Depiction Part 32 Depicting Brain To Computer Links Online Bullying Prevention

Depiction Part 32 Depicting Brain To Computer Links Online Bullying Prevention

Depiction

Part 32

Depicting Brain To Computer Links

Online Bullying Prevention 

Previous parts of this series on how writers can depict (eliminate details, sharpen symbols, transform "reality" as observed into enjoyable fiction) what the writer observes in their real world are indexed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

Writers are born observers of "reality" -- people watchers who can spin a lifes history from a few details seen on a shopper at a Mall.

It doesnt matter whether the tale spun has any relationship to the actual reality of that person -- it is a story, a potential possibility, a flight of imagination far more interesting than the persons reality.

Writers look at people -- and see Characters.

Getting good at the craft of writing means perfecting the ability to distinguish between people (readers, for example) and Characters.

We all look at people and see someone other than the person who is really there.

We all fill in the blanks, make wild and unsubstantiated assumptions, and then deal with the real person as if that person is actually the Character we have imagined.  All your readers do it -- and most people who do not ever read fiction do it, too.  

The human brain is hardwired to take shortcuts, to recognize patterns from a few real details then imagine the rest of the details to fit that pattern.

Thats how viewers guess the criminal in a TV whodunit.  It isnt TV (or videogames) that cause us to learn to do that, nor is it novels.  We do it in all our lifes endeavors.

Consider a hunter in a jungle -- gotta bring home dinner.  Hes got to spot the game animal and kill it, then retrieve it before scavengers eat it all up.

How does the hunter sort the cluttered jungle mess into information?

Like distinguishing between people and Characters, we must learn to distinguish between data and information.

These skills are developed at the brains circuits, synapses, and even the sizes of brain regions, are developed from infancy through maybe 20 years of age.  

A writers depiction is information.  What is being depicted is data.

Today, there is a massive push on among (swiftly grown to vast proportions) Tech Companies to create Artificial Intelligence that can learn to depict!  

Im not sure any of them knows that is what they are doing - rewriting the world  - but the analogy between what a fiction writer does and what a self-driving car must do seems crystal clear to me.

In childhood, we learn to understand our world (green jungle, concrete jungle, down on the farm, Kings Court Aristocracy, street smarts, etc.) by internalizing an Archetype -- a pattern, a "template" of reality around us that we then keep plugging data into, trying to transform data into information.

The current war between and against Media News can be described as a war between "Reality Templates" -- one template describing a well governed world where life is tranquil, and another describing a well governed world where life is strife-conquered-daily.

Anything that challenges the compartments of the template (think Microsoft Powerpoint or Microsoft Publisher where you download templates divided into little boxes, then insert your own images and text which magically re-formats to be beautiful), is immediately rejected with a glaring and stubborn error message.

Everything in one Media News template rejects every single bit of content from the other Media News template.  Its wrong. Its evil to disturb or distort the template of reality because that is what allows either tranquility or strife-conquered.

The two templates are incompatible.  One belongs to, say, Powerpoint and the other belongs to, say, Adobe In-Design.  There is a lot of acceptable material overlap, but incompatibility produces a mess or nothing at all.

We live in a reality where some people have internalized one template, some people the other template, some people have switched preferred templates, and others are trying to invent new templates and promulgate them.

Humans seem to thrive on this jungle like lifestyle.  It is now called multi-culturalism where each template is a culture.

Can we expect A.I. (robots, androids, smart thermostats and autonomous cars and trucks) to master all our templates, mix and match them to create new templates, overlap them and use two incompatible templates at once while ignoring incompatibilities?

The single most distinctive trait modern primates possess is adaptability and nowhere is that more evident than in the homo sapiens species.  

We might be the most adaptable intelligent species in the universe -- or the least adaptable -- and many grand Science Fiction Romance stories can be spun against backgrounds built from either premise.

