Humans can not distinguish misunderstandings from lies. It is a global problem throughout history.
And it is a mistake when we accept lies and manipulation, trick each other, because we are barely getting by with our grasp on truth and reality without manipulation. That's the point of Neil Postman and television. "I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result." - 1985
It is not deliberate, that's the reason I keep pointing to Neil Postman. We are tricked and bamboozled by our shallow superficial reactions. We don't need someone trying to trick us, it happens because of the structure and venue.
News articles mentioning Neil Postman’s1985 book and remarking how we seem to be “Amusing Ourselves to Death”:
August 17, 2015
More than a full year before November 2016 election
Howard Stern, Neil Postman
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/attytood/From-Howard-Stern-to-Donald-Trump-on-democracys-death-spiral.html
May 14, 2016
Before the November 2016 election
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christeare/2016/05/14/amusing-ourselves-to-death-with-donald-trump/
March 27, 2024
https://www.northjersey.com/story/opinion/columnists/2024/03/27/us-politics-2024-predicted-media-expert-neil-postman/73022583007/
February 2017, Andrew Postman
After election November 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley
August 6, 2018
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/6/17599010/neil-postman-trump-amusing-ourselves
November 18, 2024
https://bioethicstoday.org/blog/have-we-finally-amused-ourselves-to-death-the-triumph-of-entertainment-values-over-civic-virtues/
July 17, 2025
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/17/neil-postman-amusing-ourselves-to-death/
Some ideas take hundreds of years and teams of thousands of people. Problems that were recognized but unsolved, such as germ theory. It wasn't until the invention of microscope technology that we started to better understand diseases that seemed invisible.
There comes a time... July 31, 2025
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1mekr09/clinton_plan_emails_were_likely_made_by_russian/
Where the Spy vs. Spy sloshing of bullshit and falsehoods wreckes anyone actually comprehending where it all started. The "Tower of Babel" Torah, Bible, Quran metaphor kicks in! Bullshit deception patterns of language communications start to create interference patterns and jam truth of the technique copycat methods.
Monomyth spirals into retcon monomyth, and nobody speaks the dead Latin Lanauge that Martin Luther in Germany translated to everyday people over 500 years ago. Get it?
It isn't fun. Putin isn't having fun, Trump isn't having fun, Israel isn't having fun, Sudan isn't having fun, Ukraine isn't having fun. None of you have convinced me you grasp compassion and love at the Joycean level of 1924 "on the same page" of world monomyth.
This bullshit, deception, lies, is just not enjoyable. Whatever you are feeling is not joy or fun. It is egomania and it is fun toxic like some drug that wrecks the drug addict.
Yes, it is hopeless. Technology has outpaced spirituality. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr spelled this out in Atlanta, Georgia and Malala in Swat Valley Pakistan validates it, decades later.
We The People need to face up to media ecology, on a global scale, all people in all gegraphic places.
Yes, positive, is it REPEATED as people repeat memes on Reddit? no.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1mefuoz/ms_rachel_for_the_washington_post_photographed_by/
If it were simply the television, I'd turn it off and not watch TV.
If it were simply Reddit, I'd stop using Reddit.
If it were simply TikTok, I'd stop using TikTok.
If it were simply Russia and Ukraine, I'd stop for my mental health.
But it is not. And October 7, 2023 in the Middle East, right where I had spent years living next to Palestine in Jordan and analyzing this as a long-term problem... was a harsh reminder. Palestie rejected Malala from Pakistan, and she was talking about reality that should have attracted anyone. But it did not. And the reality of Hamas Terrorism 2023 is the Reality of USA Donald Trump - in terms of acceptance and rejection of goodness (Palestine rejecting Malala since yeaer 2013, USA society rejecting goodness since year 2014).
Deal with the second-hand smoke of the viewers and how Fox News bends allthe other news to reacting to Fox news, much like Twitter. Simply deleting a Twitter account and relocating to Bluesky as millions of people did after the election in November 2024...missesthe point of January 2024 to November 2024 - you can take the reactionary Twitter user out of Twitter, but the block-happy Bluesky remains.
