Part One: Cage

In the previous post I put forward two ideas: those of the randomness and the library angel. I’d like to connect them to my experience on social media. They say that the social media is like a village. Social media could be a good tool  for spreading any idea and to become familiar with the diversity, therefore, experiencing the randomness. You can assert yourself the way that you like without  anybody can rein or seriously refute your assertions. You “un-friend” him and become friend with those who appreciate your way. It is the way that we bar ourselves from undesirable friendship: good or bad. It is our choice.

Nevertheless, it  is an effective tool in the hands of the good and the evil. Well, who is good and what is evil? I leave this rhetorical question for later.

I know we people have sides and we take side with affairs. Like other resources on this planet we fight to monopolise the internet and its social medias or to put them at our disposal towards our aims, thoughts and benefits and ambitions. Those who have created these social media have not done that for their benevolence. They have done it for the benefit – for the sake of having power on the people.

There is one point here. Underneath of any of these new technologies there has been an essential large substructure created by certain people just for the curiosity and passion and altruism that they had. They have been mostly low paid researchers, teachers, and unpaid hobbyists and enthusiasts. Such people have passed a claim, a wealth, to the entire society as their beneficiary,  such that all the people reasonably have got the right and a share of ownership over these technologies.

We can find out how some people became rich out of the toils of others, right at this point.

One can expand any of the above propositions into articles and even books, but it remains to answer this question. If you were living during Louis the Sixteenth which side you would choose or such similar events?

Among the social media I am familiar with Twitter and Facebook. Twitter enjoys such a mayhem that it cannot use what I might call “Caging” or putting a horse blinder (blinker) such that you can see only in front of yours (update: recently using more powerful computers and software Twitter also imposes this caging algorithm).

When I use terminologies such as “algorithms,” then people, many people, become frightened to think further as if it is like rocket science etc. No, let me explain it: you have ten urns (vase, bag, or such) – ten is more than enough – and each urn painted in a different colour. You can not have ten very distinct colours in an ordinary eye, so some of the urns have colours near to each other. Then you have a lot of the small penny size tokens.

Software reads a piece of a post even a title of a post that you liked, checks which of those words has the same colour as any of those urns (words are colourful or colourless) if it could find a match then drops a token for you in that urn. Depending on your activity, it counts your tokens daily or weekly for each urn and creates your profile. By constant profiling, it puts some other urns aside. Then it searches your friends profiles and on finding similarity between urns the software creates a family.

From this point on software puts a blinder on your eyes. Now you are not a random entity for the software. You are out of the randomness of your thoughts. You become an identified entity for the monitoring software.

What is the result of that. You know what is kettling. It means that if police knows gathering of a group of people dangerous – know them trouble making – then it has to prevent them from going astray. Police confine them inside a restricted, limited area. Policing of a “kettled” group is easier. But for the software of social media, there are other reasons, too. From the capitalistic goal of targeting you and your group with certain ads and promotional material, on the one hand, to the sinister political aims such as reconnaissance, infiltration, shilling, neutralising and diverting and controling the public, on the other hand.

Psychologically caged entities start to feel comfortable and satisfied inside the caged family and feel sheltered and bold and gradually lose steam and necessary adrenalin for keeping the level of their enthusiasm.

Part Two: Angel

There was a time that searching on the internet could take you to fascinating places. You liked to know who was, say King Edward IV, then you would find a high school teacher in “Summer Bay¹” who had dedicated all his life to the study of history of England in fifteenth century AD. You see how randomly you could connect to an unknown enthusiast who also by all means needed some appreciation and delivery. It was the beginning of the miracles of The Angel of library. You could exchange emails or deepen your relation with him.

An example of that is the article of my friend Robert who walked all along the Tewkesbury battlefield and around and wrote a lengthy article here and here. The “visit counter” I have set here does not show an encouraging number of visits by non-bots, non-spammers. What is the reason?

It is because of caging. They created Wikipedia or call it better Zionopedia with the terrible  infrastructure to devour all the random ventures of all other contributors to the internet, with the goal to cage the reader and to put a blinker on his eyes such that he cannot see anything else. In particular, if you are  someone who is just at the beginning of disseminating your knowledge on the internet or at the beginning of your authoring then you are not able to attract any audience.

It is impossible that you can overpower such sites as Wikipedia or can change their biased materials so patched together. There are other sites with similar infrastructure, too. If any inquirer, especially, a young student wants to find out about some new fact he has to get it through the Wikipedia whether on the mobile phones, tablets, computers in schools, colleges, etc. That comes first. The Summer Bay’s teacher’s work cannot be found even in page fifty of the search engines. It is almost impossible to find it. This new library has only a couple of books Wikipedia and  one or two more books. It does not need an angel. They have software that bars you to access the internet in such places but those software are tuned to allow Wikipedia.

This is not a polished finished article; only wrote it under the spur of an urge. I’ll be back to improve it.

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1. Summer Bay: A fictional place from the Australian TV series “Home and Away”

That description of Twekesbury in the book mixed with what my friend here had penned down when he had walked over all the important points the history could remember and terrain could allow.

That coincidence did not end there. For a long time I wanted to write it but things happened that prevented me; one was that for almost three months my computer was not satisfactory. But this is a story I write it somewhere else. At last there came a time when I wrote about this very interesting coincidence.