But to spin such stories, the writer has to create a "template" that is being used by a Character to sort the tangled jungle of data, the heaving sea of data, the firehose of data, into information upon which to act.

Information is critical for survival, while data is not so critical.

Think about "Big Data" -- the enormous product of the Internet is massive tangles of data, but it becomes useful only when Google sorts it for you.  Thats why Google has become so dominant - they solved the problem of "how do I find what exists on this topic?" and then they solved the problem, "how do I get rid of this spam."

Both solutions were based on algorythms that "crowd sourced" data collection and used their proprietary template to sort that data into information, then sort the information into organized files that could be searched.

Some of you may not remember the ludicrous answers Google search first came up with, or the world where to determine if an answer was online you had to use at least 5 search engines stating the question in different terms.

Then social networking became a possibility, a mere glimmering of an idea.  Facebook probably was not the first -- there were many forums and email Lists, and so on before Facebook.

The Prodigy Forums and Fido Net connections were all based on the existing ways that humans formed social groups.

Family, city, town, county (geographical regions where everyone has something in common - the Old Wests Barn Dance), plus idea based groups (the Masons, Churches, Knights of Columbus, Science Fiction Fandom), and political parties, -- readers of a certain magazine or newspaper -- or people who bought from the Montgomery Ward Catalog or the Sears Catalog.

People who owned race horses, people who were accepted at Court -- whatever binding a group had in common, very often economic success depended on being an accepted member of that Group.

We are hard wired to seek acceptance in a Group.  Primates are not loners, though as a Group we do produce individuals who go out exploring (Mountain Men, the pioneers who found a way across the Rockies, etc. around the globe).  Those loners will probably be the first to settle on Mars.

But socialization is our primary survival trait.  So while it is true that, "You didnt build that," it is also simultaneously true (different Templates sorting the data into information) that "The Group didnt build that."

Among all primate species, there has always been an uneasy truce between the individual and the group.  No group can survive without strong and independent individuals -- but no group can survive without taming, harnessing, civilizing the strongest of those individuals.

The process of taming and harnessing those individuals starts with Romance, and all its associated elements from the highest spiritual plane of soul mates, to the grittiest necessities of physical sex.

It is the FAMILY UNIT that "tames" the wild individual to the purposes of the Group, so that individual survival becomes identical to Group survival.

The root of it all is testosterone and related gender identity hormones, all working in harmony (or disharmony).  

We discussed some articles about the effect that being bested by a woman has on a man - or being bested by another man has on a man.  Conquering or being Conquered actually has a lasting, permanent and continually reinforced effect on behavior and self-image.

Here is an entry in this series citing scientific research about depicting the married hunk - the hugely gorgeous, testosterone perfected, male molded into a father.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/depiction-part-19-depicting-married.html 

And here is an entry discussing how to use what you learned in Part 19 to expand the romance to include Aliens.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/depiction-part-21-depicting-alien.html

What happens in that transformation of the wild male into a father can be viewed as a Template Replacement.  

Before replacement, the Male sees the world as one thing - afterwards, as another.  Same DATA, same world, arranged differently.  

You can do this to a blog on blogger.com by changing the "template" and suddenly all your words take on a different arrangement.  At one point in blogger.com history, doing a template transformation wiped out all the comments that had been made.  The exact same world just looks so different, and new meanings emerge.

Humans in our civilized jungle undergo several template transformations, but at increasing intervals. It is called "growing up."  

A lot of the template shifting occurs because of physiological brain growth -- as the capacity increases, more data can be arranged and rearranged into more templates, giving wider, bigger, deeper, richer pictures of reality.

The more that inner picture of reality aligns with the actual data reality pours onto us, the more likely that person is to survive to become a parent.  

The more conscious the child is of the process of acquiring, sorting, and combinging templates into a personalized view of reality, the more flexible the adult will be as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things changes what it takes to survive in the world.

