Social Media has changed the paths in my mind

To be clear, after years of use, social media has changed my daily thought habits, therefore changed what I think about as well as the emotional content of my day. This is what the paths of our minds are made up of, our daily thought habits, plus our emotional moods, both body chemicals with their related feelings (are you hungry? etc...), and mental narratives based on events* (i.e. are you paying attention to events in the day to day around you, or to things happening all over the world?). It's not a I-kinda-think-therefore-it-is type of deal. And if I am one unit, one person who is part of the collective consciousness and social consciousness*, therefore social media exposure has done this to all who have partaken, to the degree that they were "exposed", according to what content people were exposed to, . ( *For more see collective consciousness  , or Social_consciousness. Yes, I 💖Wikipedia ). 

For me personally the reason I got into social media, and what I search for when there, was and is still about finding contemporary art and fiction writing. 

But, there is no escape from politics today, esp. American politics if you are an American Voter, like me. There's also a great sad heaps of religious crap tangled in the "spaghetti" of our lack of separation of religion and state. It's gotten so bad with The Supreme Court of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and other like minded founding fathers must be rolling in projectile vomit in their graves. 

Oh and money, is that the other one we are told not to talk about? The divide is pre-Apocalyptically bad in our current economic state. The working poor who were the middle class in the 70s - 80s are now as I understand it debt slaves to such a degree the wealthy can't even make money directly off of them anymore, instead they are selling all their personal meta-data and worse bio-meta-data to who knows who is buying. 

Did I mention how I got into social media to find art and fiction writing and to promote my own art and fiction writing? 

And how did that go? I wrote 5/6th of a political parody, something I never, never, in a trillion years ever imagined myself, ever doing. 

Sooooooooo...?* (my favorite word since 2019 is so with too many o's, as a question). 

I'm attempting to wean myself off of social media in 2023 and the ironic and pathetic part is that I still need the internet and/or a community of people to not be a lone artist with piles of art in a shack that no one will ever see until I die and someone buys our lot (including the shack) and finds this art pile. And to finished, to be, one must be read, before the piles of drafts on the top shelf of my closet meet the same fate. Tho, unlike the pottery, the paper can be burnt and the digits of computer memory can be deleted. 

Now what? That is the question! *blerg* (thanks, very much for that perfect word Tina Fey).

☮+💚🧠s @Uva_Be 

P.s. now is currently August 22nd, I posted this on July 13th, 2023. And I've been avoiding the social media except to post to unfired clay on my Unfired Clay tumblr. And a few check-ins at IG. For me this = pretty sparce to absent from social media activity. 

Sept 6th, just need a bit more time, and looking at time-lines, and motivation, reasons, explanations, and finally that "click",... maybe? Tho, the one that says "this is it!" not waiting forever for that one. 

Got happily lost reading a bit about chiliasm.

 What interested me most wasn't the turn of the millennium exactly as I got lost reading a bit about chiliasm.This pigeon language PIE from trade routes and massive movements of people that all the other Latinized languages the Indo-European people of the world were using. It was that feeling we get in the fictional worlds of The Hobbit or Game of Thrones or even the Naruto world. Where it's not Asia or Europe or the Americas. 

There's a very nicely done animated svg gif graphic on the PIE wiki page. 

chiliasm (n.)

1600, from Latinized form of Greek khiliasmos, from khilias, from khilioi "a thousand, the number 1,000," which is probably from a PIE *gheslo-, source also of Sanskrit sahasra- "thousand" and perhaps also Latin mille, but the exact original sense of the root is unclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language 

PIE "PIE" and "Proto-Indo-European" redirect here. For the people, see Proto-Indo-Europeans. For other uses, see PIE (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Pre-Indo-European languages or Paleo-European languages.

and

*gheslo- / Indo-European roots

Examples of words with the root gheslo-: chiliad, Hazara, kilo-, mil, mile, milfoil, millefiori glass, millefleur, millenary, millennium, millepore, millesimal, milli-, milliary, millime, million, millipede, per mil.

gheslo-

Seen by some as a base for words meaning "thousand"

Oldest form *g̑heslo-, becoming *gheslo- in centum languages.

