Editor:
I’ve just read the letter to the editor by Paul Mann concerning technology, amongst other things (“Mailbox,” Oct. 29). Not only is he correct in declaration as he asserts the downside of new technology, he inadvertently raises the question: Are we that much better off in a world full of new gadgetry?
Reading the letter is like a class in literature. I don’t know many of the complex words that Mr. Mann uses, so I have to look them up and then place the meaning in Mr. Mann’s sentence. It almost feels like a letter written in poetry, like he entertains his poetic desires to express himself with the written word.
In the written word, he perplexes my ordinary thought process to bring out my inquisitive nature, to know what he is relating to his audience in what some would call interminable fashion. Although he does evince the problems stemming from social media in a trenchant argument, he remains reticent and aloof.
His ability to quote others is prudent to his work. With immediacy he goes beyond the superficiality of life, into the quandaries of existentialism — in what eventually is derived of the enigma itself. Well done in what space of time he dwells, I might add.
Although haste and passion can be opposed to good council, according to Thucydides, they also live in the past — where boorishness and insolence attack the herculean to go beyond ignorance into an enlightened state of bliss, where the truth sets us free. (Not so easy a place to be, and equally hard to see, through modern technology.)
So the next time someone’s attempt to traduce with their euphemism on social media has given you cause to be dyspeptic, remember what Paul Mann says, “Ignorance metastasizes in the social media, compromising not only public safety (the earliest intelligence is usually mistaken) but also the public mind.”
John Griffin, McKinleyville
This article appears in The Ripple Effect.
Mr. Mann’s skill in the fine art of exhibiting the obvious in unexpected and terrifying lights, has become the mainstay of “news” over the last generation. And like mainstream “news”, Mann’s reflections take on intellectually recognizable forms, but offer no intellectually recognizable conclusion.
In essence, he has illustrated why social media is so popular.
Like so many before him, Mann is uncomfortable, disquieted and fearful of innovation. Social media merely requires average reading skills to skip any vitriol. The real anxiety is from social media’s occasionally relentless exposure of both public and private fiefdoms where nepotism, corruption and petty embezzlement were once hidden through broad self-censorship and confidential settlements.
Far more dangerous to “public safety” is the extent to which “comity, courtesy, good manners, deliberation, depth, dignity, reserve, reticence and thoughtfulness”, are readily feigned by lawyers, bureaucrats and public relations professionals to obscure arbitrary and capricious pogroms of perceived opponents without accountability.
Gone are the days when professional journalists were allowed to share the outrages within their community by reporting local ironies, hypocrisies, and corruption. We must look to the blogs, and the NCJ from time to time, to discover uncomfortable truths about local institutions, human suffering, and the individuals behind it.