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Volume 3-2013

NEWS FEEDS

The RCJ provides RSS feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving our readers a convenient portal through which to stay abreast of world events and issues. Use the links provided. The following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage (scroll both columns to the right).

The New York Times

The Huffington Post

The Economist

The Daily Beast

These are provided on other pages within this site:

Politico

Politics Daily

Wall Street Journal

Ezra Klein's WonkBlog - Washington Post

Nuclear Threat Initiative

cnet

Wired

Variety

Rolling Stone

 

Other sites worth visiting:

Cracked.com
Political Punch (ABC News Blog)
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LIBRARY OF ARTICLES

9-11 Liberals and Salman Rushdie

Police Force "Bombing" in Iraq

Anatomy of a Screwing

Fix America Now

Iceberg Economy: How the Supply Siders are Sinking the Ship of State

Bloomberg Illustrates Dodd-Frank Regulations for Investors

DAVOS WEF Points Out Single Points of Failure in the New Global Economy

Soulless Possession of Santo Niño

What Keeps NBC's Chuck Todd Up at Night?

"King of Bain" - Documentary on Mitt Romney's Private Equity Firm Bain Capital

Robert Smigel's Lost Ode to the Evil of General Electric

Riddle This: Do Our Governmental Systems Hinder Mitigation of Harmful Influences to Our System of Government?

The Achievement Metric - Time for a New Way of Determining Public Policy and Positioning Revenue Spending

Hide Your Brains! Matthews from the Left! Gingrich from the Right! Blowhard Attack! Or, more to the point...book reviews of "JFK Elusive Hero" and "Valley Forge"

Art Sampler - An RCJ Review of Art in the Modern Period

Benicia, California Case Study in Traffic Engineering and Growth Management

Everyday Heroism - The Penn State Debacle

How to Keep Things Lousy in the USA

How Being a Socialist Became a Negative

Are You A Slave? A Brief History of the Subject Suggests "Probably"

Moses, Wall Street, Human Nature and Grover Norquist

Concepts of Resistance - The RCJ Provides a Road Map for the OWS Movement

Lance Henriksen - World's Greatest Actor in Reflective Mode

Conspiracy - A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the New World Order

Elections 2012

What Does it Take to be President?

Rating the U.S. News Readers

The Antidote to Michelle Bachman

Ship of Fools - Why Won't We Save Ourselves?

White House Solar Bomb

What Is Happening to Us?

The Cloud - What It Is

Background on Afghanistan

Economics 101

Global Economic Risks

Islamic Definition

Middle East

Second Amendment Remedies

Sam Broussard - Republicans

Treason

Why All the Zombies?

Gun Rights

Leadership Chronicles

Can You Hear Me Now?


Americans and citizens around the world quickly embraced "smart phone" technology, touted for the new world convenience it provided: online banking, directions-finding, shopping, games playing, personal GPS, detail of everything they've done for every minute of every day, detailed personal preferences, present location, identifying features, ethnic profile... Hey, wait a minute! No wonder this year's word-of-somebody's-year is "Selfie"! We did it to ourselves!


By RAR

No device ever conceived has produced the reductive power of the "cellular device", and by reductive I mean the power to reduce its user to a few operable units of information. Operating on those units of information are operators whose purpose is to exploit the profile the user has created by the mere act of using the device

Somehow calling a mobile phone a "cellular device" has struck the world as funny, though when one considers the implications of a "cell phone" the chuckles tend to subside. Until the scientists at Bell Labs started adapting wireless radio transmission technologies used during WWII, putting telephones in top-end luxury automobiles in 1946, all things cellular had to do with organic life forms or systems for incarcerating forms of organic life, e.g., jail cells.  The Bell Labs people created interconnecting geometric shapes roughly centered around pockets of use of wireless telephones, thus creating a cellular network that continues to grow in an organic fashion as the use of wireless devices increases.

Here is your Wikipedia definition of a geometric shape: "A geometric shape is the geometric information which remains when location, scale, orientation and reflection are removed from the description of a geometric object. That is, the result of moving a shape around, enlarging it, rotating it, or reflecting it in a mirror is the same shape as the original, and not a distinct shape."

There, in a nutshell, is the issue with cellular technology. It is not a living organism and yet it thrives on the functions of living organisms and mimics their growth in an evolution of artificial intelligence that reflects users' own information right back at them.

There you have the aforementioned "operators": the service providers who mine user data to develop detailed user profiles fleshed-out willingly by the users themselves. Users, by their own volition, position themselves within series of cells, each of which provides greater granularity of information about the users contained therein.