1. Suffixed form *ghesl-yo-. chiliad, kilo- from Greek khīlioi, thousand.

2. Compound *sm̥-gheslo- (*sm̥-, one; see sem-¹) Hazara from Old Iranian *hazahram, thousand.

3. mil¹, mile, millenary, millesimal, milli-, milliary, millime, million; milfoil, millefiori glass, millefleur, millennium, millepore, millipede, per mil from Latin mīlle, thousand, which has been analyzed as *smī-, "one" + a form *ghslī-, but is of obscure origin.

Note to self. millepore is a coral. and millipore is a filter, made from cellulose acetate membranes, capable of removing very small particles. Related to nanopore A pore, of nanometre dimensions, in a membrane. 

Milliary related to latin for mile and milestones.

Miliary for Millet the seed, used to describe millet sized symptoms of a disease, example lesions of tuberculosis.

THIS and actual thousands of other word examples is why I fight with Grammarly and Autocorrect. I choose the words, trying to express or understand a specific meaning, NOT what is the current most popular word with a similar spelling.

What I hate most about AI

 Yes, I used that four letter word. I'm not talking dislike, or a slight annoyance. I HATE some of the newest AI features and how these "bots" bombard my life in an extremely negative way -- torturing us daily. Forcing us to retype, sometimes three times, to not have Autocorrect change the meaning of what we are attempting to say. 

The RED crayon is @GoogleAI, just today, looking at my phone. Two different unrelated Chat conversations.

Google sends an email. Let's chat about Google I/O 2023  and I mark it, because I have been contacting support / Feedback, begging them to shut off the damn digital torture. I have logged in to my settings. The only setting I can find to turn off the "Smart suggestions" is in the Chrome browser, I can't even see that setting to turn off the "Help me write feature" on my phone. I've turned them off so many times in Gmail, the settings menu has changed, moved around and changed wording. Gmail's "Help me write feature, Smart Reply, whatever they are calling it now. 

I'm having a serious and private* (not social media) Chat conversation with my elderly family. We are BRCA1 cancer survivors, my family. We are trying to stay positive in an unoffensively realistic way, and keep in touch, painfully aware of the remaining days we have left to chat and talk. 

                  [ Why that's great! ]-   -   - [ Send a photo! ] -   -   - [ Love that photo! ]

First of all, the "Smart Reply" button that says, Love that photo!, to me, when I am the one who sent the photos (often to have "something" to say, in hopes of being life affirming I send photos). True it's annoying to accidentally hit a "smart" reply button that will annoy my actually smart Boomer Mom who doesn't own a smart phone, use or understand social media, and if she wants to Send a photo! she has to ask Dad, who has a digital camera and uploads them, it's a process. Anyway, she reads, Love that photo! She's with it enough to know she didn't send any photo, so why did I text that?  But, that's only the tiny snowball that starts the avalanche of sad. 

The buttons are large and in the way. If we on either end of the conversation accidentally hit one, (there are four of us in this conversation on various devices), We can't undo this "smart" reply. It's in the Chat thread "forever" until we lose it, or lose them -- actually forever. 

When texting with a loved one, you need to hear their words. And the more trivial and less generic, more personal experience related the actual words from your loved one are, the better, to relate with them. Especially if they are not okay, and the AI is feeding you all these "easy" or "nice" -- actually in the way of the keyboard to type, words. You read them, they are in your head, and it is still not okay at all with them or how anyone feels or what the people in the conversation need to say. It's really, really tragic for someone to be ignoring their parent or their child by hitting the auto reply AI buttons instead of actually choosing the words to say, that the other family member or loved one needs to hear. 

And I can't emphasize this enough. We are talking about important end of life conversations. Possibly some of the last things we may ever say to one another. GOOGLE! PLEASE, PLEASE, TURN THE SMART REPLY BUTTONS OFF!!! 

