Can Your Actions And Thoughts Influence People You Don’t Know? Prof. Fowler Explains [PopTech Video]

Can Your Actions And Thoughts Influence People You Don’t Know? Prof. Fowler Explains [PopTech Video]

Science

If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to do anything. But if you tell them they influence a thousand people they’ll change their lives. And that’s why I think it’s so critical for us to understand first and foremost how and why we are connected.” James Fowler, Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at University of California, is the co-author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends’ Affect Everything You Feel, Think, And Do. The book describes conclusions from statistical analysis of data that was collected as part of a heart study in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking over 12,000 individuals for 32 years. For the first time,” says Fowler, “we are able to get a birds’ eye view of networks like the networks that you live in.” Here is a 9 min. clip with highlights from Fowler’s talk on social networks at Pop Tech: Fowler describes a: Three Degrees of Influence” concept: “Your friends’ friends’ friends’ have an impact on you. They’re going to impact whether or not you’re obese, whether or not you smoke… whether or not you’re happy, whether or not you’re lonely, whether or not you’re depressed…” Fowler explains that this interconnection works two ways, We shape our networks but our networks also shape us.” Therefore, “If you do a kind act to a person they’ll do a kind act to another person and that will also spread…” And that this serves an “evolutionary purpose… Human social networks are in our nature… we have grown up over hundreds of thousands of years in these social networks.” Here is a link to Fowler’s full...
Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris Finds Evolutionary Purpose In Crisis

Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris Finds Evolutionary Purpose In Crisis

Science

Humans within this planet now are the newest experience of the universe in what, biologically, always seems to come down to cycles: of unity to individuation, through which arises conflict, negotiations happen, cooperation is arrived at; and we go to unity again at the next higher level. And that’s why the story of evolution is so important today, to help us understand where humanity is, and what is our next step.”  Elisabet Sahtouris PhD, Evolutionary Biologist and Futurist Source: Interview excerpt from Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove [9 min. video] Humans Not the First to Create a “World Wide Web” In her book EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, Sahtouris describes the evolutionary cycle of other species who, like humans today, transitioned through highly competitive phases of development: When we look anew at evolution, we see not only that other species have been as troublesome as ours, but that many a fiercely competitive situation resolved itself in a cooperative scheme. The kind of cells our bodies are made of,  for example, began with the same kind of exploitation among bacteria that characterizes our historic human imperialism….. In fact, those ancient bacteria invented technologies of energy production, transportation and communications, including a World Wide Web still in existence today, during their competitive phase and then used those very technologies to bind themselves into the cooperative ventures that made our own existence possible. In the same way, we are now using essentially the same technologies, in our own invented versions, to unite ourselves into a single body of humanity that may make yet another new step in Earth’s evolution possible. If we look to the lessons of...
The Tragedy Of Our Times Defined By Anthropologist Michael Wesch [PopTech Video]

The Tragedy Of Our Times Defined By Anthropologist Michael Wesch [PopTech Video]

Culture

What I would consider the tragedy of our times is that we are more connected than ever, and yet, we don’t realize it and don’t truly live it.” Michael Wesch, PhD, a Cultural Anthropologist, stated the above at the end of a talk at PopTech where he shared insights from an exploration of one of today’s most defining characteristics – the development of online culture. Here is a 6 min. clip with highlights from the lecture: At the start of the lecture, Wesch clarifies the significance of media in shaping human culture and relationships: Media is like an environment, it takes us over, and sort of consumes us in many ways. Media are not just tools, they’re not just means of communication, media actually mediate our conversations. Media, in some ways, determine or dictate who can say what to who, what they can say, how it will be said etc. And so, when media change – our conversations change.” He later adds that the really deep question that he and his students are trying to get at is not only how our conversations are changing but how our communities might be changing, and even how our selves are changing.” In contrast to old forms of media, Wesch analyzes the nature of new social media as: • not controlled by the few, • not one way, • created by, for, and around networks, not masses • having the potential to transform individual pursuits into collective action.” Towards the end of the presentation, he shows the most responded-to video in the early days of YouTube – an anonymous video that encouraged...
Collapse [Film]

Collapse [Film]

Culture, Featured

I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place in the human soul, in the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh paper and say… ‘okay, how do we solve this problem?’” — Michael C. Ruppert Collapse depicts the present and future forecast of the world’s problems through the lens of Michael C. Ruppert, investigative journalist and author of Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World, who discusses the myriad crises humanity faces and how they are forcing humanity into a new era.   Collapse – Theatrical Movie Trailer What Will You Do When Oil Runs Out? Starting with peak oil, Ruppert clarifies how oil is literally everywhere in a person’s life… All plastic is oil. Most paints, all pesticides are made from oil. Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes, is made from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every tire. There is nothing anywhere, in any combination, which will replace the edifice built by fossil fuels. Nothing. Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain. Much easier than it was a long time ago. People have felt what $147 a barrel of oil feels like.” …and how the running out of oil in the world will force humanity to make very big changes: The end of oil is like end of the way of life. We’re hitting a new era.”   What Will You Do When Money Runs Out? Ruppert continues by painting a bleak fade-to-black picture of the world as it heads into the...
Earth 2100 [Film]

Earth 2100 [Film]

Featured, Science

Based on current scientific research and expert views about the accumulating crises humanity is expected to face over the coming century, Earth 2100 is a predictive portrayal of the century through the life of Lucy, a fictional woman born in the U.S. in 2008. No Crisis Exists On Its Own Earth 2100 paints a picture of the global crisis’ tight interconnectedness, how no one crisis exists on its own and cannot be dealt with in a pin-point manner. What the film shows is that: an oil crisis becomes a food crisis, they both connect to increase climate change and global warming, which increases drought and affects a water crisis, bringing about famine and thus, mass immigration of people seeking food and water, as well as deforestation and mass animal and plant extinction, rising sea levels and thus, floods, which then bring about outbreaks of infectious diseases, and this all becomes intensified by rapidly increasing human population, increasing worldwide consumption demand and natural disasters. The Need To See Things At A Global Level In presenting this complicated global crisis tangle humanity is expected to face, i.e. many individual crises as one global, integral crisis, Earth 2100 fundamentally proposes the need for a change in people’s approach to the world, from approaching problems locally and nationally to approaching them globally. As mentioned toward the film’s close: [By 2100] we’re going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources, of disaster management. We’re going to be living on a planet where we don’t see things at a national level, but we see things at a global level.” –Peter Gleick, Ph.D., world renowned water scientist, President...