The Psychology of Bullshittube

Who hasn't played the relate video game?  Start with a simple search, click on related videos until you arrive at an absurd end of YouTube  When not getting stuck in Dragon Ball, or Pokemon, or Hispanic singers, I always seem to end up in one portion of YouTube that never seems to get mentioned;  Bullshittube.

What is Bullshittube, you may ask?

You probably already know, certainly your sub-conscious does...


Feel free to search any of the following keywords to find out:

• Info Wars
• UFO
• Anti Gravity
• Government Secret
• Limitless Energy
• Gang-stalking

There are, obviously, many others missed by this very small list, but I can assure the reader that anything not included, will be in related videos.

Youtube has always had its absurd sides, however the exponential growth of validated madness seems to be in crescendo.  Never before in human history, has someone with a hallucinatory mental disorder had the ability to gain validation from from large groups of people.

I certainly do not doubt that most creators of such videos believe what they produce as 'facts'.  Often I ponder over where all these videos originate, how many hours are spent in producing the ever prevalent still image shots of UFOs.  

Nothing to be done but inhale that special sense of irony, that large groups of people are producing videos, of still images, of something that would be proven true, if it were presented as video instead of pictures.   And yet there are still videos of UFOs, that any seven year old could produce in after effects.

Screaming Alex Jones, years after being relevant.  Worrying random truckers in the middle of the night.  Not unlike the radio show Coast To Coast, which at one time had a host that would question the bullshit he was given.

The conspiracy circle jerk online has grown and grown.  One cannot search cat videos without finding at least one All Seeing Eye.  Or a magical infinite power source.  Or anti-gravity technology that "they don't want you to know about".

As the education systems within the United States have deteriorated, so too has increased the complete lack of fact checking.  The X-Files isn't on TV any longer, why is this still happening?

Sometimes I wonder if 9/11 is the ultimate validation event.  Truthers and common sensers alike watched the country plunge into the worst *Depression since the original (please, stop calling it a recession).  Yet, all these Bullshittube videos have been piling up since long before that.  Now, thanks to the magic of the internet, one can find a local Gang-stalking Support Group.  Schizophrenics can now find like-minded people who have experienced the same types of delusions.

Is this good or bad? Harmful or helpful?  I honestly cannot tell.

If I were to point out one single overarching explanation to all this, it would be that of Digital Culture Shock.  I would tout this concept as original, if I didn't fear falling prey to the same circle jerking of made up ideas stemming from it.

In just two decades, the world has become a much faster place.  Children read faster, scan text faster, communicate more, and do so silently outside parental prying eyes.  Bullshittube seems to be a direct result to this monumental change in how people use the Prosthetic Memory of the Internet.

One man's fan fiction is apparently another furries reality (sorry furries).

When one can construct online environments to validate any made up reality, a moral question arises.  Does this 'virtual reality' then become reality through it's consensus?  Is there a moral obligation to censor ideas so absurd they may become dangerous? Community driven validation does not seem to be a reliable means of determining quality (as seen by so many front page 'native advertising' campaigns on reddit, and others).

With the whole of human knowledge at one's fingertips, is there an (internet) cultural obligation to ensure thought segregation?

Let's Talk About Kevin Spacey's Dead Eyes

I was in call with someone today, who was watching the last ep of House of Cards. To which he had never seen the rather creepy Meachum scene.  He immediately asked the same question I had thought previous, "God this is creepy, I wonder if Spacey is gay".  A question that many have wondered about, and several interviewers had asked about, to no avail.

One thing lead to another, curiosity killed the cat.  I went back and watched the Inside the Actor Studio interview with Spacey.

He mentions two siblings. I was curious, thinking it would be amusing to find his brother (because sister could be married) on white pages.  Instead I found this.

Shrugging it off, it's just the oh so reliable fox news.

Which led me to this very relevant newspaper clippings.

Read those news paper clippings.  

Nazi rapist father.  

Think American Beauty.  

Think Long Days Journey Into Night.  

I would love to doubt the validity of this article.

It was published in a UK newspaper in 2004, and too my knowledge the UK press still had integrity. Spacey lives in London, in fact it is his only permanent home.  I then realized I had plunged into the deep end.  This lead to me going to Randy Fowler's (Spacey) website.

"Ok. It's a bad site from 1995", and then I saw the Hal 9000 icon which led to videos.  The first one I clicked on was this.

