Social Media: The First 2,000 Years (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Standage, Mitch Jeserich (KPFA), Frank Rose (NY Times, 11-1-13)

Through the ages: A Roman wax tablet and its 21st-century electronic descendant, the iPad.

The Romans had social media and tablets. The Victorians had an Internet. We are taught to believe it's novel, but it's the way things were before media got centralized. Technology has just returned us to where we were with everything potentially faster and cheaper.

For nearly 20 years, we’ve thought of “new media” as the brash young upstart and “old media” as the stalwart if increasingly embattled establishment. 

But what if new media aren’t as new as we assume -- and old media not really old at all?

 

Social media history (popscreen.com)

So argues Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall, a provocative book that asks us to look at media less in terms of technology -- digital or analog -- than in terms of the role they invite us to play. Are we passive receptors for whatever facts, opinions, and ad messages come our way? 

Or are we participants, sharing what we like with others, amending or commenting in the process? The second is characteristic of the Internet in general and social media in particular. But there’s nothing revolutionary about this, Standage says. 

Instead, it’s the role of consumer, so typical of 20th-­century mass media, that’s unnatural -- and to Standage, a historical blip. This observation has been made before, but never with such a wealth of information to back it up. Standage -- the digital editor at The Economist and the author of such unorthodox chronicles as... More

Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage. Illustrated. 278 pp. Bloomsbury.

• Letters and Politics, Dec. 26, 2013, 10:00 am
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Kepler: Milky Way is full of planet Earths

Wisdom Quarterly; TheEconomist.com, Nov. 9, 2013

Astronaut Sandra Bullock does complicated stuff above the planet in Gravity (AP).

 

Latest batch of results from Kepler is illuminating and baffling

When it comes to public appreciation of astronomy, NASA’s exoplanet-hunting space telescope Kepler is the most successful instrument the agency has launched since Hubble. 

 

Astronomers have been spotting exoplanets -- those that orbit stars other than the sun -- since the 1990s. But Kepler has transformed the field from a cottage industry into a production line.

 

On Nov. 4th astronomers gathered at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California to hear the latest news. The headline was the release of the most recent batch of data from the spacecraft. The 833 new planets thus identified bring the total found by Kepler to 3,538.

The akasha deva loka, space, from Hubble telescope's ultra deep slice (onbeing.org)

  

Technically these are only “candidate” planets, whose presence is inferred by the tiny dimming they cause when they pass in front of their host stars. Such candidates must await confirmation by other telescopes before being promoted to full discoveries. But astronomers expect a low rate of false positives.

(1967Sander) ET technology exists on the Moon, "Project Golden Dragon." Author Roc Hatfield (Ancient Man on the Moon and Moon Base Cover Up?) describes UFO machine: "Our brains are not used to seeing alien technology, so it might take a few minutes to see it. It is clearly a vast machine.... It is made of thousands of inter-locking plates, like scales on an alligator. I believe this allows it to undulate like a snake or caterpillar.... By being flexible it can wrap its huge length around the curvature of the Moon's surface.... I believe the machine can fly and has been to Earth in the past. Could be the dragons seen by ancient Chinese people."

This exoplanetary smorgasbord allows researchers to conduct statistical analyses and extrapolate Kepler’s results to the rest of the galaxy. A group led by Erik Petigura of the University of California, Berkeley, having crunched the numbers, told the meeting that around a fifth of sun-like stars in the Milky Way [Galaxy] are likely to host planets roughly the size and temperature of Earth.

By the researchers’ definition, sun-like stars are a fifth of the total, so that means only about one star in 25 would have such a planet. But the galaxy is a big place, so if they are right there are billions of Earthlike planets in it. The closest is expected to be less than 12 light-years from Earth. More

Space is full of life. Cosmonaut reveals what NASA will not. Starts at 2:33

Zeitgeist Movement: New Orientation

Recession's end in sight?
The current recession will end sooner than you might think, but more jobs will be lost.

When to expect it

"I feel a lot better," says one economist

Economy showing some signs of life

• Zeitgeist Movement website

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Zeitgeist the movie and Addendum have inspired a movement. This orientation explains what we can do now about the global economy, banking collapse, corporate consumerism, and feeling better.

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Buddha was a Businessman (UCLA)

Popular images of the Buddha do not have him "pondering how to avoid paying custom duties and taxes" nor teaching his followers "how to write a loan contract and not make unsecured loans" (Credit: Todd Cheney/UCLA).

"The Buddha as Astute Businessman, Economist, Lawyer" Ajay Singh for UCLA Today

Wall Street bankers would have benefited from being in the Buddha's audience. At the 106th Faculty Research Lecture, Gregory Schopen explains.

THE BUDDHA was a businessman. But don't take anyone's word for it — it's written in stone.

Of all the iconic scenes found in the earliest Buddhist art from India, none are more striking than the sculpted representation of a title deed involving one of Buddhism's most venerable monasteries: The transaction, involving 10 million gold coins, clearly shows that far from being an ascetic, other-worldly religious tradition, Buddhism was, in fact, "deeply entangled with money – and a very great deal of it at that," according to Gregory Schopen, chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and an authority on ancient Indian Buddhism.

Schopen spoke March 10 at the 106th Faculty Research Lecture at the Freud Playhouse on a topic that has much to say about why our world has sunk into a recession: "The Buddha as Businessman: Economics and Law in an Old Indian Religion." More>>