Category: Social Media
How Meta of you
Just the other day, Facebook‘s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Though I think the announcement was done by a VR image of him) announced that Facebook would become ‘Meta’.
The first laugh
NO! You don’t name your company after something that is a direct existing word in a lexicon.
meta/ˈmɛtə/noun
- short for meta key.
adjectiveUS
- (of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.”the enterprise is inherently ‘meta’, since it doesn’t review movies, for example, it reviews the reviewers who review movies”
Definitions from Oxford Languages
Why wouldn’t you do this?
Because any lawyer can tell you, you can NOT put any Trademark on it. You can’t claim it, you can’t OWN it. The name Meta is a reference TO the actual definition and as such can be used, but not be protected.
Here at Metawareness (pronounced Meta – wearness, but contraction of ‘meta awareness’), we know that we reference something and we used the contraction as name, which is now a prior art and can not be used by anyone else, even if we didn’t trademark it.
How to do it?
Why was ‘facebook’ which is a contraction of ‘book of faces’ or ‘your book of face values’, a name that could be trademarked?
Because it didn’t exist yet as a name. Perhaps someone created a local phoneregister and called it such, but never came out with it.
Why can Nike, Adidas, Google, etc work as a brand, but not Alphabet (Google’s mother firm)? Because you can’t protect it. You must hope that the use of the word ‘alphabet’ in the normal situation will reference positive to your brand. But how to do this with Meta?
The verb in the verse
Zuckerberg’s ‘Meta’ references the ‘Metaverse’. Great, lets see, it is based on a book from 1985, is already made a name in several ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
There is a game that is called the Metaverse, several lores. Facebook can’t own them. They can buy it, but anyone coming up with prior art after Facebook gained equity with it, will have a bigger piece of the pie.
Conclusion
I think it is either one of two things:
1. Meta is a blindsider. Facebook will come with a different name, but will out the video as their level of quality in ‘Virtual Reality’. Meta is just a reference to YOU being meta aware of what the future will bring and how YOU (Meta awareness of your reaction) will easily be tricked by this ‘fake news’.
2. Meta is the rebound relationship. As Zuckerberg is heavily under fire in the US and will see stock fail, they let Facebook go bankrupt, but move most assets through Meta to new ‘brands’. And yes, most likely Zuckerberg won’t be the lead in all this anymore in the end.
Discrimination and the genepool
Thin layers of civilization
These are interesting times. Because the US is in this scenario that much of Europe was in 30-40 years ago, we seek to find ourselves in this. Where do we, as individual, as group, as society, as culture, as humanity, where do we stand.
Of Apples and oranges
The thing is, discrimination is human, but it is also instinctive and animal. And yes, no matter how you look at it, humans are yet another species of animals.
As you might have read elsewhere on https://www.metawareness.com, the first emotion, is fear. Fear thrives survival. Without fear, most don’t survive, unless very lucky. Fear causes use to find safe spots, safe havens. As humans, like all other great apes and many mammals, we are a social species. We are born in the safety (most of us) of a community. Our parents initially keep us safe (most of the time), but the fact that they themselves live within the protection of a community, within the rules of a society, keeps us double safe. This causes two things:
- We are aware that we need to protect our offspring
- we are aware that we need to protect our community
Danger, Robinson
To make sure that we don’t get into danger, we make sure that the ones in our community, are the ones we know and the ones we know are the ones that think like us. We can identify them, because we can identify ‘as’ them. We immediately recognize (instinctive) their meaning, if they look a certain way.
Them and us
The further an individual differs from our ‘group-general-markup‘, we tend to be more cautious. This is all instinctive, because different means danger. Fear will make sure that you don’t think on it too much. Step back from danger, or die.
Choose to change
Humanity has evolved, but what we don’t accept as part of our genome, we can’t decide to change. Religion and general ‘leaders’ demand that people behave a certain way. The more power a person has, the more money they have. Riches are to be lost and losing creates fear. The more power one has, the more fear one has to lose what is connected.
Everyone is unique, so different
Each individual is different. There is no two humans on earth exactly alike, not even twins. But why do we tend to ‘discriminate’ and fall for the ‘etnicism’ (or called ‘racism’?
Because of our marvelous intelligence. True, the more intelligent a person is, the less he/she will ideally be concerned about arbitrary things like skin color or bone structure, but it is our intelligence that caused use to go from simply protective, to discriminating and do etnic profiling on the go.
It’s just an idea
Here is why: Conceptualisation. When I tell you I went to the store. You don’t ask me what the store looked like. You know the function of what ‘store’ represents and mostly you will ask: ‘What did you get?’. The same happens when I tell you I bought a new car. You will not ask me what kind of wipers it has, you will ask me the max speed, the color, the more obvious traits that don’t require extensive knowledge of either brands or technicalities of cars.
How come we can’t differentiate (most of us) between one Asian person and another, just like you most likely can’t tell one from the other from any etnically different human from your own group?
