The Memetic Hazard
Dec. 1st, 2021 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitSo a while back, siderea discovered the existence of r/collapse on Reddit and posted about it with the warning that it was a "memetic hazard": something with the potential to seriously screw up your brainspace if you read it too much. I stayed out of it for a while and then eventually poked my head in just to skim, whereupon I went "What? This is mostly similar to Sharon Astyk's Facebook feed, just somewhat more scattered and less useful, and I look at that every day... oh. Oh."
Sharon Astyk is a writer who I discovered when her essay on the importance of reading aloud whirred around the librarian community several years ago. When I realized she mostly wasn't writing much there I went looking around to see if she was writing somewhere else, and found that she has a lot of public posts on Facebook, both sharing useful articles and writing her own incisive essays. She's very realist and does not at all believe in pulling her punches, so the essays have gotten progressively more frightening about the state of the world... in large part because thus far she's been very on-point in terms of predicting things, which means I know I'm not looking at exaggerations.
And I've been at the very least skimming the headlines and often actually looking at a few of the articles she shares which taken all together put forth an apocalyptic picture. And I read her original essays.
I didn't make the connection between "memetic hazard" and "this stuff" until I actually went and peeked into r/collapse, at which point I realized that I've been looking at a whole bunch of stuff about the impending end of the world, which has indeed been having something of a deleterious effect on my mental health.
On sharing this revelation with Mathfriend it was suggested to me that I should perhaps not be looking at this Facebook feed every day.
siderea discovered the existence of r/collapse on Reddit and posted about it with the warning that it was a "memetic hazard": something with the potential to seriously screw up your brainspace if you read it too much. I stayed out of it for a while and then eventually poked my head in just to skim, whereupon I went "What? This is mostly similar to Sharon Astyk's Facebook feed, just somewhat more scattered and less useful, and I look at that every day... oh. Oh."Sharon Astyk is a writer who I discovered when her essay on the importance of reading aloud whirred around the librarian community several years ago. When I realized she mostly wasn't writing much there I went looking around to see if she was writing somewhere else, and found that she has a lot of public posts on Facebook, both sharing useful articles and writing her own incisive essays. She's very realist and does not at all believe in pulling her punches, so the essays have gotten progressively more frightening about the state of the world... in large part because thus far she's been very on-point in terms of predicting things, which means I know I'm not looking at exaggerations.
And I've been at the very least skimming the headlines and often actually looking at a few of the articles she shares which taken all together put forth an apocalyptic picture. And I read her original essays.
I didn't make the connection between "memetic hazard" and "this stuff" until I actually went and peeked into r/collapse, at which point I realized that I've been looking at a whole bunch of stuff about the impending end of the world, which has indeed been having something of a deleterious effect on my mental health.
On sharing this revelation with Mathfriend it was suggested to me that I should perhaps not be looking at this Facebook feed every day.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-02 09:15 am (UTC)