Are we all peeping toms using technological aids to social perversion while raping the constitution?
Immortalist
culture that makes us all either or simultaneously exhibitionists or
voyeurs. We have mania for observing and revealing pseudo-secret
personal information:
A typical person starts a blog, applies to reality television shows,
does video surveillance around his house and slips a GPS tracking
device into his wife's car. He's content to merely interview, rather
than join, the middle-aged couples who post their amateur porn online.
He argues instead that peep culture reprises an ancient impulse to
bond through the sharing of intimacies, but worries that our digital
version of village gossip and primate grooming is a weak and
fraudulent foundation for community (out of his 700-odd Facebook
friends and blog readers, only one showed up for his offline party).
Hey Dorks
You need to know.
You need to be known.
The compulsion fueling the peep culture, the bastard love child of
gossip'--our mass addiction to twittering, tweeting, snooping, spying,
blogging, gawking at reality TV and YouTube, spilling our secrets on
Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ping...the list goes on, may be called
surveillance with benefits. Is our consuming need for human connection
relly a virtual descent into the loneliest of worlds?
Nosy Peepers; the phenomenon that currently finds us all yearning to
watch and be watched. It's spawned everything from reality TV to
Facebook to complex spy technologies used for entertainment and other,
not so benign purposes. . . .
TV shows like 'Cops,' originally intended to curb crime, wind up
promoting it. . .
Is homeland security really the elite peeping tom perverts agency
sacrificing the constitution to get their jollies off while making
everyone else afraid and in need of immediate action. Are Americans at
all levels really terrorists and suicide bombers in one sense,
whipping their asses with their constitutions and wheeling and dealing
their favored God and doctrines of extremism cloaked in decency?
Is there a way to understand how we at all levels got hooked up to
this IV drip of perpetual connectivity, of watching and being watched?
The social context that got us into peep culture and the forces allows
a food chain of peepers to exploit our participation in it.
Peep culture reprises an ancient impulse to bond through the sharing
of intimacies, but our digital version of village gossip and primate
grooming is a weak and fraudulent foundation for community, replacing
the good society with the lynch mob and the witch hunt, sacrificing
people on whim and preference without any evidence at all.
Will the rest of the world be fool enough to follow America into
piggish and anarchic oblivion, burning the constitution and social
contract to warm their perverted desires, obese with meme?
What's Peep, you ask? Peep is the innate human desire to know and be
known, to see and be seen, to communicate and be communicated with. We
are social animals, goes the Niedzviecki Hypothesis, and this
primitive compulsion to reach out and touch (or view) someone harks
back to our days as mutually grooming primates. . . .
http://www.amazon.com/Peep-Diaries-Learning-Ourselves-Neighbors/dp/0872864995
Rod Speed
> Ubiquitous video technology and the Internet have ushered in a peep
> culture that makes us all either or simultaneously exhibitionists or voyeurs.
Mindlessly silly, its nothing like ALL.
> We have mania for observing and revealing pseudo-secret personal information:
Fuck all do.
None of the rest of this even more mindless silly shit worth bothering with.
Sir Frederick
Next will be brain based qualia presentations of the subjective experiences,
Then the 'subconscious' processes that produced the qualia.
Then the brain states and processes that underlay the 'subconscious',
including 'feelings'.
It is all a simple systems problem. :)
Immortalist
>
> Next will be brain based qualia presentations of the subjective experiences,
> Then the 'subconscious' processes that produced the qualia.
> Then the brain states and processes that underlay the 'subconscious',
> including 'feelings'.
>
> It is all a simple systems problem. :)
The author is already referring to those brain areas from which gossip
comes and how they evolved to their unique human configuration now;
Why did human language, and the enormous brain necessary to enable it,
evolve? The classic hypothesis is that it helped (male) humans hunt
larger prey by communicating with each other, thus making it more
likely that their descendants would survive to adulthood...
Dunbar offers a startling alternative hypothesis: that language
evolved as a substitute for primate grooming, functioning to
strengthen social bonds and increase the possibility of cooperation in
groups too large for extended personal contact between all members. He
points out that grooming and talking (especially if it causes
laughter) both stimulate the production of endorphins, causing the
participants to feel soothed and mildly euphoric -- but conversation
is more efficient, in that an individual can only groom one friend per
unit of time but can chat with three. Furthermore, Dunbar posits that
our brains have primarily developed to process social rather than
physical information; and he even hints that females may have driven
this process, both by forming alliances among themselves and by
preferring to mate with the smoothest-talking males.
http://www.sciencebookguide.com/book.html?book=32
Why is it that among all the primates, only humans have language?
According to Professor Robin Dunbar's new book, Grooming, Gossip, and
the Evolution of Language, humans gossip because we don't groom each
other. Dunbar builds his argument in a lively discussion that touches
on such varied topics as the behavior of gelada baboons, Darwin's
theory of evolution, computer-generated poetry, and the significance
of brain size. He begins with the social organization of the great
apes. These animals live in small groups and maintain social cohesion
through almost constant grooming activities. Grooming is a way to
forge alliances, establish hierarchy, offer comfort, or make apology.
Once a population expands beyond a certain number, however, it becomes
impossible for each member to maintain constant physical contact with
every other member of the group. Considering the large groups in which
human beings have found it necessary to live, Dunbar posits that we
developed language as a substitute for physical intimacy.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674363361/qid=1089563345/
Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in
the intensity of their social relationships. All their grooming is not
so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends,
and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a
way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups
of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost
half their time grooming one another -- an impossible burden. What
Dunbar suggests -- and his research, whether in the realm of
primatology or in that of gossip, confirms - is that humans developed
language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems
there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse,
dynamic group -- whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates.
Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in
relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's
original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that
language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date
with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and
we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by
teleconferencing, e-mail, or any other communication technology. As
Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our
primordial need for face-to-face contact.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0674363361
http://web2.airmail.net/dsh440/grunt.htm
http://faculty.knox.edu/fmcandre/99P0282R3.pdf
Immortalist
> Immortalist wrote:
> > Ubiquitous video technology and the Internet have ushered in a peep
> > culture that makes us all either or simultaneously exhibitionists or voyeurs.
>
> Mindlessly silly, its nothing like ALL.
>
Ya, it makes it sound like a real peep show where you get on a phone
and tell the lady what to do to turn you one while she does it behind
the glass wall.
> > We have mania for observing and revealing pseudo-secret personal information:
>
> Fuck all do.
>
ah, ha, ha, da, do, doo,
> >http://www.amazon.com/Peep-Diaries-Learning-Ourselves-Neighbors/dp/08...
BOfL
It is no secret that until the individual 'finds himself', he looks to
others for elucidation.
The ways of the 'tribe' are predictable, always facilitating a
platform where self realization is the "real' glittering prize.
BOfL (alt.philosophy)
ZerkonXXXX
>> Immortalist wrote:
>> > Ubiquitous video technology and the Internet have ushered in a peep
>> > culture that makes us all either or simultaneously exhibitionists or
>> > voyeurs.
>>
>> Mindlessly silly, its nothing like ALL.
>>
>>
> Ya, it makes it sound like a real peep show where you get on a phone and
> tell the lady what to do to turn you one while she does it behind the
> glass wall.