Ukraine February 2014 and Palestine October 2023 and Ukraine February 2022 all had Reddit media invasion components, influence campaigns. As have the USA elections of 2012, 2016, 2000, 2024.
What bothers me deepest is the Internet grey-rocking of Malala since October 8, 2013 book publishing. I had been following the Arab Spring befor it was called that. A Internet revolution driven by less-expensive personal computers, emerging Hollywood films and TV shows depicting the Apple iPhone / smartphone usage. This article from May 26, 2007 had a huge influence on me. New York Times: A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women. The society was transitiong from "cyber cafe computer rental" / university computuer lab to at-home personal computers, and Ihad spent the 1980's in USA introducing people to personal computers with home delivery in high school (and I even opened a retail store for 1 year). I had a sense of the media ecology changes this could have on society in North Africa.
2007 ...New York Times: A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women - that was the computer lab at university, the library at university. Women being given access to media systems they had never had in North Africa. the Arab Spring on Facebook and Twitter and such... that was at-home personal computers in year 2009... where it was in the evening when the university computer lab was not where islamic girls hang out. An emering social media culture of personal, and then a wave after that was yet to come, inexpensive larger-screen smartphones and tablets reaching North Africa.
"Well now we don't do that anymore. That kind of action has fallen into disrepute. Nevertheless, the king still wears the golden crown of the sun. The kingly paraphernalia of the installation of Queen Elizabeth and so forth, or of the burial of Winston Churchill a couple of years ago, was an imitation of these heavenly movements. And even in our own country, the burial of President Kennedy, those horses with their black feet, their feet blackened, the color of the horse, the canons and so forth, the number of the horses, the horse with his inverted stirrups and all—all of these are imitations of old rites in which the king is dead and his vehicle, his horse, is going with him. The sense has gone, yet the poetry somehow echoes. What happens is that the old fascination disappears, an echo remains and you have, as it were, the vestige of a mythology." -Joseph Campbell
» All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. « - Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore 1967
I had seen these waves of technology media-driven changes before. I was a published author on these subjects. I had been a personal computer trainer, I founded OS/2 users group in Fort Wayne, I founded the Microsoft Backoffice users group in Dallas, I had seen from the top in Bellevue Washington, and Austin Texas in 2007, 2008, 2009 was the smartphone social media society to come. And in December 2009, I recognized the women of North Africa had the university book library and the private personal computer at home... to compare the world outside wehre their (terrorist nation) passport would not allow them to go, middle class familie. These people were comparing what they knew of the world from fiction films and television shows to now computers and social media. They could read English... were age 20 to 28 adults who were also not folowing their parent's arranged marriage. Choice marriage was a topic on my mind, going through a divorce in 2009. I was dusting off my summer of 1988 "Power of Myth" thinking of how huge a historical change that was.
In North Africa it may have been university middle class women age 20 to 28 in 2009... the middle class home personal computer was having impact for an upstart in another part of the world that same year: "Malala Yousafzai did start blogging in 2009. At 11 years old, she began writing anonymously under the pseudonym "Gul Makai" for the BBC Urdu website. Her blog documented her experiences living under Taliban rule in the Swat Valley and expressed her desire to attend school, which had been banned for girls by the Taliban."
“The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and man never went to the moon.” ― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. October 8, 2013
REPEATING: » All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. « - Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore 1967
When Malala first came to my attention in the days following October 9, 2012 - I recognized right away how media ecology of living under a terrorism passport situaiton (unwelcome in the world) with world wide web Internet English skills had influnced her media ecology thinking.
When I got into social media and interacted with strangers at age 13, it was tied to geography of a weak radio signal and you knew a voice. And you rode your bike and you met up with people at gatherings. And when you got a commodore 64 there were users groups. Not that many people went to users groups given that several retail stores sold the computers and clearly lots of people had them, but the large public schools did not have computer clubs or computers for general studends. But we formed them, maybe 12 to 80 people show up, regional within the city (wasn't the norm to travel across city to such an event monthly).
My high school was huge into sports. Indiana is huge on basketball and American football. And when Cable TV came, that was the media ecology focus of 12 year old middle class kids in Fort Wayne winter of 1982. My family all watched sports on TV, and cable TV brought more sports. But I was reading nonfiction books and magazines, and the Radio Shack catalog and wanted a social media radio. I was not into video games, our family did not have a gaming console. I would read about the technology and play sometimes at friends houses.
