The purpose of my Blog? All 8 billion-plus people are special

 I was trying to come up with a catchy and concise title for this post, and although the above title may sound maudlin (because I had to keep it so short), at least it probably got your attention enough to get you thinking "Boy, what a sappy, maudlin title!"  

Now I can get onto the fun part of my purpose-statement: explaining my personal take on all 8-plus billion of us being special. First, however, I have to get a little doom-and-gloom out of the way: Actually, I think all life forms are special, but for the moment I'll stick to human-beings - within the human species alone, and regardless of advances in language, communication and other metrics of civilization too many human beings remain marginalized, and indeed dehumanized.  I'm concerned about whether advances in social media and other communications technologies are accelerating, rather than decelerating this tragedy of dehumanizing others.  

In being concerned about the uses of social media, I know that I join many other people far more knowledgeable about the relevant statistics, the constructs of new communication technologies, the workings of the human brain, etc.  Therefore I'm a concerned citizen or "netizen" (a once-popular term for writers like myself).  I am about to turn 57, which means I remember the early days of the Internet when there seemed to be a lot of optimism (approximately the late 1990s to early 2000s, in my own experience).  I worked as a public library paraprofessional in the mid 1990s, and having plenty of opportunities in reference-service, collection-development and cataloging items for subject-access.  At this time, with the Internet becoming newly available to the public, I remember repeatedly hearing "No one owns the Internet", and finding it very exciting and refreshing that here was something that was open to all, that seemed, at the time very difficult to commodify, very "hippie-trippie" but with an appeal toward reason and civility.  My memories of the 1990s are of many people working in education, libraries, etc. envisioning the "Information Superhighway" (with cautious optimism) as a very open forum for the discussion of ideas and the dissemination of information which information-workers like myself would have a hand in curating and evaluating, and most importantly encouraging the public to learn these skills so that information would be increasingly available, and the Internet would be an extension of the public library - a kind of "people's university" in which people could continue to learn and develop themselves well beyond their years of formal education.  In those days, as I made the decision to pursue my Master's degree in Library Science (MLS), it never occurred to me to associate the idea that "No one owns the Internet" with the free-for-all which I observe social media having become in subsequent years.  I hope that if I was overly optimistic in the 1990s I might be overly pessimistic now in the early-to-mid 2020s.  I have been hearing mostly negative things about ChatGPT4, a form of AI whose very creators tend to express regret or reservation about having empowered, as if it were a kind of "Frankenstein's monster".  

 In order to write this blog with any quality I need to seek out further information on social media, ChatGPT4, etc. beyond the top results of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.  I need to reframe my search-terms, look into specific questions not the least of which is "Can government regulations keep ChatGPT4 from totally replacing human intelligence?" or perhaps "Can human nature resist the pull of ChatGPT4 in replacing human intelligence?"  Obviously I need to keep working on how to phrase these questions, but I remember, from my library days, to evaluate the source of the information.  That seems like a skill which should be obvious, but is it becoming a lost art?  Are younger generations increasingly prone to shorter attention spans than my generation had?  Will it make at least an infinetissimal difference that I send my two little grandnephews books to encourage their sense of wonder in trees and streams, words and art?  After I'm long gone, and they themselves become old men at the turn of the 22nd Century will the planet even still be habitable, and will my little grandnephew have the initiative and the ability to ask good questions about everything and anything they encounter in their lives?

At age 57 I already feel so "burnt out" on all the changes that have taken place during my lifetime.  I was in my 20s and early 30s during the early and optimistic days of the Internet.  I was 23-25 in 1989-1991, the years which were described as the "Collapse of Communism".  I was old enough to refrain from exuberance, but still young enough to be optimistic about the state of the world at that point.  Apartheid also had collapsed, and although I remember how worried the guys in Vail House (the co-op housing in Ann Arbor, MI in which students and young professionals lived) were about being drafted into the war in the Persian Gulf, the war turned out to be only 6 weeks long to the relief of everyone around me at that time.  (We didn't yet know that this 6-week long fight would become the "First Gulf War", and would be followed by a second one, precipitated by the events of September 11, 2001 which would last for 20 years, and end with yet more days of infamy, in which Afghans desperately sought refuge in the last planes to leave the squalor and chaos of Kabul Airport.).  In 1991 I didn't anticipate the many atrocities that were yet to come in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, and many other places.  I think of the early 90s as a brief breath of fresh air between the "Greed is good" era of the 1980s and the anxieties of the 2020s, including the 100-plus million people globally seeking refuge

I will write my blog as a "netizen" in the best sense of that word, remembering the term as a description of people who simply want to contribute something positive to the vast cybersphere, with the understanding that the things I have to say probably will get swallowed up and lost among the trillions (or has it reached quadrillions, quintillions or beyond) of pieces of data in the cybersphere, but hoping that, combined with the contributions of other likeminded "netizens" my online "footprint" may somehow tilt the world's mighty algorithms and AI away from the evil and bigotry and disinformation that tends to grab attention by titillating too many pairs of eyes, and resulting in terrible events like the January 6, 2021 Insurrection.  

I'm not vain.  Actually I don't think my writing is anything special, but with the world in an existential crisis I don't dare NOT contribute toward kindness and good in any way I can.  May the same be said of all well-intentioned people, some of whom are my friends and family, and tell me "You can't change the world".