“A lot of experienced news people — whether broadcast or print — feel like they’ve been baited and switched, that they were trained and hired to do one thing but are now being required to do something else. That’s understandable, but it’s also completely irrelevant.”
— Terry Heaton
I’ve been thinking some about fear and happiness recently, so these excerpts from an article by Roger Fransecky (“Happiness Is A Choice”) caught my attention:
“Dan Baker’s book, What Happy People Know, confirms the wisdom of the research into what (Dr. Martin) Seligman calls “authentic happiness” and “learned optimism.” Baker notes that a major barrier to happiness is fear. He writes, “We all have a neurological fear system embedded deep within our brains, a neural network that once helped us survive as a species, but now limits our lives. The biological circuitry of fear is the greatest enemy of happiness.”
We’ve written about how fear binds us, edits our hopes and diminishes our potential for happiness. Baker reminds us that fear is the repository for our past traumas, our fear of the future and our archaic instinctual terrors. Fear can be a gift, our way of staying out of the darkness and moving into the light of awareness and new beginnings. But if our fears own us, we have to break free…by awareness of those fears, and through the courage to challenge our fears to see if they are still real.”
For additional information on “neurological fear systems embedded deep within our brains,” reference the work of Dr. Warren Chapin.
My favorite political pundit, Matt Taibbi, penned a cheerful article about politics, media and class in America. Since nobody is going to click on a link to an article thus described, here’s the final paragraph:
“These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.”
“(Blogging is) headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what’s important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world.”
From Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
“The blogs… the good news and bad news about blogs. First the bad news. The bad news is anybody can say anything about someone and they don’t even have to put their name on it. In fact, the anonymity encourages irresponsibility. And it is pretty frustrating, I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I just stopped reading this stuff a long time ago.
“The good is, when there are allegations made, in any variety of formats, there are people who know the facts, and step forward, and correct the facts. People who put their name on it and correct.”
— Sen. James Webb on bloggers