* This is a copy of my Facebook post.
Today I was finally ready to delete my Instagram account. This part of leaving Facebook has been the most difficult for me, actually. I have not looked through my FB news feed for a couple of years or more, mostly using the platform to connect to specific people. But I have been using Instagram a lot. Too much, probably. That's why the decision to leave it felt right. When I am tired or stressed, it's much better to meditate than to mindlessly scroll through images (even if they were mostly beautiful pictures of nature or art). Anyhow, today I decided to let it go. And you know what? I could not! Not because I changed my mind. I literally could not. I went to the deactivation page, which asked me for my current password. I did not remember the password, so I try the "Forgot Password" option - and it did not work! I tried logging out of my account, but then I would get right back in, no password asked. I was close to thinking that this may be some kind of conspiracy to not let me leave the metaverse. I stopped myself from embracing this idea, luckily. The solution was easy. It turned out that I was logged into Instagram through my Facebook account. I found a place online where these two accounts were linked, and I unlinked them. Ok, maybe it was not so easy after all. Bottom line, I was able to change my Instagram password, which I then used to deactivate the account. The deed is done. Facebook, you are next.
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As I am distancing myself from Facebook (see my previous posts to learn why), a different kind of social media will be my new platform of choice: Medium. I have just published my second post there!
I describe a (perhaps surprising) source of inspiration for fighting polarization: an Australian animated show called Bluey. Please, check out my new post titled: "Dealing with Arguments around the Thanksgiving Table: A family of Australian dogs has a piece of advice for you!". I made it short and sweet. Let me know what you think in your comments :) New entry in my online experimental book Me, Looking for Meaning is ready!
We can probably all agree that "What's the point?" is not a happy question. If it occupies our mind so much that we are not even able to get out of bed and proceed with our lives, doctors call this condition "depression". It's difficult to find motivation if we don't feel that anything we do have a purpose. Even if we don't struggle with depression or a similar mental illness, this question lurks in our heads once in a while, especially when we are tired and upset. It's what we wonder what things are going wrong. In contrast, we are content when our efforts pay off and our activities seem to contribute to some bigger goal. Knowing "what the point is" appears to be a prerequisite of happiness. By taking a closer look, we can see that the dreaded question is about meaning. A response depends on ideas, thoughts, associations, interpretations and assumptions that exist in our heads. And because all of those are not natural or absolute, our answer will be subjective and subject to change according to circumstances we are dealing with. This explains why, on bad days, our life may seem meaningless, while on good days we will be able to find our purpose again. The answer to the "What's the point?" question will be different for different people according to their backgrounds and experiences. Small children are often motivated by the goal of having fun and being loved by their parents. As people grow, a meaningful life is increasingly determined by groups and collectives they associate themselves with. An individual's motivation changes throughout her life, depending on values she chooses, things she learns and meaning communities she joins. One person can be motivated by the urge to afford a certain quality of life and image. Another individual may be driven by the quest for truth or by the need to promote what they consider to be true and important. One's motivation can be self-oriented (e.g., become famous) or altruistic (e.g., save the environment); it can be vague (e.g., make a difference) or specific (e.g., raise happy children, strengthen one's country). Despite this variety, one thing is clear: we want our life to have a point. We want to see how different activities we do contribute to the overarching purpose. When we are caught in routines and their stresses, keeping the eye on the bigger goal may become increasingly difficult. That's when the "What's the point?" question becomes more prominent, leading to dissatisfaction. Because people's backgrounds and circumstances are so different, understanding each other's motivation can be a problem. It is easy to assume that, when somebody does something we dislike, this person is "just mean" or "just stupid". We should remember that people's actions are determined by meanings they attach to these actions. There are always underlying goals, which we may not notice when we observe them from our limited perspective. Questioning people's behavior is unlikely to produce a lasting change if we are not looking for deeper reasons that determine this behavior. In contrast, when we see actions through their underlying motivation and when we show each other that we respect this motivation - even if we disagree with it - a real dialogue can happen. I have "slept on it" (as they apparently say), for a couple of nights actually, and decided that I am definitely leaving Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. I also realized that it will *not* take a few days.
