant Reformation, Berry notes, but the reaction to the plague set in motion the individualism that would later question the power of corporate Catholicism and a move to Protestantism.

The other change of direction was almost like being drawn to a fire in spite of fearing it — a fascination with the cause of the plague that led to exploration and ultimately to the development of modern science. It gave birth to geology, a science that explored the origins of the planet and initiated our ability to move beyond history, Its sister science. paleontology, with its new ways of extracting bones of our ancestors, enhanced our understanding of history even more. The telescope and the microscope gave us entry to new worlds not previously imagined, and we gained a growing understanding that humans as a species evolved from simpler life forms. Our growing consciousness gave us the additional sense of being a species with a right to dominate the earth. Medicine and biology could save us,

Those times resonate today. One the one hand we have thought with confidence that we are in control of the environments that surround us through our growing advances in biological research — but suddenly we’re not. On the other hand, we have individuals who resolutely say they are “washed in the blood of the Lamb” and can go to their megachurches no matter what. When asked whether these folk might put others in danger by getting infected, they simply don’t care - because they are saved. The more secular adherents of capitalism want everything to open up and if that means sacrificing the elderly, even including themselves, — well fine.

The impact of the modern virus is small compared to the loss of life in the Black Death, but today’s news travels with the speed of the virus itself. Viruses have always moved along trade routes. In another New Yorker article, Kate Brown notes that the modern crowding of humans and animals in some parts of the world has contributed to zoonotic disease transmittal not only from east to west, but quite possibly through American megafarms. Their monocultures sent diseases from chickens and livestock to other parts of the world. Viruses have little respect for border or walls.

The poor in crowded cities, Brown notes, are often dependent on foraging on urban borders to find wild animals to eat and survive. Their manufactured factory goods travel the world. More affluent modern traders include people who exchange their boring local lives for more exotic foreign shores on planes and cruise ships — hothouses for viruses to grow and penetrate. We congregate in conference centers, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and some of us even in churches. We’re totally focused on our self created worlds and pay no attention to corona viruses unless we are research scientists. And the news that reaches every point is processed selectively. We like the metaphor of butterfly wings flapping on one side of the world having a direct impact in organizational seminars as a neat idea without applying to us — until it does.

I also can’t help getting Clive Hamilton’s book, Defiant Earth, out of my head. Has Gaia looked around and pondered, “I sent them hurricanes, I sent them floods, I sent them tornadoes, I sent them fires — all with increasing intensity. While the environmentalists moan and the politicians deny or ignore, what do I have to do to get their attention? Are they not seeing what they are doing to despoil the earth? Maybe I should try something that they can’t see but has a universal effect to scare the bejusus out of them”.

One of the effects is that climate change and the Anthropocene have almost disappeared in favour of the viral scene front and centre. The omni-present press can talk of nothing but medical disaster and economic disaster in an endless news cycle and when there is no news, they turn to analysis to assign blame. The battle between economics and health can suck up all the oxygen. If that is isn’t enough, add in the drama of federal versus state. Paying attention to the news these days is a disaster leading to outrage or despair. It’s as though climate changes and its ongoing danger have disappeared. The only odd glimmer that “Hey the air is cleaner now that there are fewer cars on the road” disappears as we now decide that the contamination of the virus isn’t caused only by travel and congregating. It’s in the air.

Doing Great Work

At this stage of my life, funerals of various kinds are a regular event in contrast to weddings - though I did attend one on Saturday where the bride and groom made their way to a small church on Toronto Island from the mainland by canoe.

Walter Pitman OC Oont would have approved. Doing things a different way was something he excelled at.  He lived a full 89 years with many careers and achievements - secondary school teacher, first elected member of the New Democratic Party to the federal government, member of the provincial parliamentant so much more.  Electoral losses later never slowed him down.  He subsequently became Dean of Arts at Trent University, President of Ryerson Techological Institute, head of the Ontario Arts Council, head of the Ontario Instutute for Studies in Education - and in retirement the biographer of five outstanding Canadian musicians.  He and his wife Ida were inveterate arts attenders and I first met them as delegates of a major choral conference where they joined a massed choir for each of my eight years on the job. Incredibly modest about his own abilities, Walter always said to me, "You're doing great work!".

