[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the challenges of bringing HR to the forefront in the new world of interconnectedness. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
[Let me here share with you a potpourri of the worries many of us have when necessary human rights (HR) discussions are drowned in a sea of rant and chatter].
On communications:
1. Is it that, perhaps, we have to raise, not only the volume, but our radical hope on HR in our communications (in the way philosopher Jonathan Lear prescribes when a culture or civilization such as ours risks nearing its end)? (David Zakus)
2. Virtual communications, which is the more recent phenomenon –and which until now has only been possible through the Internet– is different. Communication is supposed to be horizontal: I am a receiver, but I can also be a sender. When mostly vertical, communication has scarily many times more power (including through the spreading of fake news)*. No wonder, then, that politicking today is increasingly oriented towards the social media. The internet having been captured by the market and by spurious influencers has thus eliminated the horizontality of communications we all hailed in the beginnings of the internet. (Roberto Savio)
*: Beware: Fake news are not an Internet issue only; believing this assumes that fake news have not been a daily occurrence in the mainstream press forever. (Oskar Lafontaine, Anne Applebaum).
On the internet:
Why do we take the internet to be a glue of civil society, even though it obviously is not?
-We are fully dependent on the internet –and that is changing everything.
3. The internet is many things. We are talking about the part that we use in our daily lives, the part that has dopamine reward systems built into it that leads to addiction. The key path to effectively controlling the ever-present exchanges that social media rely-on (exerting subliminal influence?) is its algorithmically-driven-privately-held-for-profit-character.** Through this, not only HR, but also democracy are under serious threat –and for this reason, we ought to be very wary precisely since certain posts are given preference based on algorithms we are not allowed to know about, because they are corporate secrets. (Justin Smith)
**: Social media and other sources of digital power bring us a ‘massive distraction’ that, day-in-day-out intrudes into our lives… (Soledad Gallego)
4. Today, we have moved from the era of Gutenberg to the era of Zuckerberg –and we users are mere data, not people.*** Search engines that divide users into affinity groups have eliminated dialogue, because when someone from part A meets someone from part B, they clash and end up insulting each other without listening or sharing. (R. Savio)
***: Numbers contained in data are important, but are thrown at us with biased intentions so they can and do hijack policies –we know this all too well. (Nicoletta Dentico)
On Smartphones:
Smartphone blues (Rebecca Seal)
–The smartphone genie is out of the bottle and has run over the hills and far away.
5. “I cannot remember anything” is a common complaint these days. But is it because we rely so heavily on our smartphones? And do the endless alerts and distractions stop us from forming new memories? Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphonification of life has been rising since the early 2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general.
6. So, what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we are not as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? While smartphones can obviously open up whole new vistas of knowledge, they can also drag us away from the present moment, like a beautiful day, unexperienced, because you are head down, …whatsapping.
7. You see? Our brains cannot multitask. We think we can. But any moment where multitasking seems successful, it is because one of those tasks was not cognitively demanding, like you can fold laundry and listen to the radio. If you are paying attention to your phone, you are not paying attention to anything else.
8. I do not believe smartphones free us up to do more. Let us be real with ourselves: How many of us are using the time afforded us by our banking app to write poetry? We just passively consume crap on Instagram.
9. Smartphones are, of course, made to hijack our attention. The apps that make money by taking our attention are designed to interrupt us. Period. (R. Seal)
On the press:
-The written press has always been used by power, both economic and political. (R. Savio)
10. Newspapers increasingly focus on ‘hot’ events and abandon reporting on processes. But international relations and HR cannot be understood without analyzing the process in which events take place. (In Nairobi in 1973, there were 75 foreign correspondents; today there are three. No European TV has correspondents stationed in Africa). It is, therefore, easy for a government to decide to expel correspondents, but it is almost impossible to shut down social networks, even if autocratic governments try to do so. That is why the Russian public knows little about the reality of the war. But if someone is determined, they can always find a way to overcome censorship –a skill of the young; the old are not so much on the internet and still rely on traditional media (TV?). (R. Savio)
11. Yes, we still have our press rooms and a steady flow of information, that changes topics daily, but never giving due attention to anything important long enough (HR?) to sink-in and lead to the changes we so desperately need. (D. Zakus)
And finally, on Wiki:
12. Wikipedia has fundamentally rewired our cognitive apparatus. We have an immediate external prosthesis for any curiosity we may have. Over time, this has fundamentally altered our relationship to knowledge –and also our understanding of what it means to ‘know’ at all. Old cognitive practices are being lost, new ones are on the horizon, and those of us who learned the old ones, like reading entire books from cover to cover, are feeling sad. (Justin Smith)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com