A stand alone comment.

CityVP 🐝 Manjit writes a comment on Ali Anani's buzz, The New Mirrors of Social Media, that deserves to be posted on its own.

Social media does what digital extension does, it warps our relationship with others, unless we remain vigilant of the forces at play, and that means being extraordinarily self-aware. The reality of education is that our minds are trained to pick up knowledge and useful information, where useful is an economic measure related to work. So it is that reflection has taken a back seat because we are not taught to reflect where we are trained for purpose and busyness.
If the education system prepares us for work, the entertainment system alleviates us, to create a rest-bite from work. What does that say about us that we study to make a living and then in making a living find ways to distract ourselves from this very process. So if we cannot see how we operate ourselves in this system, what are we then looking for in another. If economic circumstance rather than personal reflection is a higher priority, then we are looking for hooks and we are effectively virtual salespeople, making links and connections as our economic system has taught us.
The fortunate thing is that there are observant people, either these people have understood the meaning of being scientific - and therefore are a part of a rare breed of people who can objectively observe, or these people have a poetic ability and the artist in them see's a different facet of human existence, and where we have someone who can do both, we find the rarest kind of person of all, the renaissance man or woman.
All people possess what is called theory of mind, our ability to interpret the thoughts of others through facial expressions or behaviours or actions, but this theory of mind is affected by our social conditioning and by whether we think concretely or have higher capacity for abstraction. It is at levels of abstraction that theory of mind is operating at the awareness described in this particular buzz.
CityVP Manjit