Motus Mentis

This should worry you:

The Shaming of Cheryl Rios

Because the world has got so small, everything collides with everything else. Attention from all parts of this flattened, shrunken system can swivel to focus on any node at any time — and attention can exalt or destroy. In this case, it is like stereotactic radiosurgery: the malignancy, once detected, must be annihilated.

This happens in a spontaneous, self-organizing way. It was always so, but the difference now is that in a heartbeat, any node of the social network can attract the attention of the entire civilized world. Also, because the connectedness that makes this “small world” possible exists only at the superficial level of electronic social networks, the connections lack the deeper, empathic linkage that characterize “real-world” relationships, and so there is nothing to mitigate the impersonal malevolence these ‘viral’ outbreaks bring to bear. Very few of us are so constituted, or situated, as to be able to withstand such a heat-ray, and so now we have a “new normal” in which human lives are casually, almost sportingly, vaporized.