Part 10
While our various means of communication have opened up dramatically over the past twenty years, we still have to keep in mind that initially the words “Social Media” were meant to describe an exciting concept that offered multiple ways of reaching other people. In others words, it was a great way of putting us all in communication.
However, as inevitably happens to anything that starts out with the best of intentions, a segment of the population immediately sought ways to pervert this great idea. Now “Social Media” has come to include fake news, false advertising and, even more alarming, a massive campaign created to keep the man in the street in a perpetual state of anxiety, even terror, over the state of their health, the condition of the economy and the end of civilization and life as we know it.
News channels make fortunes by spreading “doom and gloom” to a society that has been fixated on negative attitudes. Some examples are, “One person in four will get cancer” or “Help starving kids in Africa to drink clean water” or “Your loved ones will struggle to pay the cost of your funeral” and so on and so on.
Fear, anxiety, despair and depression are the most advertised issues published on Social Media and TV today. Any attempt to raise the mood of the public is derided and decried as being an effort to destroy the existing order. Social Media’s Pandora’s box of ways and means of spreading good news has been craftily turned around to promote the very reverse – a world in chaos going down the tubes!
Why should we be surprised?
History is littered with examples of either mass suppression or distortion of communication. Remember the Spanish Inquisition’s vicious suppression of any data that varied from the dogma of the church at that time? Or Nazi Germany, which specialized in cartoons and savage betrayals of anyone who didn’t fit into the mold of the Aryan master race?
On a personal note, after being educated in South Africa, I came back to Britain and worked in television for a few years. On returning to South Africa in 1960, in expectation of the imminent opening of TV there, I was stunned to discover that the medium was being withheld for purely political reasons. The infamous Apartheid government feared that television would allow the African population to understand how the rest of the world had mostly moved on from racial intolerance. They realized, correctly as it turned out, that television would spark unrest in the major segment of the population, cut off from any real communication with the rest of the world.
When television finally opened up, with intense supervision and censorship of “unacceptable” topics, I was warned that a memo had been circulated around the South Africa Broadcast Corporation to the effect that there were two people not to be employed in the Corporation under any circumstances. I was one of them. Both of us had three strikes against us: (1) We were not fluent Afrikaans speakers (2) We did not support or vote for the Apartheid Government and (3) Worst of all, we both had experience in working in the medium at a reasonably high level. The other “villain,” Ken MacKenzie, had opened both Rhodesian and Jamaican television as their General Manager. I was the youngest Studio Manager in Britain at the time and in line for the youngest TV Director had I remained in Britain.
Today the media, social or otherwise, has become a political weapon on a par with the biggest tanks, guns and bombs in a country’s arsenal.
What would be different about ExoBrain?
ExoBrain’s Founder Peter Warren and his team are adamant that this uniquely simple-to-operate and inexpensive computing system will be used solely for positive and ethical outcomes.
Can this realistically be achieved?
Yes, through ExoBrain’s powerful encryption system to prevent leakage of data, and through its ethical team, dedicated to providing truthful and accurate data for all its users. It is predicted that it will soon counteract fake news and mind-manipulative programming by existing systems.
Someone has to take a stand, if we’re to reduce and prevent the poisoning of minds and let us get social again! ExoTech is doing just that.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.