Discussion sites versus social media

I know it's not quite the same thing because it's a much more passive form of participation, but I am also struck by the large numbers on YouTube. For example, Russell Targ's last interview by Jeffrey Mishlove on YouTube has been viewed 4,635 times (the channel has 62,500 subscribers).

The quality of discourse you could get in the 90s and early to mid 00s, compared to what you get on social media...it doesn't even compare IMO.

[The latter being far worse, which is not to say there haven't always been issues with anonymous, at a distance communication.]

The decline of the ATransC Idea Exchange discussion board paralleled the rise of social media ... well, the board's decline lagged by a year or so.

The board also declined as alternative groups became available. At the time, our focus was on EVP with a growing emphasis on transcommunication in general. (For instance, we sponsored sessions with several world-class physical mediums.) While there was hardly any back then, today, probably every town has a ghost hunting club that uses EVP. They represent a local outlet for people interested in EVP for the fun of it and not for the science.

My policy has always been that, as directors, Lisa and I were responsible for the veracity of the content on the website, NewsJournal and discussion board. As an example, failure to live up to that responsibility would have looked like us endorsing the radio-sweep technique for collecting EVP just to keep our members happy. One of my several mottos is "Always error on the side of the mundane." We feel the second greatest sin is to accept something as truth without understanding its implications. This is not a fun approach to the paranormal or survival metaphysics.

I say all of that to make the point that the Idea Exchange moved from a quiet back-water membership board to a ghost town when I demonstrated that radio-sweep probably did not produce EVP and that the use of foreign-language speech as background noise for EVP formation produced too many false positives to be of any use. Both are highly popular silver-bullets for beginner practitioners.

In trying to understand the Facebook-discussion board, conservative-liberal and seeker-non-seeker dichotomies, the one thing that stood out for me is that the choice of which fork in the road to chose is mostly informed by human instincts. This diagram represents my effort to identify the primary drivers of our behavior.



The vertical green line at the top represents the threshold in our spiritual development beyond which our decisions are more informed by our discerning intellect than our human's instincts. Think of it as the threshold of enlightenment. Until we cross that line, we can only go through the motions of seeking.

I know this sounds elitist, but there are not too many ways to make the point. Thinking is fine on facebook as long as it is done from the human instinct perspective. Thinking is encouraged on this board and human instincts just get in the way.

My kids are big Twitter users and barely know what FB is let alone being big users there.

I can't even follow Twitter and while some may pawn it off to me showing my age, I think its something else: A general lack of depth.

Twitter is surface level it seems; 160 characters and all that.  Sure, I sometimes find a nugget that is of interest but if I want to learn more I typically am guided out of Twitter to an article/blog/etc.  Discussions seems clunky and just as I see with FB clouded by bias-confirmation and tribalism.  Very little actual critical dialogue appears to occur.

While online forums battle those same things, at least they have produced some pretty good discourse (IMO).

I don't worry too much about the young as we were all young once too.  Maturation occurs and I believe technology will morph to suit the prime user base (i.e., younger people) and provide them more depth, more opportunities for more honest discourse as their interest in such things grow.