One ofmy points is that social media actually was a way for me to meet adults outside my middle school and high school. And the computer using adults at that time tended to be book readers, publiclibrary users. To understand computers and learn, you would read a book. And magazines exploded with word processing and printer advancements.
I traveled, I met real people. I was not "terminally online" in my parent's basement, I was selling computers and doing home delivery and I got an after-school job at age 16 with adults in an office where (Telos Federal Systems apprentice) everyone had a masters degree or doctorate. And after graduating from high school and working for Slater Steel, I negotiated in the interview taht I could trave to compuer conferences training sessions on bleeding edge software. Which I did. I selected PARTS Workbench,Smalltalk development forapp and took two different week-long trips to California for conferences. If founded the Fort Wayne OS/2 users group, we met at Central Soya.
(( And the whole "terminally online", in middle class Fort Wayne Indiana - what people were was terminally sports oriented, a personality I'd argue is way worse than long-form nonfiction bookworms. People who are attracted to and concerned with sports events, sports stars, and celebrety of sports wealth and marriage / divorces / birth of children / death of famous sports stars. Video game consumers, repetitive highh score competition also has a sports-like mentality. People who play video games for the sake of agressively defeating another person playing. ))
(( Also worth menioning that the F.M. radio scene in Fort Wayne was rather good, the way Professor of Rock (Adam Reader) talks about Idaho influence of F.M. radio I can relate to. Sports-oriented people focused on sports-oreinted content and sports news. Same with the newspaper. F.M. radio - no static at all is a deep deep metaphor of independent stations. And this was not "shock jock banter" commute time radio I'm talking about, I'm talking about F.M. radio where the music was the topic - and talk was interviews with musicians and DJ discussing something about the song itself. Not politics or sports with songs mixed in. But media ecology of the songs, like where the musicians were from (UK or USA, etc) and the year the song had been recorded, etc ))
With my published books, and Compuserve participation - I was given IBM's highest OS/2 Ambassadora award for OS/2 at a lavish Indy 500 ceremony. I was recruited to work in Philedlphia for SAP (lotsof IBM influence at SAP, founded by ex IBM people).I worked so many hours at SAP,that all my social was just with other workers, it was very rapid growth in those years. Relocated to Dallas/Fort Worth after having taken a business trip as SAP was growing so rapidly that the American Airlines training centers for teaching was the fastst way to have near-airport training centers. While in Dallas, I got back into users groups and the first saturday swap meets and the dfw.single Usenet group I was organizing movie outings and get togethers.
Then I relocated to Seattle out of choice, I could have gone to Houston (or stay in Dallas) as an alternate. I knew practically nothing about the Pacific Northwest, so I did lots of exploring. Got into VW clubs and took weekend trips out to the Olympics west and mountains east, and went to Canada for a VW weekend event. My job sent me to Alaska and Portland as a consultant.
And in November 1999, I moved full time into a RV and relocated to Arizona for the winter to work, and I had never been there and explored several cities that winter. After September 2001, my wife and I moved full time into an RV and went all over the USA.
I had developed a strong sense of what magazines said vs real world, what social media said vs. real world. I would read hundreds of movie reviews from non-professional writers and compare with my own experience. I would read dozens of resturant reviews on dozens of places before using our RV to go out to eat.. And you got a sense of how many differnt people of different ages and experiences described things on the Internet. I did this for years and years, upgraded and changed RV sizes and styles like 7 times.
I lived overseas from December 2010 to 2014. And like Peter Pomerantsev described after returning to London from Russia, I realized that the Arab Spring I had seen from December 2009 online to living in Africa December 2010 was starting to happein and change in USA in 2014.
Online and real-world were no longer reality. And then, the non-reality of the Internet started to take over USA reality. The yard signs and automobile stickers of Donald Trump 2015 and 2016 became Reality TV "The Apprentice" and Reality TV fiction "Fox News" and Reality Social media in the real world.
this needs editing editing rewriting, maybe split into another page.