Combat and Competition and Hope in Age of Universal Electronic Social Media (Thesis)

[Due to a sacroiliac injury and siatic nerve pain it has been several weeks since I've had good REM sleep.  This has made it difficult for me to concentrate and finish longer blogs, and I've turned to shorter statements via Twitter and news content.  Got some different nerve meds and had a long vivid dream last night.  Woke up with these thoughts, which I want to record in over 280 characters]

Universal Electronic Social Media [notification beeps on Facebook comments, or prolonged internet time on Reddit, etc] has created an impression of increasing conflict.  A lot of pundits are concluding that the internet is becoming more hostile, people less reserved or nuanced in their commentary -- or withdrawing altogether, or reserving comment for tighter social circles with less conflict (but also less exposure to genuine dialectic disagreement).

Hans Rosling of Gapminder Recognized

A few years ago my son, then a student at United World College, sent me a link to "The Best Statistics You've Never Seen", a TED talk by Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling.  I shared it pretty widely.  In recent years, Dr. Rosling (who still seemed quite young) was increasingly turning over presentations to his own adult son.  Last Friday, we learned Rosling had died of cancer [NYT Obituary]

Over Facebook and Twitter, Rosling has not exactly been a celebrity like Prince or Bowie, but you start to observe really really smart people are all noting his passing.

Here's a short 2015 interview with Rosling with Engish subtitles.   If you haven't seen it yet, go to one of his longer 2006 TED Talk video in English.



It isn't the 1970s.  It has not been the 1970s for over a decade.  The talk about "third world" and "lesser developed nations" and "primtive" and dystopian descriptions are being kept alive by a type of white nostalgia that seeks to leverage exoticism into a kind of nuture-instinct currency.  I do it even now - returning from Africa I find far more photos on my card of grass roofs than of metal ones.  We are attracted to documenting poverty, leveraging schadenfreude, gaining a fantasy of heroicism in the process.

 "Herrschaftskritischer Ansatz" is another good German expression to describe it.

Here is my observation about how Rosling's Gapminder can bring us together.  Yes, this is political.  The wealthier blue state democrat demographic and blue collar red state demographic are both guilty of portraying the rest of the world as seriously far more "other" than it is.

Earth Population to Exceed 7 Billion: Video

According to recent statistics, the human population of planet Earth will exceed 7,000,000,000 (seven billion) in another month to two months.   In perspective, there are now fewer Tigers in the wild than there are in zoos in the USA... around 5,000.   The line of extinction blurs with loss of habitat, replaced by of vibrancy of the DNA (preserved in umbilical stem cells)... 


The best video on the subject of population growth remains BBC's Hans Rosling's, 

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

The key to his video is that no country (USA) is declining.  Neighboring countries are catching up.  In terms of international comparison, there is less difference between poor and rich nations today than there was 75 years ago.  

 


The plan is that as the statistics on international well being level out, that the birth rate will level out, and that we may be approaching a "soft landing" as far as survival of humans and life on earth.  If we are going to survive this "soft landing", then we should start to protect the other species and planetary diversity.   Otherwise, we may survive Noah's flood, but we may have nothing but picture books of coral reefs and rain forests and savannahs to show our kids.


I for one think that internet access is important to the soft landing. The video shows that human progress helps humanity on the whole.  As the old threats to our lifespan decline, we invent new concerns about "toxics" and "vaccinations".  


The key measure is not population, but the net common sense of the population.