Cell phones have an apparently lobotomizing effect on their users. There now exists a world of people who walk through life staring into cell phones, providing a steady stream of personal, previously-private information as they remain in constant contact with friends, associates, stockers and other people they probably don't know, i.e., the data miners.



To a person not addicted to cellular technology - the leash that tethers users to a constant stream of text messages, Tweets, Facebook updates, photo sharing, office email, etc. - the advantages gained by using these devices seem pale compared to what users surrender in exchange. Key among these willing sacrifices is privacy - the ability to maintain a safe place to which to retreat when retreating is the best course of action - and the blissfully ignorant among us might want to consider the ramifications of that. Does one wish to remain constantly available, a dog on a leash?

Ironically, in sacrificing privacy addicted users also surrender their social natures and their socialability. Here red flags pop up everywhere among those people who suspect that personal developments that conflict with one another signify reasons to be alarmed. Life has this way of rewarding people in something like equal measure to the their own contributions, i.e., you get out of life what you put into it. Cell phone use seems socially destructive in these and other ways:

  • Users talk on cell phones, even headsets, as they wander through public places, apparently feeling that they are moving within cones of deflection, protected from the public environment that surrounds them, and absolved of any responsibility for interaction with it.
  • Users stare into cell phones as they stand on line, surrounded by other people, many of whom are doing the same basically anti-social thing. The act of occupying close space with other people with whom you will not interact on some basic level of social etiquette is an anti-social act.
  • Users check their cell phones for messages constantly, even during business meetings and important social functions, such as family dinners. This is passive aggression, a statement saying that the user has more important things in their life than what is presently at hand.

Somehow cell phone users have achieved a shared agreement that excuses them from personal interactions if there is some reason they can think of to use their cellular device instead. The device takes precedence over people.

Cell phone users not only surrender the desire to communicate on an interpersonal level, but also the means to communicate with any level of depth and detail.



The world today is actually devolving communication skills; returning to a more primitive state of written communications that relies on broad symbols (emoticons) and short-cut versions of real words (abbreviations, acronyms). This has created a reduction of actual information that has lowered the expectation of depth in interpersonal communications, and has in turn reduced users' interest in or ability to read detailed documentation of any kind. In the U.S., we have whole generations of elected officials who will seek defense on grounds of unavoidable ignorance because the legislation documents are too long and detailed for them to read and understand. This is all related to the reductive methods and means of communication that have been introduced through the advent of cellular devices.

Product developers no longer produce detailed documentation. People don't read instruction manuals anymore, not when every electronic device works on a somewhat standardized model of user interface. Devices are not incredibly complex things to operate, and they are specialized to such a degree that they require only a few controls.

Even documentation of technical procedures, design guidelines, and technical work plans are stripped down to bare minimum these days, with manufacturers preferring to have their customers rely on user forums; to, in effect, be their own organic Help systems. Those forums provide the last lines of nerd defense, the last place where hope for actual needed information on product features and use may reside. That is a small group of volunteers upon which to place the hope of all device-addicted mankind, should their come a time when everyone needs information and assistance all at once. That is a risk feature of the cellular network. A cell can go dark and one links to the next, and large parts or even whole networks may experience outages.

The question of our present age may be, What do we have once the network goes down? Or worse yet, What will we have in the future if the network stays up?

There is a investment-loss ratio to life. Are the things that we do returning values equal to or greater than the tangible losses we incur by engaging in these activities?

It takes a keen mind to parse and factor that equation, given the subjective aspects that people apply to returned value. Is the sense of safety that one feels in talking on a cell phone to a family member while traversing a dark parking lot outweighing the potential downside of your system provider tracking your movements and monitoring your calls? People will always choose denial as their first response to almost anything, save possibly direct personal assault, so most people will choose to go with the immediately tangible benefit (a feeling of safety).

And who minds having the National Security Agency listening to your cell phone calls if there is nothing you have to hide? There again is the investment-loss ratio at work, except at issue here is the value one places on their own person. What does it mean to be part of a cellular network that links wireless transmitters and produces patterns within that cellular structure that detail not only you and your location within that structure, but also everyone else who happens to be like you in a variety of sortable data points, or ways.

In our global addiction to the use of cellular devices, we have executed the ultimate in "selfies". We have systematically dumbed ourselves down and positioned ourselves within boxed places, like components within those shipping containers carried aboard ocean-going freighters.

One wonders where we will be dropped off, and if that grumpy cat meme will have any value as you and yours sink into the abyss.

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©Rick Alan Rice (RAR), December, 2013