We Will Co-exist in Two Realities: In the Real World as Surfs and in Our Cyber Fantasy

Docs Warn About Facebook Use and Teen Depression

Our children are simply not developed sufficiently to deal with the immediacy of facebook and all that electronic media entails. Simple face-to-face squabbles are challenging enough. When we incorporate the 'nowness' of the virtual world with the distance (perceived) and even a sense of anonymity (which can be easily manufactured) children struggle to inhibit anti-social impulses, and get easily swept up in whatever issues are present before them. Our young children, perhaps even under 18 -- but at least 16 -- are simply not sufficiently developed and mature to deal with what the electronic media offer them. The concerns extend to other media including email, mobile phones (watch this amazing video and follow the story), and the Internet more generally. - Why Your Children Should NOT be on Facebook, Happy Families, March 9, 2011

Your profile is really your idealized self,” explains co-author Amy L. Gonzales, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, focusing on your good qualities gives you an ego boost. But if other people are also presenting their idealized selves, then those profiles could make you feel worse about yourself. In fact, other research shows that looking at other people’s posts can bum you out. - Facebook Boosts Your Ego!, Men's Health, March 10, 2011

A group of Stanford researchers found that people are pretty intense when it comes to assessing their friend's lives online. Apparently, an online persona goes a long way: "Specifically, Stanford researchers found that undergraduates underestimated how often their friends got lonely or had fights, and overestimated how much they partied and had fun. The researchers also found that underestimating the crappiness of other people's lives was linked to feeling crappy oneself — although its unclear whether students were sad because they thought their friends had better lives than they did, or the other way around." - Facebook Will Make You Feel Like A Loser, i eat grass, January 27, 2011

March 28, 2011

AP - Add "Facebook depression" to potential harms linked with social media, an influential doctors' group warns, referring to a condition it says may affect troubled teens who obsess over the online site.

Researchers disagree on whether it's simply an extension of depression some kids feel in other circumstances, or a distinct condition linked with using the online site.

But there are unique aspects of Facebook that can make it a particularly tough social landscape to navigate for kids already dealing with poor self-esteem, said Dr. Gwenn O'Keeffe, a Boston-area pediatrician and lead author of new American Academy of Pediatrics social media guidelines.

With in-your-face friends' tallies, status updates and photos of happy-looking people having great times, Facebook pages can make some kids feel even worse if they think they don't measure up.

It can be more painful than sitting alone in a crowded school cafeteria or other real-life encounters that can make kids feel down, O'Keeffe said, because Facebook provides a skewed view of what's really going on. Online, there's no way to see facial expressions or read body language that provide context.

The guidelines urge pediatricians to encourage parents to talk with their kids about online use and to be aware of Facebook depression, cyberbullying, sexting and other online risks. They were published online Monday in Pediatrics.

Abby Abolt, 16, a Chicago high school sophomore and frequent Facebook user, says the site has never made her feel depressed, but that she can understand how it might affect some kids.

"If you really didn't have that many friends and weren't really doing much with your life, and saw other peoples' status updates and pictures and what they were doing with friends, I could see how that would make them upset," she said.

"It's like a big popularity contest — who can get the most friend requests or get the most pictures tagged," she said.

Also, it's common among some teens to post snotty or judgmental messages on the Facebook walls of people they don't like, said Gaby Navarro, 18, a senior from Grayslake, Ill. It's happened to her friends, and she said she could imagine how that could make some teens feel depressed.

"Parents should definitely know" about these practices," Navarro said. "It's good to raise awareness about it."

The academy guidelines note that online harassment "can cause profound psychosocial outcomes," including suicide. The widely publicized suicide of a 15-year-old Massachusetts girl last year occurred after she'd been bullied and harassed, in person and on Facebook.

"Facebook is where all the teens are hanging out now. It's their corner store," O'Keeffe said.

She said the benefits of kids using social media sites like Facebook shouldn't be overlooked, however, such as connecting with friends and family, sharing pictures and exchanging ideas.

"A lot of what's happening is actually very healthy, but it can go too far," she said.

Dr. Megan Moreno, a University of Wisconsin adolescent medicine specialist who has studied online social networking among college students, said using Facebook can enhance feelings of social connectedness among well-adjusted kids, and have the opposite effect on those prone to depression.

Parents shouldn't get the idea that using Facebook "is going to somehow infect their kids with depression," she said.