Okay, I have more, much more, but I'm going to stop now. Because one battle at a time. One human against a bot (an actual army of email and text crawling AI) that can "read" and "type" I don't even know how many times faster than an actual human. There's a limit to what is helpful, and me being angry, at the digital tide invading the details of my life, this isn't it.  +  Uva Be

Tune in next blog post when I rant about Autocorrect! And Google Photos Magic Editor! 

P.s. After I don't know how many searches attempting to turn off Smart Replies, and only finding the settings in the browser, I finally got the search result that seems to have turned them off on my phone. The place with the least space/most easy to accidentally ""click". It was right there on top with settings/more, as if I was/am the crazy lady, again. 

P.s. 2 years later. I turn smart reply whatever they are calling them now, off after updates, again, and again. My Mother is dead now. The last couple of years were really difficult. I'm thankful I was able to spend some time with her, not just chat about what she was looking at outside her window.

😐

P.s. #2 weeks later. I have turned smart replies a.k.a. those boxes of crap filling up the screen space on my phone twice now. Three times if you count me driving to the air-port and someone who just landed calling me and me hitting the box that creepily said. "I'm driving, can't chat now." When actually they needed to know I was there to pick them up, don't get a cab, or get on the bus. :(

Week note #2 Art Therapy

 While humans have been communicating via art since the first cave paintings, for the 20th century, (life-span 1890 to 1983) the American Margaret Naumburg, could very possibly be the mother of art therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Naumburg Quote from Wikipedia.

Margaret Naumburg's dynamically oriented art therapy, approach promotes " the release of spontaneous imagery" from the client through the symbols drawn and free association of the artworks, sometimes with eye closed drawing on a large sheet of paper. The patient to move their chosen material, paint or chalk pastel, around the page until satisfied but asked that the material not be lifted from the page from start to finish. After the drawing is created the drawer is then allowed to look at the artwork and try to create another form from the scribble. The client is encouraged to move the page around until an image is found. Once an image is seen in the scribble drawing, or painting, they are asked to color it in. At this point if the client wants to talk about the artwork while creating, they are encouraged to do so.

The therapist withholds interpretation encouraging clients to discover what their picture means to them. It was important to Naumburg to avoid interpreting or commenting on the client's artwork so the client would not change their mind about what was created and to avoid being wrong. Naumburg used art as the means for clients to visually project their conflicts, and when it was too difficult for the client to relax, she would provide them with art lessons or specific directive projects instead. 

Other than think about art therapy instead of doing art, I've been researching and reading quite a bit, as learning-stuff definitely is a happy-place for me. 

Speaking of reading, I've often talked with artist friends about our personal mark and form language and I'm reading this. Early Rock Art of the American West by Ekkehart Malotiki and Ellen Dissanayake

https://books.google.com/books/about/Early_Rock_Art_of_the_American_West.html?id=Ui5fDwAAQBAJ

A quote from page 8, (yes I'm also reading the introduction pages).

World-wide, abstract-geometric marks are remarkable for being persistent (enduring in time and recurring over time and space), consistent (having similar style and content wherever on Earth they are found), and resistant (to change over time and to change in the individuals or culture that created them). 

But, I'm not feeling like sharing much else from last week, but 😌.... I did make this graphic. It was in response to another graphic I didn't like. I was like, I don't like that graphic, so make one that I do agree with/like and here is it. 

Maybe, random what I learned this week...?

Processing social media over years, two decades in 2025. More if you count the film forum I was involved with in 1999. I've come to the conclusion that processing the negative (anger, hate and fear) is changing my daily ruminations to such an extent that I need to have a self-defense plan for my mental health. 

On Mastodon in December last year 2022, someone um... Andrew Doran suggested learning in public.

 https://indieweb.social/@Uva_Be/110198936104504047 and https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public

At the time, another person, Steve Martin (not that Steve Martin) had caught my attention because he was doing a hashtag game on Twitter, #365ThingsILike regardless of if he invented the game. The idea is to pause and ponder something you like, instead of responding to the negative i.e. the (anger, hate and fear) 365. 