I started making in my head a list of things I need to do before I leave: 1. Download my photos from Facebook. 2. Download my photos from Instagram. 3. Go over my contacts on Facebook and find alternative ways to stay in touch with a few friends that I am currently connected via this platform only. 4. Notify everybody that I am in touch with via WhatsApp that we need a different way to connect (Signal or Telegram?). 5. Find on Patreon some comic creators that I am currently following on Instagram. These are just some things that came to mind so far. Oh, and I am also going to document my steps here*, in case somebody is curious to know how this all can be done. Again, no judgement for anybody who is staying. I can see already that leaving is a huge hassle, but I am not going back. *This blog was also posted on Facebook. Today, I decided to leave Facebook and associated platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp). I am going to document my transition away from the social network that I have been using for the last fifteen years or so. Twenty years! This sounds scary. Anyhow, this is what I posted on Facebook today in order to alert my friends about my decision:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi all, I am writing to let you know that I am most probably going to leave Facebook soon. After reading reports about the latest testimony by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, I am very upset. For a while now, I did not think that Facebook is oh-so-wonderful. According to Haugen's testimony, the situation is way worse than I imagined. If you are familiar with my worldview, you should know that I value both accountability and empathy. I do not think that people who work at Facebook are evil. They make choices based on their biases (like all of us do) and limited by multiple constraints (that we all have). I am sure each of these people has a story that explains their motives in a way that would go beyond the "they are just horrible human beings" kind of explanation. At the same time, I think that any actions that hurt others should have some meaningful consequences - ideally, diminishing the harm. Biases and constraints cannot be fully eliminated, but most people have at least some freedom to make different decisions. If you follow my work, you may also be familiar with my whole "media is us" argument. I think that Facebook is not merely the people who run it, but also all the people who are using it. And I don't feel comfortable being one of the latter anymore. This means deleting Instagram and WhatsApp as well, sigh. By the way, I also do not think that people who keep using Facebook and its products are somehow bad. So if you are staying, me leaving is not the same as me judging your choice. All of this will take some time, as I want to try saving some of the content I have here and making sure I am not losing my contacts (especially on WhatsApp). The process I anticipate will be very sad and annoying (it will take a few days, maybe weeks), but this just feels like the right thing to do right now. Once I am gone from Facebook, you will be able to find updates about my life and work on my personal website elizavetafriesem.com. Stay safe! Love to all. Has this ever happened to you? You are talking with somebody, and it feels like the other person is completely missing your point, although you are using the same words. This can feel confusing, frustrating, even infuriating: "Are they stupid?!". If you have experienced this situation, you are not alone. And, actually, it's nobody's fault. Many conflicts - big and small - happen because we assume that language is a simple and transparent tool that helps us understand each other. Alas, it is not.
To clarify: I do think that language is essential, as it allows people create and share knowledge, set and achieve common goals. You cannot convey any complex ideas nonverbally. That's true even for relatively simple statements. For instance, try communicating to somebody the phrase "I have never been to Paris" using only your gestures and facial expressions. (Side note: sign language is a language, so the fact that you can use it to "say" the phrase above does not count). It is not an understatement to say that the human ability to communicate through words makes human civilizations possible. On the individual level, you would not have become an actual person without verbal communication (as stories of children brought up by animals illustrate). And yet there are so many things we cannot express through words! For example, smells. I have realized that by doing aromatherapy with essential oils. No words (sweet, earthy, woody, green, spicy, floral, etc.) can prepare you for a fragrance if you have never experienced it before. Same is with tastes. Can you really describe sensations of your palate as you are biting into a mango or an avocado? Even a taste of the most mundane fruit - say, a Granny Smith apple - defies an accurate description, which may be difficult for most of us to believe because we have tried it. "Who cares about flavors?" one may say. Does it really matter if I cannot communicate to somebody unfamiliar with lemons what they smell or taste like? The most important thing is that we can use language to discuss useful things, like building houses and curing diseases. I agree that we should not underestimate the importance of language, and we must do our best to express our ideas to each other as clearly as possible. My point is definitely not that we have to give up on words because they cannot help us communicate exactly what we are feeling and thinking. The practical aspect of language requires mastery, which we can only hope to achieve if we believe in this tool's benefits. Yet, the question remains: what are we supposed to do with the fact that language can be also very unhelpful? And not just when we talk about tastes and smells, but also when we are discussing complex ideas that could help us understand ourselves, solve our conflicts and improve the way society works. The situation I described in the very beginning of this page - you and your interlocutor completely missing each other's points despite speaking the same language - is not a glitch. If we pay attention, we will notice that it happens all the time. Moreover, even when assume that the other person understood us completely, we are often deluding ourselves. There are a few interconnected reasons for this profound miscommunication: 1) All people have unique experiences. Even people from the same community, with similar traits, living in the same time period. You may, of course, say that nuances are irrelevant. Sometimes they are not, but in other cases they are crucial. 