At only 15 views, and unlisted.  It appears to be Kevin Spacey brother's community college speech class presentation about his sexual abuse in childhood.  I  cannot seem to shake the horrible feeling that I have walked over a grave.

Author's Biased View:

I have often wondered about the genius of Kevin Spacey's acting. Where that seeming kind of blank stare originates, where that amazing acting originates.  Sure, none of my goddamn business. But yet, I could not help shake that HoC scene, and the scene in American Beauty.  Something in my brain registered something deeper, and curiosity soon followed.  And yet, it's of course none of our business.  But after reading that article, it pains me even more. To see this amazingly successful person, who I honestly believe was protected by his brother.  A person who is permanently alienated from other human beings, because of his inability to emotionally invest in anyone but his mother, who understands what people expect to see, but has no core understanding outside of the external action.  I see what somehow my brain perceived through Spacey's work, that in there is a dead person.  A psychopath or sociopath, who knows or cares. But just that there is a man out there, who has suffered enormously to protect another, and the other who succeeded because of that protection and holds no allegiance to the one that protected him.  Reading the agent's response was really telling, 'well sucks for you buddy'.  I see that $80 million+ net worth, and wonder if he has thrown a million to his brother for the hardship.  My instinct says... Probably not. At least those dead eyes finally make sense.

What do you want to BE when you grow up?

When was the last time as an adult you thought of your profession as a state of being?

For those of you that are teachers, you exempt from this.

Few these days would label their professions as a state of being, unless they are still paying off large sums of student debt.  Why is that?

People seem to have no issue identifying their job in quantified tangible terms.   Yet somewhere in the process of schooling there was a shift from 'being' to 'functioning as'.  I of course have met adults who identify with being their jobs, but generally they have job satisfaction.  It is an interesting rift, that.

The more pleased with a given current professional work environment, the more identified they are with it.  As though the job called to them, rather than them applying for the job.  I often ponder over whether this shift is a survival mechanism brought on by wage stagnation. 

From what I understand of yesteryear, jobs of any status has status associated with them.  The shift in the workplace seems to have robbed away not only pay increases, but job satisfaction.  The increase in productivity without any parallel in wages removed the status from virtually professions making less than fifty-thousand a year (net, not gross).  Wage is the only determining factor, for most profession below what I will call the 'realistic poverty line'.   I am not, of course expressing a need to increase the wages to all meet that line, in that it would simply inflate the costs of goods all around.  What I am attempting to bring to light is the seeming pervasive death of 'job status' within society. 

That is not to say there is a lack of passion in given professions, but there certainly is a lack of wages and benefits within American culture.  I would theorize that previously, part of a job benefit was the status and familiarity of a given class of people.  Take mailmen for instance.  Previously a high status job with little pay.  There was  built in cultural aspect of familiarity to mailmen, an instinctive friendliness towards them. 

I believe one of the major reasons for the death of 'job status' is certainly population explosion. There is very little means of garnishing a personal relationship in larger cities with given status jobs.  And without that small psychological boost, it would seem the only means of determining the value of a job and the self worth that that person within the job, is financial. 

Television vs. Internet: Effectiveness of Influence

Do even the most technologically inhibited of us ever intentionally click on an advertisement pop up?

We have all found interest enough interest in at least one television commercial to search it online.  I ask, which is more effective and influential modus operandi?  Which shapes minds more easily?

This obviously is simply a qualitative question.  Advertisement campaigns function entirely differently between the two.  Television follows the ancient routines of product placement, and witty commercialization.  What strikes me oddly about the new marriage between the two mediums is that there seems bleed-off only one direction.

Internet genius bleeds only into television.  Whether an ackward attention catching ad stream designed by a popular internet band, or hearing skrillex music on shopko commercials.  I have never witnessed functional advertisement originating in televsion on the internet.  That is not to say I have not borne witness to attempts, as such.  Television ad's on the internet lead to the birth of such things as adblock.

One might call the new generation of internet inspired television advertisements as intervision hybrids.  A seemless blend of social networking, social engineering, and short cuts can be seen at any commercial break.  The internet's integration of advertisements directly into websites allows for seemless surfing without breaks.  The only example of such in television I can recall (for as little television as I watch) is the constant pop-ups on networks of their upcoming show lineups, always there to remind and annoy one away from the program.