It was good to be cut down to size at his service of celebration.  We heard from a theatre director that he always said the same thing to him.  And we even heard in a moving tribute by his daughter that he said the same thing to his children.  But perhaps the best tribute of all came when she said of her parents, "Any time any of us came into the room - children, grandchildren and now the 10 great grandchildren - their eyes would light up.  A lovely memory of a man whose enthusiasm and support lit up so many of our eyes that evening.

Egged On

The author Ursula LaGuin died in 2018 at age 88 after a long career as a distinguished novelist, poet and essayist. I picked up a book of her essays, No Time to Spare, Thinking About What Matters and very much enjoyed the opening one, “In Your Spare Time”.  She reflected on the survey she had received from Harvard asking about how she used her own spare time, with a checklist of 27 items.  The first was “golf” and she didn’t put a check mark there.  I wouldn’t either. But as she went on to say, this is a strange question to ask people in their eighties.  I agree.  All our time is spare time. 

LeGuin observes that normally we think of spare time as free time left over from a job or working hours.  There were other things to check on the Harvard list that she didn’t tick off and I wouldn’t either. Racquet sports? – No.  Bridge? – definitely, No.  When my husband was alive he always chose to play against me.  When he won he was happy and when he lost he was amazed.  Shopping? – “if necessary would have been better than -Yes.  TV? – we would be lying if we said No – and last but not least, “Creative Activities” – specified further as Paint. Write, Photograph etc.                                                                                      

Like LeGuin, I don’t regard “Write” as a spare time activity.  I’ve written all my life as I am doing right now.  Most of my writing would be regarded as non-fiction whether paid or otherwise.  It includes reports, newsletters, articles, grant proposals, a book.  journals, letters, minutes, agendas, websites, blogging (since 1995) and more recently posts and tweets – plus a few poems.  Writing is a continuum.  It’s not about spare time.  It also suggests the Harvard survey writer didn’t have a clue what it might be like to live for eight decades.  I find myself thinking that way about a lot of other people too.

It came up when I read about my university’s alumni celebration dinner – to be honest I wasn’t reading at all but watching a video - containing a frame picturing a large collection of golden spoons.  Those who graduated fifty years ago were to be recipients, as I was nine years ago.  “That’s lovely”, I thought – “but has anybody asked whether that’s what we really need from the university after fifty years?”   Were any alternatives considered?  A massage certificate?  A discount for upgraded reading glasses or hearing-aid batteries?  Boots with better treads?

But LeGuin, bless her, has come up with the proper use for the golden spoon.  Maybe between our fixation on probiotic yogurt and fibre-filled cereals, we have forgotten about the frequent menu item of our childhoods – the soft boiled egg.  In her chapter, “Without Egg”, she even gives instructions on how to cook one for the benefit of recent feminist grads who wouldn’t be caught dead in the kitchen.  And to go with it, she spends a bit of time on the egg cup.  Apparently American homes no longer have them – and I am tempted to put a picture of one on Facebook in the “Share if you know what this is” category. Of course I still have one – three in fact.  I also still have the Corning ware with the blue flowers on it which was a popular shower present for weddings in 1959.

After some discussion as to whether the egg should be placed in the cup with the larger or smaller side up, LeGuin moves on to the search for the proper spoon. Before that, she notes that a knife must be made of steel and the spoon must be untarnishable. “I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon but I’m sure one would do” she says.  VOILA!  I rushed to buffet drawer filled with odd bits of silver and there sat the spoon unopened in its little plastic gift box.  Now it becomes a neessity and like Leguin, I start the day with a boiled egg and an English muffin – and browse another of her essays.  My favourite to date is entitled, “Would You Please F*cking Stop!  You’ll have to read it yourself to find out what it’s about.