I often see the same dream. In that dream, I’m suddenly forced to sing on a stage in front of a large audience. I’m not confident at all and confused but the atmosphere is not bad. Actually I can’t sing but this is a metaphor of what I do in the real world. I’ve had almost 4000 friends on Facebook and 16,000 followers on Twitter since about 10 years ago. It’s like a number of subscribers of a local newspaper of a local magazine. Whatever I say, I get loud reactions all the time.
Through the pandemic and the presidential election, a lot of people spent hours on the internet and they had endless debates. They can’t believe why there are so many intelligently challenged people out there and try to prove how wrong those people are. Then sometimes those people terribly insult them. They take the weapon (keyboard) again and stand up (turn on the PC). It’s already 2am. In ancient times, I mean the 90s, the internet world was more savage. Internet warriors used to stay up all night for the completely useless debates. After all, nothing has been changed. The one truth about the internet is that you can’t fix it. Maybe we can sweep Covid-19 one day, but we can never clean the internet.
We think about an idea for 10hours. After such a consideration and the inner discussion, we post it on the internet. Then someone leaves a totally irrelevant comment on it. We get furious and curse at the entire human beings. Why does this happen and is it so often ? Because there are a lot of people online and most of them check the posts while waiting at a traffic light or waiting for a waiter to serve a beer. Some of them might be drunk or almost asleep. It’s not that you can’t understand what other people are thinking. It’s that other people don’t think anything about your post. This is the internet.
The election period was horrible. Some “educated” people invented a phase that is “social disruption”. This is an academic phrase to express “we are annoyed by the lazy and uneducated group of people”. When this phrase is used in the context of pandemic, it means Covid-19 is spreading because of the uneducated people. I did research to analyze the demographic statistics and Covid-19 data. The analysis said that the states with the higher standard of education have more Covid-19 deaths in the US. These states have slightly less infections but the mortality rate is higher. Additionally these states have higher rates of illicit drug usage including cocaine. The usage of cocaine is in the strong correlation with Covid-19 deaths. Probably this is an inconvenient truth. In the US, education background is in the very strong correlation with income. Some rich and highly educated drug abusers died of Covid-19. Probably this was the reality. News people don’t want to talk about it because they are one of them. I guess those people started using drugs in university and continued to use it even after graduation. They don’t look like junkies and probably use it only at a party or something. Either way, it’s not as good as potato chips. I really am not interested in politics at all. What I wanted to say is that there are always things we don’t know and it makes us think we are surrounded by “utter idiots”.
From my personal experience, when we feel very annoyed by the internet, probably we use the internet too much. We check it and post too many things. We actually are annoying the thread. The Internet is a closed place. In a closed place, people appreciate the things coming from the outside. Actually the key to be valuable online, which has nothing to do with the number of Likes and reposts, is to increase the activity outside the internet. The knowledge outside the internet, the fresh experience offline contribute to the internet world the most.
Everyday I post my research analysis, which I believe is truly valuable and helpful for people. However, my most shared post was the picture of my cat sleeping on the bed. It was featured by more than 10 magazines and had approximately 400,000 likes. I still can’t be as good as a sleeping cat.
