WTF is social? Media and Politics

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Media & Politics 

Let's get into the media business a bit. Why do people care about a child stuck in a well more than statistics on number of people who died in second world war? There is no pain in statistics. Being able to be pained by statistics is a special faculty of the brain and perhaps only as old as numbers (few thousand years max).  It needs to be inculcated and developed. It needs imagination that is not universal. It is inhuman for normal social brain humans. I almost wept when I reduced context switches from  150K to 200 when building a multi-threaded non-blocking http proxy. The social brain can only detect pain in other people, not numbers. We have been feeling pain of other humans for millions of years. 

The key to social brain is personification - the act of making a thing or a system appear like a person. And as a corollary, the key to suppress humanity in a person is de-personification - the act of labelling or suggesting a person is not worthy of being called a person - perhaps an insect, or a virus or a poison or a thing. Enimification is similar to de-personification except the person remains a person but evil and localised enough so that at least in imagination can be defeated in one move. It is stupid to term anything undefeatable as enemy like global warming. All you get is smirks.

 The only thing we can assume that every human can understand is the pain and happiness of other humans. This makes selling things as person and persons as things, the main business of mass media and politics. Media keeps changing but the politics is the same - tricking the social brain into making people into things and things into people. Being together is not enough. That is just the first step. Surviving each other is the real test of survival, just like marriage. 

Next: Stress

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