2) Words help us generalize our experiences and find overlaps, but they cannot fully convey the complexity of our experiences. 3) Words have different meanings for different people, and these meanings go far beyond dictionary definitions. Combination of words complicate things further, as well as human tendency to use nonliteral communication quite a bit. It, therefore, remains a mystery how much we can really understand each other. 4) Despite these nuances, we usually assume that words (in the same language) mean the same thing for everybody who speaks this language, with some minor variations based on dictionary meanings. To put it differently, language is a medium - a form of media. It is a channel that we use to transmit to each other our unique experiences and ideas based on them. As any other tool created by human beings, it has limited capacities and it reflects people's biases. Of course, language has plenty of benefits as well. I believe that, in order to make the most of this tool, we need to understand both its advantages and its imperfections. As I am slowly rearranging my old Russian poems, they keep surprising me with how some things about me changed while others did not, no matter how many years have passed. For example, the poem below is about loneliness that results from our inability to put into words how we really feel, what we really experience. Coincidentally, the next entry that I am planning to write for my online experimental book Me, Looking for Meaning is supposed to be titled: "Why is language so unhelpful?". I love languages, and I know a few (which does not make me a linguistic expert, or course), yet I am continually amazed by how difficult it is to explain ourselves through words. I am convinced that many misunderstandings, big and small, stem from our assumption that language is a simple and transparent tool. Abandoning it would be stupid, of course. Is there a solution? Blindly relying on words can make us feel desperate and lonely, the way I am describing it in my poem below. By acknowledging the imperfections of language without rejecting it, we may be able to find a place beyond words where a truer connection is possible.
What do you see in this picture? For me, this is a question about meaning, at least in one sense of this word.
In this first sense, "meaning(s)" can be defined as ideas, thoughts, associations, interpretations and assumptions attached to an object in the mind of an individual. For the purpose of this conversation, an "object" can be anything that our senses perceive by seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing or touching it. This can be an aspect of the world outside of us (we see a cloud, we smell a perfume), but also our inner sensations (e.g., emotions, physical pain). In addition, each one of us is an object for ourselves, as we attach meanings to our own body and identity. By the same token, other people are objects to us and we need to interpret them in order to live our everyday lives. (Side note: this is not the same as objectification). Most of the time we do not think about meanings of objects we experience. Instead, we take them for granted. This allows us to go about our lives without giving routine actions much thought. Our days are filled with things that make sense. The routine is disrupted when we encounter something unfamiliar (e.g., a strange sound, smell, bodily sensation, person). In this case, our brains start working extra hard to attach meanings to this new object. In other words, we try to understand it. Imagine that you are sitting on the train and a person dressed in a particular uniform enters the car. You know that the conductor is here to collect your ticket - or maybe make a tiny hole in it and give it back to you, or do something else to make sure that you are not travelling for free, and that you are not going to travel twice using the same payment. You "simply" know what this situation is about, and what is required from you (I put "simply" in quotation marks because the cognitive processes behind this knowing are far from simple). Because you understand the situation and it makes sense, you are relaxed (or perhaps bored) - unless there is something else on your mind that requires your attention, of course. In contrast, if you are sitting on the train and a naked person walks in, shouting some strange words and pulling tickets out of passengers' hands, you will be not bored or relaxed at all. Instead, you will be struggling to attach meanings to this situation and all the objects involved in order to determine how to react. The second sense of the word "meaning" is exemplified by the phrase: "This ring has a special meaning for me." What is implied here is importance, as want to say: "This ring is of special importance for me." Upon a closer examination, however, we will notice that the first and the second senses are connected. We are still talking about ideas, thoughts, associations, interpretations and assumptions attached to the object in question. The ring is important for me because of experiences associated with it in my mind (e.g., my wedding, my relationship, etc.). Finally, there is the third sense of the word "meaning" worth mentioning. It is similar to "goal" or "purpose": think about the phrase "the meaning of life". This third sense is distinct, yet it is intrinsically connected with the previous two. The purpose of anything depends on ideas, thoughts, associations, interpretations and assumptions attached to this object in people's minds. The purpose is related to the object's importance. For example, we want our life to have meaning, because we hope that our existence will have some significance in the grand scheme of things. Otherwise, "What's the point?". Meanings have been studied within a variety of disciplines in social sciences and humanities, although often indirectly. As part of the postmodern worldview, semiotics and symbolic interactionism point out that it would be a mistake to think that meanings are just there, waiting to be found. Although we may feel that we are looking for pre-existing meanings, we actually create them as part of communication processes that underlie social coexistence. Meanings we attach to objects are not natural or absolute, yet they can be very difficult to change. It is easier to conclude that certain things just "are what they are" than to explore where their meanings come from - to say nothing of challenging these meanings. Because ideas attached to objects are not universal, we can say that different people belong to different meaning communities that can engage in meaning wars about assumptions and interpretations shared within these groups. So what is in the picture above? It is actually a rusty side of a mail collection box that I saw in West Hartford, where I lived between 2015 and 2018. I took this picture because the pattern reminded me of an animal. My memories and some interpretations are unique, so they produce individual meanings of the object in question. At the same time, my readers can understand what I am talking about because we have shared meanings. Many people know what a mail collection box is and how rust appears; some have been to West Hartford; and a few would recognize the animal that I was noticed. These shared meanings allow us to understand each other - to a certain extent, at least. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an entry "Meaning" from my online experimental book Me, Looking for Meaning. This entry contains a lot of terms that are yet to be explained in other parts of this project. On August 16, I will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of my move to the United States. When I arrived in Philadelphia back then to start my PhD program at Temple University, for a first few weeks I had the strangest feeling. It seemed like I was in a movie, a character living on the screen. Everything was unusual - faces, voices, tastes, smells, and even temperatures - but not unfamiliar. As if I have experienced all of that somehow, somewhere... A few friends of mine who visited the United States or immigrated here described their sensations using the same "like in a movie" comparison. How come? An explanation seems to lie on the surface. Even though I had never been to the US prior to my arrival in 2011, I experienced many aspects of its life by watching films and TV shows imported to Russia. Representations are far from perfect, but sometimes they can have this strange power to influence our perceptions and emotions. When I still lived in Russia and could not even imagine moving to the US one day, I wrote two poems about a person stranded in a far-away land. I shared one of them on my blog a few months ago. Today I want to show you the second one. It was not about me back then, and it's not really about me now, although I did become a kind of wanderer myself. I do not feel as lonely and lost as the narrator. But I can relate to his description of the "strange looking-glass resemblance" between our present and our past - between stories we were told, dreams we dreamt and roads we are walking now.
I have started going though old versions of my recently published book Media Is Us. Let me tell you, most of them are pretty bad. But here and there (usually closer to the end of the writing process) I can see some interesting parts. It would be a pity to just delete them. So I am going to use these snippets for my blog! See the first fragment below. When the gruesome Black Dahlia murder was committed in 1947, a media frenzy immediately followed. The story about a severed body of a beautiful waitress and aspiring actress Elizabeth Short discovered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles was on front pages for days. Wild rumors about the victim, the crime, and possible suspects captured the public imagination, leading to the emergence of increasingly sensationalized and often inaccurate stories. The journalists’ role in this affair was not pretty. They harassed Short’s family, confused the general public, and interfered with the investigation. Some even say that the Black Dahlia mystery has remained unsolved due to the meddling by the media professionals.
On the other hand, there is the famous journalistic investigation by The Boston Globe in 2002 that revealed to the world the rampant child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. What first appeared as several disconnected cases, turned out to be a network of conspiracies. Although accusations against many different priests were made for years, Catholic bishops kept these crimes secret and moved the accused to other positions where they continued abusing youth. Thousands of victims came forward thanks to journalists of the special Spotlight Team, who had spent months investigating the cover-ups and connecting the dots. The story they broke eventually led to the international scandal and the global crisis of the Catholic Church. One can think of many examples when people communicating through technology hurt each other, and when they do good. Social networks are used for vicious harassment campaigns or to raise money for important causes. Books can increase our awareness about social problems that we have not personally experienced; alternatively, we can use the printed word to justify acts of cruelty and deception. One can uplift a friend in need by sending her text messages, or cause a serious car accident by texting and driving. Despite this ambiguity, blaming media remains a popular activity. Search op-eds, blog posts, books, and articles that cover the state of the modern culture, and you will find plenty warning their readers about negative effects of different media texts, practices, and spaces. Violent video games are responsible for rising crime rates. Too much time with smartphones leads to depression. Stereotypical representations of darker-skinned people do not allow otherwise developed countries to eliminate racism. Early pregnancies, drug abuse, unfettered consumerism, sexual harassment, child abduction, low self-esteem, desensitization to suffering of others, gender pay gap, obesity – it seems like whatever problems society has, they all have at one time or the other been blamed on media’s harmful influence. As we have established earlier, people constantly influence each other in direct and indirect ways. This is what society is all about. By communicating, we can help but also hurt those around us. And if we define media as people negotiating meanings through technology, it is logical to conclude that media influence is not necessarily benign. Yet, exactly because media is us, achieving a deeper understanding of the problems we associate with it is not going to happen through aggressive finger-pointing. A more nuanced approach is necessary. |
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I often use this blog to share new or updated entries of my hypertext projects. If you see several versions of the same entry published over time, the latest version is the most updated one.
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