This all speaks to me of the oncoming death of television, as some have said.  I do not think for a moment, that television will go quietly.

I envision a blending of the two, as seen my smart televisions.  Hulu and netflix are now producing their own television.  Commericals, hopefully, will the first casualty of the war for attention.  The internet generally has 'ads' which seem to differ from 'commercials' in that they are static, and they are avoidable in many respects thanks to customizable mediums of viewing the internet.

That customization has always been lacking in television, adjustable only by breeding four versions of every network. Just as MTV was one of the first break off into MTV2 so as to retain playing music videos when the regular channel was so overrun with shlock, each network has followed suit. Always behind in meeting consumer needs.  The giants of television networks have shown their lack of adaptability time and time again, unwilling to give up their monopoly hold on their content, while loosing any sense of monopoly in distribution thanks to torrents and streaming.

I welcome the slow death of the ancient giants, stagnant as they are, they have had their time.  I cannot recall seeing a historical educational show on the history channel for many years.

The fundamental means of distribution has been changed to something that requires control and choice on the users end.  The endless stream of mediocre programming and fifty-two minute shows has passed.  Television networks, in their dire attempts to retain viewership in this time of change, have taken to showing intros and credits to both programs at once.  Even having shorter commercial breaks at the begging of an hour show to give way to seven minute breaks near the end when viewership is highest.

But it is all in vain.  None of these things are customization or choice, and so the viewer goes elsewhere.  As Gabe Newell cited many years ago, the distribution model has changed.  If someone is pirating something, it is likely the result of a lacking distribution model.  Steam has become one of the most popular mediums of distribution among PC gaming, by simply asking the community what it wishes.

Television would do wise to follow suit, but it will not.  It still relies on focus groups instead of cloud sourcing, and so will continue to fail in capturing the minds it so direly needs.

Internet was at first an extension of television, and thankfully that has been swapped. 

People do not fall for the same routine models of marketing and induction they once did.  Thought television commercials have gotten shorter, and faster in cuts, their effectiveness has fallen to the wayside.  People are far more likely to be duped into miss clicking a download link to a torrent then they will ever be of buying a Mercedes because the commercial is racy.

At it's core, televisions sole purpose has and will always been the commercial break.

The internet continue it pygmy parade of darts, through open source projects, free alternatives, and new distribution models to kill the ancient beast of television.  All the mediocre Jimmy Fallon jokes uploaded to youtube will not force someone to watch the shows commercials.

Perhaps marketing agencies will take note that they no longer make sales without proving their worth to some degree.  Without brand image in social networks, there will be no mass consumption as there once was.

I, for one, am thankful that customization now regulates the means to which advertising is effective.  Though mental programming may be more effective through this, so too is peoples resistance to that marketing grown.  Like any other negative exposure, those who do not fall for it will be stronger for it.

Wild Wild West a.k.a. WWW

When I am asked by those outside internet culture what exactly the internet is really like, I like to use the metaphor of the wild west. 

Of course, as with all mythos, the reality differs. The wild west is rarely like it's portrayal in the cultural mind.  Like the wild west, the internet is similar in its portrayal in mass culture.

Just as the wild west movies and series turned what was essentially a genocide into battle for good, while even managing to reverse the attackers to the Native Americans, the wild west is idealized in the cultural mind with many repeating themes of savagery and civility. A masterful piece of propaganda to be sure.  The internet has a similar aspect.  The most reputed hackers are evil to the consumer masses, and messiahs to the internet masses.  Youtube personalities as reviled by the internet masses, and glorified by the consumer masses.

This is not intended as a diatribe about the 'evils' of mass culture.

It is a slippery slope when one starts demonizing mass consumer culture, it usually ends with a kick in the nostalgia.  Conspiracy culture is another niche system for people to construct their own specialness, and will not be included here.  Both provide a purpose of luxury.  Like a brick, they hold no inherent good or evil, only if one smashes a window or builds a school is the brick's morality evaluated.

This is simply an evaluation of how propaganda functions, or has diminished function on the internet currently.  That is not to say it is without impact, or that it will not increase it's grasp of peoples minds (as seen by any political website), only that propaganda will always need to be accounted for, no matter the methods of moral determinism.

Just as in the wild west, new sums of money came about as the result of burgeoning frontiers, so too with the birth of crypto currencies of the internet like Bitcoin.