It is possible the generation being born now, the generation that will regard your current W.I.P. as boring, antique, false because it is old fashioned, will live in an Artificial Intelligence world, a world crafted by and for A.I. and thus demanding humans adapt.

In every generation for the last few hundred years parents have adamantly refused to "let" their offspring do whatever new-fangled activity was now possible because of technology.

In other words, "good" parents prevent children from acquiring the adaptations that will insure their survival.  

Parents do that because we have survived dire threats to our survival only because of the adaptations  (the templates that transform data into information) we have internalized.  The goal of a loving parent, therefore, is to transmit the successful Template to their offspring.  

Because of the increasing tempo of change in the world (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock explains this), each recent generation has had to mix-and-match and create new Templates, new survival strategies, new ways to transform data into information that is actionable intelligence.

In the 1950s grammar schools forbid children to take ball point pens to school and insisted on teaching fine-motor-skills by using fountain pens.  The prior generation was forbidden to bring fountain pens and had to learn the proper way to dip a nib and not splash ink.

In the 1960s, college courses forbid electronic calculators and insisted students had to learn to do the calculations on a slide rule.  That insistence lasted fewer years than previous resistences to tool adoption.

And by the 1980s colleges began insisting each student must have a computer to log into the Universitys system.  Today live, real-time video courses are common, papers, grades, almost everything is done online.

When you choose the story you want to tell, you have to run up and down the sweep of history to find the decade that most vividly showcases that story.  Knowing the details of a historical decade is important, of course, but more important is understanding the connections among those decades.

It is not enough to depict the way parents resist the technology of their era, because you are writing for todays readers, and for tomorrows readers.  Your story will have more verisimilitude if you explain (in show dont tell, not exposition) why these specific Characters are resisting whichever technology is swamping the development of their offspring.

Good parents have the objective of equiping their children to survive -- maybe also to thrive -- but to present grandchildren and great-grandchildren as soon as possible.  

Over the last century, there have been any number of books on how to raise your children.  Lately, there are more titles, not just because its easier to publish now, or just because more people can read, or just because more new parents are so estranged from their parents that they have no source of reliable in-person advice, but because times are changing so fast.

New parents today know that whatever Template they acquired in childhood would lead their children to destruction because it is no longer valid in this world -- and change is accelerating in a direction that makes the truisms of twenty years ago deadly today.

So new parents go looking for books on raising children, new books based on current scientific research.

And of course, News Media interviews form a major source for stressed out, overworked new parents struggling to found a career.

The loudest thing new parents are hearing today is how Facebook Is The Source Of All Evil.  Facebook is rampant with Bullies.  Cyber-bullying on all the social networks is driving teens to suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/19/popular-social-media-sites-harm-young-peoples-mental-health

To me, this sounds just like the ban on ball point pens.  Ruination will be the result of allowing teens to access current, modern technology.

That is a result of sorting many dozen News Items through a Template of my own crafting, composed of a multitude of Templates Ive mastered (if not adopted, just learned how to use so I can depict Characters who see the world differently than I do).  

Like ball point pens and electronic calculators, social media is something todays teens must master, not be protected from.  

But how does a parent who did not grow up on Facebook teach their child to stay out of trouble on Facebook?  You can see how the writers mind transforms reality into a Plot Conflict and thematic statement.  The writers mind poses questions nobody else is asking, nevermind answering.

What is cyberbullying?  Why does it happen?  What is the mistake being made, and what Template does a parent have to train a child to use, to avoid becoming a Bully or a Victim of cyberstalking?

Develop a theory that can supply answers to those questions and you will be able to extract, clarify and symbolize a THEME -- one large enough to support a galactic war and powerful Alien Romance.

Such a theme will be a statement of what the human primate really is, how it cam about that we survived to dominate this planet, and whether we are adaptable enough to survive in a galactic civilization.

There are thousands of such themes.  How do you find them?

Study people.  Invent Characters from them.  Find the Characters "story" and his internal conflict, then generate the plot that supports the story of his life.  

