In the 6th century, a list of the seven deadly sins was officially outlined by Pope Gregory the Great, who reduced the original list of eight written by a respected monk named Evagrius the Solitary. The list was changed only slightly again in the 17th century, with the final list, which we still refer to today, composed of lust, avarice, gluttony, sloth, anger, greed, and pride.–
The Atlantic notes that seven years ago in a soliloquy transcribed by The Wall Street Journal, Reid Hoffman suggested a comprehensive theory of social-network success.
“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins,” the LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist said.
I do remember it all starting out quite differently. I was recently kicking through some of my archives and came across this piece from 2006: We are not alone
Mother Teresa spoke often about the effects of being lonely and the crushing poverty of spirit that is caused by feelings of being unwanted- so much much so that she called this ‘the leprosy of the West’. A recent international study claimed that more than a third of adults are lonely.
There’s alot of talk that screens are taking over face to face interaction, and that culture is suffering as a result. David Armano’s fantastic post We Are Not Alone. Life 2.0 puts forward the notion that the growing suite of web tools allows us, through creating and connecting, to find out that others like us exist.
There is a now a place where we can find that ‘we are not alone’ and more. Screen life, online life IS ‘real’ life. For many (and there are many- over 450,000 bloggers in Australia alone) our online time informs and inspires our terrestrial activities.
Examples of this range from the fabulous red paper clip story, to the spontaneous walkouts in high schools of over 40,000 students across California organised through individual myspace pages and to the popularity of acts like The Artic Monkeys and OKGo.
These stories, OUR stories, will only grow as we continue to contribute our time and energy to trying to connect with each other.
Myspace organised walkouts…wowsers…(the more things change the more they stay the same: https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/ organises local walkouts through Facebook, a platform that wasn’t even available in Australia 13 years ago)
While I’m sure that humanity’s darker traits get more oxygen on social platforms that we’d like- there is light to be found. I wonder how useful it is to entirely demonise something that is only reflective of… well, us.
Twitter gets a very notices, a a wrath filled echo chamber and for very good reasons.
My parry and repost:
( Rob Campbell shared this with the line: “The most beautiful, loving – yet heart wrenchingly sad – story that you’ll read today. Especially the last 5 words.”)
Please explore this marvellous thread about sharing unsolicited poetry with crying strangers:
The kindness will just kill you.
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