Just as in the wild west, anonymity is valued and permitted for a rise in privacy and criminal activity, as with digital warfare and cyber crimes.

Just as the wild west brought about new standards in regulation, so to do SOPA variants keep appearing in U.S. courts.

Through both WWW's, propaganda is and was used through two fundamental methods, one more effective than the other.  The first is to adjust perceptions of perceived threats through ignorance of the topic. The second is the adjustment through understanding of the topic.  People fear that which they do not understand far more than those those things they do understand.  Understanding frees one from rejecting a whole, and instead, choosing specific points of contention.  Ignorance breeds the rejection of the whole, and is far more memorable.  It also is far more effective a means of influence until the ignorance is understood.

Now, before one points to the ignorance of the people during the days of the wild west, I would point out that the literacy rate among (white) males and a majority of females was 96% to 99% nationwide.  After the creation and adoption of television the literacy rates slipped into the high 80's percentile, and with the internet the literacy rate has returned to 99%.

When one ventures into the unknown, it's best to be prepared.

Preparation may be in part a physical process, but majorly a mental process.  When one enters a frontier of any kind, risk and reward are increased.  Often rewards seen beyond the boundary are unlike those within.  Risk assessment is a comparison of data between potential loss and probability of that loss.

The possible losses are often, one's life, image, or wealth, what some would consider finite resources to begin with.  The probability of loss relies on the manipulation of propaganda through ignorance. As more is known, vague arguments against the given subject become specific.  As Lincoln said,

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."


As more come to the internet by facebook, or reddit, or whichever such place first hooks their attention in a digital medium, ignorance is lifted and propaganda of yore ceases to work.  Demonizing is, for instance 'online bullying', the result of a misconception, a vague, blanket approximation in which mass culture becomes hyper vigilant to perceived wrongs.  Anything that 'seems' or 'feels' like 'online bullying' should be punished to the full extent of the law.

The demonizing process of ignorant propaganda ensures that even if the woman seems like a witch, she probably should be burned anyway.

The Oroboros of Memetics

meme

mēm/

noun

noun: meme; plural noun: memes

1.

an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.

Many discount memes as the scourge of the internet; a happenstance regression of online culture.  In the concept of memes I find something more.  Bold as it may be, I find memes to be form of regression of thought, but it also represents something that previously in history did not embody the same meanings it contains today.

Some have noted that the further back in mass culture that one goes, the more shared experience there is.  This certainly can be quantified by asking an old timer what movies were their favorites.  They will most likely list off common names, and few names.  Ask anyone today their favorite movies and you will be bombarded with a diverse history of just the past decade.  Not only has the production quantity of mass culture grown exponentially, so too has the division among it's consumers in finding their niche.

As the masses follow their ever more diverse and specialized interest, thanks to the digital revolution, so to does the difficulty in finding shared territory of which to embody those interests. 

So follows the meme.

The modern meme construction represents a method of shared experience.  Even language is a meme by the above definition.  For instance, the certain dialects specific to geographical areas are memetic.

Language differs on a fundamental level, however.  Memes capture a specific shared experience and to some degree encode that experience into a concise simulacrum.  Those that have no point of reference for the meme will not garnish the meaning of it (try showing your grandma a meme).  To them it would appear just an odd picture and a text caption.  To those who construct or use memes, they are sharing a personal internal experience.

Some might ask if this sharing of personal experience through memes, rather than words, is a product of a failing education system.  Grammar has always fallen short in the regard of spoken word.  One can write in ways that a person would never speak.  And previously there were no ways in which a writer could capture feelings with simple expressions, only vague stanzas to express a single thought.  The invention of the smiley face, for instance, is an example of such.  Someone saying 'smiley face' is not the same as :) both carry varying meanings. 

The meme harkens upon multiple systems of phenomenological  input.  It uses words and pictures both, and depending on who the particular meme may be of (do note that most memes are a 'character' if even through anthropomorphic) it can queue audio hallucinations. 

The primary aspect of memes seems to revolve around the character within the meme.  Each specific type of meme embodies a particular phenomenological experience that could, indeed, be written out in just words, but in abstaining, it conjures more impact, and is far more elegant in its simplicity.  The question then arises, by confining experiences to specific memes, is the transfer of cultural genomes doomed to siphoning upon itself?