So we have a Character who we first meet as a teen of Romance-Susceptible age.

And we have a world of social media where Facebook Must Be Forbidden Because It Is Full Of Nothing But Cyber-Bullies.  Using Facebook turns you into a bully - it must be so because everyone on Facebook is a bully and generally, everyone isnt a bully.  Facebook must be at fault.  

Good parents must ban Facebook.  It is the root of all evil.

What will children raised under such a ban, ban their children from doing?

Is banning and preventing the best way to raise children to survive in a rapidly changing, A.I. world?

A first set of the Characters in your novel would affirm that thesis, and their Tempate would justify banning as a parents duty because children are impressionable and can be harmed for life by a bad experience (which is a scientific truth we have to live with.)

Another, second set of Characters might reject the thesis out of hand, and their Tempate would sort the data stream into true and false based on the thesis that research comes out the way those paying for it demand.  Its not a "conspiracy theory" because nobody conspires with anyone to produce this behavior - it is intrinsic human nature to want to please your employer.

This second set of Characters might permit their children to do any sort of online thing the child wanted - including porn - and possibly online bullying, forming online gangs to beat the rejected child for the sheer joy of beating up on the weak.  After all, being beaten up is how you learn to hit back harder and become a strong adult. (thats a THEME)

A third set of Characters creating the conflicts in this novel-series might use a Template that was bigger, and required much more data to fill it up into a textured and nuanced picture of reality.

This third set might look at the natural growth stages of youth, look at the social networking scene, and use a Template which not only distinguished between data and information, but also distinguished between the Tool and the Tool User.

The first of the 3 sets of Characters (maybe 3 families?) would use a Template that arranges incoming data according to a picture of a well governed world where tranquility is the goal.  The way to craft such a world is, of course, to prevent children from experiencing strife and fighting their way to the top of the heap.  A fighter is relegated to the Templates compartment labeled Bully. All fighting is wrong and must be stopped by Authority (parental or governmental).  

Today, for example, there are a lot of STOP BULLYING campaigns. 

We all know (even the bullies) that bullying is wrong - but how many know why it is wrong?  How many know what in society has changed concurrently with the increase in bullying in schools -- and the advent of school-hall bullying leaping into Facebook and other social networks?  

Perhaps you know what is happening, but as a writer constructing a novel around a Conflict that is Resolved satisfyingly in the end (by Love Conquers All, to a Happily Ever After) you must also have a theory about why it is happening.

So lets back up to the science of what a primate is.  Basic Bonobo and Chimp behaviors include bullying.  

The most powerful and dominant male hammers his way to the top.  In other species, that dominant male acquires the top position by murdering the former top guy.

We adore werewolf romance where wolf physiology blends and sometimes dominates primate physiology, producing a pack led by an Alpha Male who recognizes and mates for life with an Alpha Female.

Romance loves a Bully!!!  

Why not raise our kids to be the best bullies on the block?  Thats how you get to dominate the pack, how you get to mate and have lots of children, how we gain immorality -- by bullying, right?

But bullying is "wrong" and we must stop it.

Google up the plethora of images generated by the stop bullying movement.  It has become a cause -- alter human nature, dont master it.

We must expunge a behavior, not understand and harness it for the survival of the Group?  

Look carefully at the images you can find if you Google stop bullying meme.

They are about some figure with power and authority commanding those of lesser power or authority (adult to child for example) to go out and stop other people from bullying.  Or to alter your behavior so that I dont think you are a bully.  Nobody notices they are exhorting people to bully people into not bullying.

In that group of memes are also memes about those with issues pleading for others not to bully them because of those issues (weight, gender, ethnicity, a wide variety portraying their group as begging not to be bullied).

I see few if any memes noting that authority commanding bullies not to bully is bullying the bully into not bullying.  

What exactly is bullying?  And why is it wrong?  

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