Personally, I found this challenge to be much more difficult than I expected, and at about 322 I stopped posting my list because I'm a natural introvert/recluse and it felt like exhibitionist behavior. 

Soooo.... ? (soooo as a question with too many 'o's is one of my favorite words). 

With art, my favorite form of communication, seconded by writing, mostly free prose like this and terrible almost Vogon level poetry, and years of attempts at long fiction. Soooooo? I have been doing an art derivate paper meditation since July 2012. 

And just a few minutes ago, April 14, 2023 I was thinking about posting a note I wrote to myself. 

Human hearing: there's too much about the bad, hearing loss to hyperacusis yikes! And nowhere near enough about good hearing. 

Good hearing. Musically, it's called perfect pitch, and there's levels of trained ears, golden ears, silver ears, etc... regardless of the natural non-metallic resonance to my ears or how good or not my sense of pitch is. Because of cancer in my 20s, not because of hearing loss, my hearing was tested. I have acute hearing. This turns out, once again to be a mental thing and the extreme sensitivity to noise is more commonly associated with folks in the Asperger's/Autism spectrum than in the general public. 

Back to the first two words in the above paragraph. Good hearing. A lot of the work of hearing, as with sight, is done in the mind. And good news! There are four areas of good hearing: 

1. Word clarity and comprehension of the strings of sounds and pauses that make up speech. 
2. Amplitude or volume: ability to hear soft or quiet sounds, or comprehend what is a loud noise. Seems counter intuitive please see Hyperacusis. Amplitude also requires the ability to hear many sounds, in an overlapping mix of waves or sound depth and textures.
3. Pitch: ability to hear high pitches or low sounds.
4. And hearing range: the human version of echo location or understanding of relative distance or closeness of heard sounds, to be able to triangulate the source of a sound, or understand a noise's origin as the sound waves rush past or reach you from a distance.

And this little, what I learned this week was brought to you by the hashtag game #OneWordWednesday 4/12/2023 theme sound. 

-------------

Last week: April 6, 2023, again attempting to neutralize the negative (anger, hate and fear) a doctor I banter with sometimes for fun on Twitter Allen Y. Tien MD MHS  

https://twitter.com/Uva_Be/status/1644053848322117633 was tweeting about deep learning, and I wanted to know why it's such a challenge to find data about the good chemical's as the cortisol stress hormone and fight or flight is "everywhere" in search results, I'd heard a podcast I now can't find, via Lex Fridman (yes I went to his official site and did a search on many of the people who I thought it might be, with no joy). While I still haven't found this Professor of Joy at seeing nature expressed in the body, not just a conversation on obvious aesthetics but the positive chemical correlation in the body. No, not melatonin. That is apparently stress's chemical opposite. BIG #sigh. Anyway, Allen suggested Deep Beauty Brain Systems as search words. And this led me to #neuroesthetics  to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroesthetics 

And I found an author. Ellen Dissanayake with multiple books on the topic and one of the four books was in the library. 

There's my random what I learned from the past two weeks. I'll post more as I find something interesting and find I have a block of time. 

+  Uva Be

All talked out?

April 5, 2023 

Writing again. And taking breaks on social media, again. Can't seem to quit either, writing or social media. 

--- three months ago ---

1/25/2023. Last night er,... sometime between 4 and 5 in the morning. I was pondering if it was possible that I talked myself out of my social media habit. 

I thought about writing one last haiku about it and seeing how long it would sit there. 

#haiku title: talked out moment

not much idyllic
tired of paltry media
who knows for how long

3 writing prompts: #HaikuChallenge #vss365, and #vssdaily

But, then I logged in, today's vss365 prompt was moment. (very short story 365 and or daily) I do like that word, moment. Something that I haven't been doing daily, for a while now, very short stories. Haiku challenge's prompt was idyllic and very short story daily's prompt was paltry, sooo... there's a 5/7/5 line poem with one of three prompts in the title for 1/25/2023. 

Then today is Wednesday. I thought about writing one word with the hashtag, #OneWordWednesday ... done.