Clean up, stand up
To keep our brains tidy, we group things: Balls (that can be big, small, blue, red, football, soccer, tennis, etc balls), we don’t think about the type of balls that can fall into the hegemony, we make it a homogenous group of balls in our mind. Same with Houses, with Money, with Feelings, with Cupboards, with Math equations. We group, to preserve space in our brain, and to (IF the need arises) do differentiation later on when it is important. We do the same with people: Brothers, Sisters, Siblings, Fathers, Mothers, Parents, Spouse, In-Laws, Daughers, Sons, Nephews, Nices. Nowhere while reading those words did you pick one specific image and did you think: Oh, this is about this person. Except possibly with Fathers and Mothers.
Doesn’t differ to me
We discriminate because it makes life easier. Circles are circles, squares are squares. However, there are people who are very much aware of this, and they will use it to advantage. Fear is the strongest emotion and therefore the easiest to invoke. ‘Divide and conquer’ is how wars are won. It is how communities are controlled. You know who you CAN trust, so all one has to do, is make sure you don’t trust people that fall outside that scope and you are set for control.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
When you see your own kin, you put them in a box, when you see non-relatives, you put them in another box. When you see people that are ‘images of self’, you will allow them in your box. When they differ on visual, auditive or other traits, you will first put them in another box. Why? Safety, quarantaine, ease of mind, conceptualisation for later.
Now is the time, that people can become honest. Move to a new neighborhood and unpack all the boxes. Go to ‘Earth’ and meet your new neighbours. Unpack and bring a cake. If you don’t like your neighbours, dislike them for their actions. That is something that represents their individuality. Not their skin, not their feet, not their smell.
They only divide you, if you let them
We are all human. We should shed the bad concepts like religions. Those are still causing great grief. We should fill our problems with solutions from all trades of life. So everyone can live the same kind of life and enjoy their life on Earth for how long it lasts.
The ‘commersocial’ media
<Dear friend> It has to do with self-acknowledgment andprivacy. The post I did just a bit before explains how we are being forced into a corporate led environment where the sense of self control becomes more and more illusionary. Imagine yourself to stop Facebook, what is the first real emotion you have? Is it regarding pride? No, likely it is rather a fearful reaction. For some it will be ‘what will others think of me leaving’, for me it was ‘but what if I want to keep track?’, but it all boils down to the same thing. We aren’t really afraid of losing connection with others, we are afraid others won’t SEE us anymore. You won’t get likes on a post any more, you can’t share feelings or a picture you hold dear anymore. To get a response from someone, you will have to go to someone physically and show them, or send them by mail or other mean.
In Facebook, G+ and other social media, you share the item with ‘family’ and ‘friends’, but what do you really do? You share it with the ‘world’. That world isn’t just more working, but actually a whole machinery of money laundring.
Consider this:
– Do you know what it costs to keep a server (physical or virtual, which is just more data on one physical server) running?
– Do you know what the costs are of the software to run a server?
– Do you know what the costs are for maintaining the server?
– Do you know what the building, updating and changing of the software costs?
– Do you know what the legal advice and checks and defenses cost?
All these will amount to thousands and quickly, taking the size of the platform right now, into millions. But what do you pay?
Exactly nothing!
But actually you do. Your life has become a means of payment. Because sharing the data of your life doesn’t only allow Facebook to tell companies what you like, but the thing is, that it can even mold you into liking what it wants. This process of Neurolinguistic programming isn’t new, it is actually what many marketeers learn. But here we are in an era where everyone wants and ‘needs’ to share. Where all companies need to address efficient groups…and need those groups to grow…efficiently.
Daar lezen we het zoveelste bericht dat iemand vindt dat een regeringsinstantie of een ander institutioneel apparaat moet ingrijpen in hoe men omgaat met online gedrag.
Ik denk dat iedere weldenkende Nederlander (slash wereldburger) eens moet gaan begrijpen dat ‘online’ en ‘offline’ gedrag geen verschil moet maken. Zeker nu we allen zoveel vaker ‘online’ communiceren door de diverse restricties van de ‘offline’ wereld.
Als je in de winkel iets ziet dat volgens jou niet hoort, zeg je er dan iets van? Ik wel. Mijn identiteit wordt niet beperkt door een glazen schermpje en draadloze verbindingen. Ik ben wie ik ben. Online EN Offline.
Het zou volwassenen sieren, als ze zich online zo gedragen, als ze willen dat hun kinderen zich offline gedragen. Daarnaast ook, dat mensen offline begrijpen dat regels en wetten online ook gewoon van toepassing zijn.
Het uitleggen van gedrag aan kinderen geeft ons een spiegel als volwassenen op onszelf. Zijn wij zo verdraagzaam? Zijn wij zo tolerant? Zij wij zo mondig?
De volgende keer dat je iemand online wilt uitschelden, denk dan aan de jeugd die dat bijna tot een kunst verheven heeft en een klasgenootje de dood in kunnen drijven. Waar denk je dat ze dat vandaan hebben? Hoe zou jij als volwassene dat hebben kunnen voorkomen? Misschien door te leiden met voorbeeld?
Wees je bewust van je acties en van de observatie van jouw gedrag.
Lees je eigen berichten eens als een vreemde…zou jij dat accepteren? Zou jij je er fijn bij voelen?
#meta #bewustzijn #awareness #metawareness #eerlijkheid #opvoeding #cyberbullying #cybercrime #omdenken #spiegel #mirror #blackmirror #whitemirror #yourmirror #eyeontheworld