July 06, 2016

Free Ur Mind From This Rat Race

Glam Slam
Free your mind from this rat race
Glam Slam
Escape!

Pop quiz time! How do you get 46,000 people to forward an article that amounts to nothing more than gibberish? You give it a sensational headline. After all, most people don't read anything more than the headline before forwarding anything on to the masses. That's how the true thieves in the temple get to us. They know it's like herding sheep blindly through a fantasy. Because few people question what they read anymore. It's all clickbait for the rat race and its time we escaped. Now that I have thoroughly confused you, let me explain exactly what I am talking about here.

It seems that the satirical news site Science Post wanted to have fun with people so they made a post on Facebook with the headline, "Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting." Now the text of this post was nothing more than lorem ipsum but that didn't stop more than 46,000 people from sharing the post with their friends. Now let's think about that for a minute.  First, the post is nothing but lorem ipsum.  For those of you who may not know what that is, lorem ipsum is defined as:
In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.
So, lorem ipsum basically amounts to nothing more than gibberish. Now, let's look at the post's headline, "Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting." According to this, 70% of the people who read this should have commented without reading the article (which they couldn't read anyway because it was gibberish). I don't know how many commented but more than 46,000 people shared it. How do you share an article that is total gibberish? I don't get it! Come on people, free your mind from this rat race!!!

Now to show you that the above incident is not a fluke. A new study by computer scientists at Columbia University with the French National Institute shows that 59% of the links that are actually shared on social media have never been clicked. Once again, herding sheep blindly through a fantasy! Wake up children! Free Urself! Almost 60% of people retweet articles without ever actually reading them? Then what's to be expected from 3-3? Absolutely nothing! The Purple Army knows what I'm talking about!  Anyway, here is part of the Chicago Tribune's article on the subject:
Worse, the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.

"People are more willing to share an article than read it," study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. "This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper."

To verify that depressing piece of conventional internet wisdom, Legout and his co-authors collected two data sets: the first, on all tweets containing Bit.ly-shortened links to five major news sources during a one-month period last summer; the second, on all of the clicks attached to that set of shortened links, as logged by Bit.ly, during the same period. After cleaning and collating that data, the researchers basically found themselves with a map to how news goes viral on Twitter.

And that map showed, pretty clearly, that "viral" news is widely shared — but not necessarily, you know, read. (I'm really only typing this sentence for 4 in 10 people in the audience.)

The researchers made a few other telling observations, as well: Most clicks to news stories, they found, were made on links shared by regular Twitter users, and not the media organization itself. The links that users clicked were much older than we generally assume — some had been published for several days, in fact

But most interesting, for our purposes, is this habit of sharing without clicking — a habit that, when you think about it, explains so much of the oft-demoralizing cesspool that is internet culture. Among the many phenomena we'd tentatively attribute, in large part, to the trend: the rise of sharebait (nee clickbait) and the general BuzzFeedification of traditional media; the internet hoax-industrial complex, which only seems to be growing stronger; and the utter lack of intelligent online discourse around any remotely complicated, controversial topic. (you can read the full article here)
So is this the colonized mind? Is this the microchip in your neck?  When will we wake up and realize that they are force-feeding us the story they want us to hear and not the truth? You can see in the study above how we propagate their lies by taking their stories viral. We base our opinion on the summary of a summary or an opinion of an opinion. We need to do the work and go deeper than that so grab your scuba gear! Ask the questions that need to be asked! Don't be afraid to find the truth! Free your mind from the rat race and FREE URSELF!

If U look, Ur sure gonna find
Throughout mankind's history
A colonized mind
The one in power makes law
Under which the colonized fall
But without God it's just the blind leading the blind

Love4OneAnother! Love4EachOther! Love4UsAll! Peace & B-Wild!

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