getting mind back

I've moved back from this gurglacious setup to a 17in laptop at a standing desk. Sitting down is part of the problem.

I have been conscious of the way in which in the last several years the pressures of the smart phone's proddings and the presence of the bigger screen/s at which I type this have been interfering with my capacity to think. We seem all to become more and more dependent on sucking the tits of digital means.

One of the things delivered unto us on these digital devices is called news. But what is this 'news'? With a few exceptions it too seems to have succumbed to undying lemming behaviour, 'journalists' chasing each other over cliffs of nonsense they themselves have erected, cliffs which blind the incessant reader to anything that happened more than a news cycle ago. No one wants reality now, we all want the games.

And now in a blizzard, we lose some of the best members of the Australian parliament, all in a rush. Fear and bigotry vultures remain, with a few good men. The renewed Prime Minister, a charismatic, demagogic, hypocritical, lying, conniving, eroding, manipulative genius (a doctor friend today said "psychopathic narcissist?"), has all but destroyed his party to get the prize. He says he has learned, he says he is a better man, but he really just seems to be doing the same only more. He has a not to be rebutted way of speaking in public, cutely said today he might give consideration to some views some others may offer; others he would vehemently reject. His return has been loud. He is most likely to lead the Labor Party to a defeat in coming elections less dreadful than it would have been under Gillard, Gillard facing an internal and external opponent every day. As to whether this renewed Prime Minister will resign from the leadership after such defeat... well, it would not be on character if he did.

But I digress.... Go here for a good commentary.

I suppose it's not just digression, it's also fury at the way our minds are led astray because of the way we now get news and the way news and attitudes are shaped.

----

We face corrosion of the brain personally, not just in the body politic.

This article in The Guardian expresses the problem very well:

...Such are the annoying ironies of work and play in the 21st century: more and more of us are "knowledge workers", doing jobs that require deep concentration, yet we do so on machines that seem deliberately designed to interrupt us all the time and to keep us on edge. Then, in the evenings, we try to relax using similar machines, which all too often whip us up into a state that isn't relaxing at all.
The dirty secret of the internet is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable. ...

 This hit the spot for me, directly.

So...

I have disconnected my phone from receiving mail and news updates. I am unsubscribing from a lot of new news. I am going to try to get the focus onto longer writing projects of my own initiative. More art.
... less blogging???  :-)

 I have refrained from Twittery and Face-painting, declining invitations from whomever. LinkedIn, about which I've giggled a bit here before, lost its shreds of worth, in my view, by pointing at me and presumably the world a hose pipe of opinion of General Stanley McCrystall this week. Enough bullshit, enough demagoguery from celebrities.

Oh and Huffington Post, a formerly great initiative, going down the drain: possibly interesting serious material now interspersed with celebrity cleavage and thigh revelations. Remove from phone. I can get enough of that in many doctors' waiting rooms!

The 'App' is the poison, the means to more quickly vanish into mindlessness, or to avoid prospect of elevating oneself from mindlessness, to ensure succinctification of the bullshit. Up from the merde let me struggle now. Before the depth turns all the lights out.

I will still look to The Guardian for reassurance that there are some sane people, so reflective thinkers, some independent minded editors out there.

I've not been writing much here, but

There's been more out there in my 'suburban forest' blog (link in right column) but I confess I am doing more outside work than scribble about it. With physical and mental benefit!!

Notes from linkedin caused me to review my profile generally today (after all, three people have looked at in three months... Well, maybe a few more). The great puzzle I find is that people send me messages saying they would like to connect... but if I write to them ["Hello, thanks for asking me to connect, your profile is interesting, etc.. ] it seems usually they do not respond. What is this 'connect' ... or does someone imagine my name will help them in the world, or is it just raw numbers of connectednesses?

Which tends to bear out this fun item in The Guardian this week, asking "has every conversation in history been a series of meaningless bleeps?"  One commentator on that usefully sent me (and hopefully one or two other readers, who knows) to find George Orwell's four motives for writing. What Orwell seems to miss is the tendency of this species to burble on and on, or conversely, not. Though he might suggest that that is a dimension of propensity not motive. On the matter of whether there is point or not to things said (motive or propensity), the brown chook, the elder-chook – yes, this is sort of in the wrong blog, but it remains germane – spoke to me with evidnet concern when I took my breakfast outside this morning: to say, I took it, that the two white chooks, recent arrivals, had vanished. Or so I thought Mrs Brown to say, at length, over hours. And to the of us both relief, later in the day the elegant young Livornese Ladies wandered back in from up the street.

Also though, I had figured out by then that Mrs Brown was telling me not only that she was alone and had only me to Friend and Connect (see meaningless beeps, previous para, but see also this, also from The Guardian recently)... but also that the feed bin was empty. This I divined from inspection of the bin, not from our discourse.

Cross-cultural barriers lesson 1: attend to the facts, not your assumptions,

Cross-cultural barriers lesson 2: do not presume the number of facts is the number you suppose.

===

Last night the LinkedIn computer, perhaps after a party, had written to me to say:

From: LinkedIn
Subject: Dennis: Australian Aerospace Resources Pty Ltd, BAE Systems Australia and NGO Recruitment are looking for candidates like you.

That last one was for: Country Director - China - World Society for the Protection of Animals
The details (of course I went to look) mentioned animals once but then slipped gracefully into the human resources species-talk, beginning with this from The Book of Common Babble:

You will be responsible for the development and delivery of the business strategy in accordance with regional and international goals. As the spokesperson you will develop and nurture relations with stakeholders including government authorities, inter-governmental organisations, media and key society. 

So:
... these below are my newly edited top-of-page self-promotional LinkMeUpScotty words, to see what new offers may come!

Beginning as you may know with Job Title, Company, Dates and Location, the sine qua nons of existence:

writer  

good company occasionally July 1943 – Present (69 years 11 months): in head, on paper, on screen, on brain, on soul... on too many subjectsI have a novel half done, 50000+ words. It runs through my head but currently not to paper, many other things under way in life. 
The novel draws on life experience in locations, in Australia and China. It has social and political dimensions. 
It also derives from personal experience of trying to be a reformer who works to change systems from within, rather than by tearing down. An activity that can mean you get abused from both sides, from the entrenched and conservatives on one side and on the other from the protesters at the gate. In my novel I hope to describe the story of leaders in China in the 1980s in that difficult context. 
But also with a contemporary Australian connection... though month by month, like the female protagonist in my novel, I find much of 'contemporary Australia' disconcertingly unattractive, not only in prospective political leadership but also the determination it seems, of a swathe of the population, to abandon thoughtfulness and go for dumb whinging. 
See, whatever I do turns to writing.. or thoughtful dumb whinging?
Oh, here is something I wrote long ago, so many aspects of life seem to weave together so often:
http://aplaceof.info/06/0610.1/1027capes.htm