 But, the optional theme was geometry, so I read about geometry and looked at geometric art for longer than I read about it and didn't select one word. Never mind, here's a good one. End point.

terminus 

#OneWordWednesday theme geometry. 

Not loving "smart" phones is so unpopular, people seem think it means that you don't like people, if you don't like phones, see 2 of 3 comments. 

Well the 3rd person got it/understood. Obviously, I took a couple screenshots for posterity.  

Also, 18+ on nobody is forcing you to own one? 

BIG #sigh. I've had a cell phone since at least 1989? And you do have to have one. Esp. with all calls being long distance. Have you even tried to have a landline, like ever? I bet whomever these 18+ people are have not personally, themselves dealt with an actual plug in the wall land-line and paying the phone bill themselves, ever.  Or I don't know. I wonder what the odds are for a boomer with only a landline and a computer to upvote that comment in the brief time it was up before Reddit took it down? .... grrrrrrrr... Mute point since I hated landline phones in the 80s too. Annoying other people always on them talking away for what seemed like hours. Yep. A VERY unpopular opinion, hating phones.

Conversations in the old Tweet river

 A blog post about Twitter -- and the big 2022 44 billion sell-out.

How has social media changed your daily routine?

I asked this question on 2 sites and posted a poll asking the same on two more because social media has changed my routine gradually over the years. And I'm attempting to decide what to do about it, Dec 2022.

(Jan 2023 I'm working on focus on the real, where I'm at more). 

In 1999 there was only forums, or that's all that I knew of. I searched for very specific networking for my art and writing.

In 2005 I joined MySpace. I actually found local music and art events to go to, and started "collecting" cartoonists and contemporary artists of all types, people whose work I liked. But, it wasn't a daily routine thing, yet. I just checked in when I was bored.

FB is not worth mentioning because it sucks people in, there's no escape to find art there in my experience. I've also tried a few writing groups and also, no joy. The site annoys me too much and I close the tab. Yes I said tab, in a browser. NO I don't load these horrible *beeping* apps onto my phone.

My daily routine wasn't changed until about a year after I joined Twitter. I found lots of fun conversations there. I checked in and replied to people. They became part of my daily consciousness. The poems, and very short stories and art. Then gradually it went sour. Politics stuff I never thought much about before now also became part of my daily routine.

It did change me quite a lot. And now? It's like Pandora's box has been opened and there's no shutting that box. For me, especially as related to #climateChange and wishing for more climate action that's not happening.

Since the Billionaire bought Twitter I log in there and block people, every single day. So, I've divided my social media lunch breaks from work into four social media sites. Mastodon, FB including IG, a few threads on Reddit, and last check-in is usually with Twitter, only to check notifications and then close that cesspool in the same way that is used to check notifications and then close FB.

Yep, even with limited exposure social media has definitely changed my daily routine. To answer my own question -- How has it changed my daily routine? I read and reply to strangers almost daily. At least 6 days per week. I pay a lot more attention to what is going on in the world than I used to. That's how I guess?

#haiku title: words in boxes

cross posting four times

quadruple social bypass

and I feel quiet

On Mastodon I posted an alt image photo description. Mastodon @indieweb.social@Uva_Be

Today, (Dec 16, 2022) I've 3,310 Twitter Followers (and dropping steadily). I'm Following 3,263 (also dropping without me unfollowing anybody). 

Jan 23rd, 2023 -- 3,309 Followers / 3,264 Following. Not much has changed except the time I don't spend there.

 I have a social page on my blog. www.uvabe.com, there are page links on the top bar click on social. I will update this page with current data. 

+  @Uva_Be 

(emoji translation = peace and green heart = environmental love, brain = thoughts with you, and remember to breathe with the trees, world).

P.s. Not an influencer that I know of. I just chat/reply with people, mostly on my social media lunch breaks, or if I'm bored, like waiting for something. And if you go to my other pages, you will see I share my art, write some times, take photos out in the world here and there, and will take photos of food as art. Food is good art IMHO. Or sometimes I'll check-in with the world when there are news events or happenings.