Our Destiny: Digital Nomads in a Virtual Void

We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet! - Sean Parker, 4% Owner of Facebook

November 12, 2010

HenryMakow.com - Britain is a surreal place to be living right now.

The infamous Ministry of Defense trend report for 2007-35 projects the British middle classes 'becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat.'

I should be seeing the start of the ferment.

Our living standards are being attacked: people are losing their jobs, there is fast inflation, taxes are increasing and every year hordes of young people leave university to few job opportunities.

And yet there is virtually no anger at all. The conversation between people is as trivial and inane as ever.

Most social life in my town of 25,000 people is found in cafes and pubs. Primarily young mothers and housewives inhabit the cafes, while the pubs, charging £3 a pint, are now too expensive for most people to visit regularly.

Everyone else is locked indoors.

The streets are surprisingly subdued. I often take long walks lasting many hours and encounter few other souls. It is eerily quiet. Even on a Friday night in Coventry, a city of 300,000 people nearby, the high street is surprisingly lifeless. The young are not out mixing and causing trouble as they should be.

When experiencing this shocking lack of activity and desire for life, you may wonder: Where is everyone?

Floating in cyber space.

They are at home gorging on limitless free TV shows, movies, songs and social networking. Their leisure time is spent engrossed in a fantastical ‘second life’. Television is a tremendous tool of distraction. Internet is even more dangerous. It is a black hole of amusement that swallows people’s lives and destroys whole cultures.

It is why few will panic as Rome burns.

AMUSEMENT- A LURE FOR TYRANNY

Distraction aside, the ‘second life’ experienced online is designed for a more sinister purpose: to lure us into an electronic control grid. The elite plan a borderless world where a homogeneous slave populace serve their interests.

Jacques Attali, an Illuminati banker go-fer, wrote a book called ‘Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order’ in 1990. He said amusement machines are used to re-program us:

‘These objects—whose embryonic forms, like the Sony Walkman or the laptop computer, are ubiquitous today—will help create a different human being.’

The new human will have no family or cultural ties. He will be nomadic, tracked and controlled by a ‘memory card’ (i.e. ID card):

‘The memory card will become the principal artificial limb of a person, at once an identity card, a checkbook, a telephone, and a fax machine—in sum, nomadic man’s passport. It will be a kind of artificial self. 
To use it will only require plugging it into the global electronic networks of information and commerce, the oases of the new nomads.’

As nomadic worker bees, we will scramble to live in the super-cities of the future:

‘Middle-level nomads will stay in places that are impersonal, like the hotels that today ring airports throughout the world. Only the most fortunate rich nomads will have the means to become property owners in the large cities, which will be the magnetic poles for their brethren from all areas and regions of the globe.’

We will co-exist in two realities: in the real world as surfs and in our cyber-fantasy:

‘Cities will be fortified, dangerous places, the tangled heart of electronic networks, a cabled field of dreams.’

The internet is designed to lure us into totalitarianism. The acceptance of a ‘second life’ online is a rejection of reality, making us clay in the hands of our rulers. Those hooked on the internet, most especially the young need to start rejecting it and fill our parks, homes, pubs with real social activity.

We must start shaking off our ‘second life’. If we don’t, we may become the ‘losers’ Attali describes inhabiting the NWO:

‘In the coming world order, there will be winners and there will be losers. The losers will outnumber the winners by an unimaginable factor. They will yearn for the chance to live decently, and they are likely to be denied that chance. They will encounter rampant prejudice and fear. They will find themselves penned in, asphyxiated by pollution, neglected through indifference. The horrors of the twentieth century will fade by comparison.’

What is Second Life?
SecondLife.com is a web site that allows people to create their own identities in an alternative virtual world. In 2005, its membership has increased from 100,000 to more than two million. Persons logging on to this site are given software tools to design and create “avatars” of themselves - three-dimensional images of their own character inhabiting this world. Once “embodied” in cyberspace, people can be and do whatever they want to be and do. They can build houses, start businesses, visit night clubs, have sex, and spend money. (For a $6 monthly fee, SecondLife.com will give the player a certain amount of money to spend in this virtual world.) The various characters develop relationships with each other. They have experiences which simulate those in real life while avoiding the real-life consequences of making bad decisions. On the other hand, the hours which people may spend on their “second life” on line are hours which they might otherwise have devoted to their “first life”, dreary as it may be. To become addicted to this virtual experience is a form of escapism.