Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Back in innocent days when you could tell the subject of an advertising campaign in the first screen shots, Apple did this forward-feeling campaign showing seminal cultural figures like Ghandi with the overlay phrase THINK DIFFERENT.

Well, it’s time to THINK DIFFERENT AGAIN.

That is to say, think different about Apple, about Amazon, about Google, about Facebook …

To be comfortable in reality. To reject virtual reality.

Consider what is happening on the internet. Recently I read a frightening multi-book review in the London Review of Books, called "Schadenfreude With Bite," by Richard Seymour.

Here are some highlights:

• ·         What’s so funny about trolling? “Every joke calls for a public of its own,” Freud said, “and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of a far-reaching psychical conformity.”
• ·         Grieving parents are among the easiest to exploit – their rage and sorrow are closest to the surface.
• ·         [Trolling] is a “mass cultural response to women asserting themselves [in] previously male-dominated areas.
• ·         Much of the laughter, [Whitney] Phillips [This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture] points out, is “directed to people of colour, especially African Americans, women, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer” people, while trolling communities disproportionately comprise young white men in Anglophone or Nordic countries.

OK. There is a role for the internet in small doses among close friends and budding relationships. But a deep dive? Fuhgeddaboutit. People ask why I don’t even run with headphones on? To stay real, baby. So much of the internet doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So, if you’re searching for the latest in tech gadgetry and VR headsets, you got the wrong address. Around here, it’s all running, reading, and ’riting.

Next: Running for Your Life: Little Look Back at 2016