Social Media: The First 2,000 Years (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Standage, Mitch Jeserich (KPFA), Frank Rose (NY Times, 11-1-13)

Through the ages: A Roman wax tablet and its 21st-century electronic descendant, the iPad.

The Romans had social media and tablets. The Victorians had an Internet. We are taught to believe it's novel, but it's the way things were before media got centralized. Technology has just returned us to where we were with everything potentially faster and cheaper.

For nearly 20 years, we’ve thought of “new media” as the brash young upstart and “old media” as the stalwart if increasingly embattled establishment. 

But what if new media aren’t as new as we assume -- and old media not really old at all?

 

Social media history (popscreen.com)

So argues Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall, a provocative book that asks us to look at media less in terms of technology -- digital or analog -- than in terms of the role they invite us to play. Are we passive receptors for whatever facts, opinions, and ad messages come our way? 

Or are we participants, sharing what we like with others, amending or commenting in the process? The second is characteristic of the Internet in general and social media in particular. But there’s nothing revolutionary about this, Standage says. 

Instead, it’s the role of consumer, so typical of 20th-­century mass media, that’s unnatural -- and to Standage, a historical blip. This observation has been made before, but never with such a wealth of information to back it up. Standage -- the digital editor at The Economist and the author of such unorthodox chronicles as... More

Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage. Illustrated. 278 pp. Bloomsbury.

• Letters and Politics, Dec. 26, 2013, 10:00 am
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Amazing India (video)

Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly (BRAHMANISM CO-OPTED BUDDHISM)

The spectacular and iconic Muslim art of the Taj Mahal, Agra, India (sjpaderborn)

(Shakti Gyana) This is the second episode of a five-part documentary on the history of Hinduism explained in Western perspective. 

Om, the primordial sound of the universe

This explanation of Brahmanism/Hinduism should not be taken as absolute fact but rather as an interpretation. What ancient Brahmanism evolved into was directly influenced by the historical Buddha's Dharma (Buddhism). This became modern Hinduism.

 

It is closely related to Mahayana-Buddhism, a popular reform movement from the more austere Buddhist schools, most of which became defunct. The strawman Mahayana and Brahmin philosophers set up to decry they called Hinayana, the "Lesser Vehicle." It refers to Sarvastivada and other sects. Theravada is not one of the "Hinayana" schools of thought, but as the only other extant and viable Buddhist school, laypeople often equate them.

There are sheaths or bodies within this body

The Buddha's teachings run contrary to the Vedas, the views of the ancient Brahmins, and modern Hinduism. Those teachings survive in Theravada Buddhism. What makes Mahayana so popular?

 

Many of the peculiar Mahayana "innovations" are actually reformulations of the very things the Buddha rejected. The Buddha did not arrive on the scene to affirm the Vedas but to correct strong misconceptions. Those misconceptions reassert themselves again and again.

Only by the realization of certain counterintuitive truisms, like the eternal existence of a self or unchanging soul (atta, atman) can one finally breakthrough to liberating insight, find enlightenment, and glimpse nirvana. Endless lip service given to discerning "emptiness" (shunyata) in place of anatta, finding a "higher self" or "true self" rather than no-self (anatta), essentially personalizing the impersonal, identifying with timeless verities, or mistaking consciousness as self... all of these very high minded notions miss the mark.

So long as mind is bound by even subtle traces of greed (sensual lust), aversion (fear, hate), and delusion (ignorance, wrong view), it is not released. Temporarily suppressing these defilements through samadhi (purifying-concentration) and jhana (dhyana, meditative absorptions) will not in itself lead to Buddhist enlightenment. Only when it is used as a foundation for the practice of insight by turning persistent attention (mindfulness) to four posts or foundations: body, feelings, mind, and mind objects, all of which are defined in details in the Maha Satipatthana Sutra.

 

Welcome to India

(BBC.co.uk/programmes) This observational series continues to explore what life is really like in some of the densest neighborhoods on the planet: the backstreets of India's mega-cities. A popular tactic for people here, so adept at operating in a crowded world, is turning the stuff others would call waste into an opportunity. Johora started out as a rag-picker, but through building a bottle recycling business on a railway embankment, she has big ambitions for her family of seven kids. When the local gangsters increase their protection payment demands, she boldly takes out a big loan and attempts to push her illegal business to another level. (Episode 2 of 3).

• Meeting System of a Down's Serg Tankian (Hollywood)
• Cars fueled with ordinary alcohol instead of gas or petrol