Memes are in a way a form of oroboros, of the snake eating its own tail.  Many people dislike memes, but cannot quantify why. They can only qualitatively infer that memes degrade culture.  There is in some sense, a quality of how memes are sublimated into their simulacra form.  I would be the first to point out that there is a marked truncation of experience in meme transfer between cultural data, but would also be hard pressed to find a similar means achieve such shared experience.

Culture feeds upon itself.  As counter culture moves further to the extreme outside of mass culture, mass culture is there to sublimate counter culture and sell it back to the masses.  This system of production has pushed mass culture far into the realm of counter culture, as seen by sites like knowyourmeme.  One could even say such websites are 'content free', in that they only track memes but do not produce them, except perhaps, in that they are as 'worthless'  as memes themselves.  Worthless perhaps, but meaningless?

Certainly not.

If we are living in the age of the global village, does that mean too there will be an infancy in global language?  I do not mean by this which exact language is being spoken, but instead I point to the 'worthless' babble of a child learning to speak.  Learning to sublimate their needs into words.  Perhaps memes are the global village's first words, and as the vernacular increases so does the specificity and clarity of the cultural messages. 

Myths are Based in Fact

One will note I stated 'in fact' not 'on fact'. 

On fact implies topicality in my view.  "It's just on the surface" vs "it's in the deep".

More often than not, it appears to me in text based online contact, people do not observe the specificity of a statement.  Perhaps it is simply a linguistic advantage of a naturally spoken language (one you spoke originally, or think in), but I quite enjoy the subtlety of conveyance within my native language of english.

I find that when debating with, for instance, Russians (one in particular, you know who you are) that the meaning within my statements are lost.  I am fond of the old saying that "Russian and French are for lyricism, English and German are for specificity".

Not that I speak Russian or English.  This is vague semblance of a premise that thanks to the subtlety of English, allows me to make light of the generalization without necissarily believing it an absolute.

This inherent flexibility of meaning could be considered an informal fallacy; a misrepresentation of definition, but alas I would have to part with my beloved sarcasm.  Let alone would it emasculate humor.  Even in the last sentence I chose 'emasculate' instead of 'defeminize' soley on Christopher Hitchen's argument that humor is a byproduct of male evolutional mating (that is not to say anything of the hubris of that assumption).

To return to point, mythos is constructed between the words used to explain an event and the actuality of the event itself.  In part, imagination used in text interpretation allows for a greater flexibility. 

Where with spoken language, there is a large sum of information transfered through body language, tone, pitch, speed and the like, with text these subtleties are left to the mind to reconstruct.

Rarely is a story considered poor in its execution because it does not align with what was expected.  It fails in execution through syntax and form, in not being comprehensible.

I can think of many examples in the medium of videos or movies that do not align well to what my mind imagined in reading the page. 

What does this tell us of the medium of text versus the medium of video (we will leave music out for the time being)?

If I were to communicate my internal thoughts and feelings, what medium of the two would best represent those ideas and why?

Literature has been long hailed as greatest medium for such.  I believe the reason is the inherent flexibility and adaption the reading process compels of the reader.  The movie watcher is a bystander to the imaginative musings of the director and producer.  The reader recalls books as though they had been experienced by one's self.

This fundamental difference in medium type leaves one with a valuable insight into the fact within myth.

Myths originate and are conveyed through the absence of certain things.  Those absences allow the person experiencing the myth to 'fill in' and 'imagine', and in other respects role play for themselves the experience of the characters of that myth.  One will also note, that the movies and videos that have had the greatest impact on culture as a form of myth, are those that leave the absence within the medium.

I am not naive enough to assume that video transmission of stories are somehow less than those of reading.  I am inclined to believe however, that the fundamental 'absence' found within spoken, written, and visual language are the fundamental elements defining the difference of a story and a myth.

Facts are 'the story'.
Myth is the 'absence of absolutism', and the 'flexibility of interpretation'.

Very few good myths tell of the colors of someones clothing, or the details of their hair.  They leave these things to vaguety, until a visual storyteller happens upon on that myth and is moved by it.

One such example I enjoy to use is the movie Alien.

At only four or five junctures does one actually see the xenomorph.  The myth and the suspense that carries that myth are rarely exposed to direct observation, just as the facts of a myth are.

The vital ingredient of cultural myths lie in the inability to directly verify or measure the facts.  The myth may contain some form of fact, but the fact is never absolutist.