I was eager to share it with certain friends of mine on the Facebook.  I have to say that I have a kind of inhibition to do that. I can’t post constantly on social media. Inside me I believe it is an inconvenience for the people if I bother them too much by flooding them with my personal taste of affairs.

Well, every now and then I might share some very interesting post of a friend as a sign of comradeship, but not more, not much more. If I have something to say I usually say it as the comment on the posts of other people.  What should I do?

And right next day the library angel went to my friend “Donna”. She tagged me in a post about a very related news about a community who helped their local bookshop move their books into its new place; it was in Southampton. I got the opportunity to propagate my blog there in the comment section of her post.

200 volunteers form human chain to move books from old store to new space

I understood that the fairy was still at work. How? That gave me a way to advertise my blog post regarding the library angel in that message. It was on my wall but not in a way that I usually avoid.

My  next proposition is regarding the truth of the library angel. People who already has mentioned such a phenomenon also believe that all the scientific discoveries of humans are in debt of this being. I believe it is true and scientific.

Let me tell you something from the early computers. By early I mean 1960s, 70s around those times. The memory of those computers were sequential. That is, to find a piece of data computers had to search all along the length of a tape to find that data. Perhaps you have seen them in movies or perhaps some of you can remember. It was slow and tedious. Those memories later replaced with the random access memories. Randomness gave speed to retrieval of data.

But computers remained sequential as always. Computers cannot understand randomness. Even the random numbers they create are pseudo-random not the random-random.

A thinker, an intellectual, a scientist needs to walk along the isles of books. Suddenly, some  being asks him to stop right at that shelf, at that isle of shelves and to take that book out, flick through the pages. Who is that being. Nobody knows; except those who go into a library into a bookshop and allow the angel to walk them through the randomness.

I like to add some more paragraphs but I leave them for later,

I do not want to make a  big deal of this. I do not like to, either. I have been educated in maths and engineering and such things and have always had some pet words and phrases and quotes regarding pseudo-science and pathological ideas. It took me lot to integrate myself many things in a unified manner, to look into the mind and matter in a horizontal way.

One afternoon when I came to this site for some house-keeping chores I became very surprised. I noticed that one of the editors in this blog had published an essay about the Tewkesbury battlefield during the War of the Roses in 15th century.

That morning I was in the public library. I rarely go to the libraries. Yes, sometimes to British Library but not for the books but for a coffee and to enjoy the buzz of the central London. I also do not borrow books from the libraries. Let me confess that I do not read a lot from the hard copy books or even from the Internet books that now a days are available. I have not read much for many years. I like the writing more than the reading. I believe that I know everything, in a way!

In that day I stopped in front of one of the shelves, just randomly, and looked and took a book. I just took it and carried it to the circulation desk. Well, we do not need any circulation desk anymore that much these days. I took it to the borrowing machine. I came home and started to read it. Its title was, “Wars of the Roses – Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors,” by Conn Iggulden. It is one of the four volumes the author has written in the form of a story book but with an attempted historical conciseness.

My surprise was due to the fact that the climax of the book happened at Tewkesbury indeed. The title of the book is on Ravenspur but all the heat of the story is at that battlefield – Twkesbury – and also the turning point of the King Edward IV. There is a vivid picturesque description of Twekesbury. This was a coincidence that I interpreted it in a way in relation to what my friend was busy writing it in the same morning and at the same time that I was in the library.

I believe, again in a way in the existence of something known as the fairy of the libraries. When I was young I used to go to the libraries much taking books and start to read them randomly. Later in my life I noticed that I could integrate those pieces in a strange way and deduce my unique ideas about everything without becoming shaky about them.

For example, I’d like to attach this story to the politics. If we do not support libraries and starve them in terms of the funding that they need as it is happening right now in our UK, if we do not frequent public libraries and do not encourage younger generations to use them then we might lose or reduce the number of the library angels or they might face extinction similar to many material and visible species on our planet. We cannot, then,  go into a library and randomly take a book and sit and read part of it and become more inquisitive and more curious about certain things. I have not finished it and I hope to continue this but right now I am in my usual hurriedness.

Prompt, modern answer is: “a question that won’t need an answer.”  The question is supposed to give a lesson most of the time to chastise the audience into accepting propositions put forward by the ‘orator’ or the writer.

Rhetoric is one of the arts of communications described by Aristotle as part of his pentad crafts. Simply, you say something without considering to prove it. Listeners listen without arguing back. Then you leave the podium, or lector to one, to any other one, who puts his own rhetoric into the judgement of his audience. Perhaps I know that rhetoric, art of speech and oration, has extended and diverse meanings. But I leave them for later.

This blog is dedicated to those who have something to say, without they can find definite documentation and prove their points.

For example, sometimes ago a friend asked something about events around the decisions for beginning the first world war. I could remember facts from the documentaries I had seen but for certain I could not find those documents as evidence of my propositions. This is where one cannot use the term ‘investigative essay’ but somehow things which are near to reality.

In such cases it is fair to avoid blatant labels, libelling , lies and accusations, except in mild rhetoric: asking some bitter questions, or sarcastic questions, that naturally will not expect and will not wait for an answer, from the audience but only has an awakening effect.

We frequently might enter the partisan ideas . Then how far we respect the freedom of speech? This rhetorical question has been answered many times and could be one of the main themes of these blogs that could attract response from different contributors.

Later, I discuss some domains of communication adjacent to the rhetoric, such as puffery and bullshit.