#Book Today bots, trolls and cyborgs could create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate, which was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation would then become reinforced as people modified their behaviour to fall in line with what they thought was reality.

#Book In the age of mass communication, media becomes the indicator by which people decide what the dominant public opinion is. Noelle-Neumann rather prettily describes the dynamic as a ‘spiral of silence’. On one side are interpersonal connections, which push alternative opinions up the spiral; on the other are mass media, which push them down. At the bottom of the spiral lies the silence.
Noelle-Neumann defined two types of people who fight against the silence. The first are what she termed the ‘hardcore’, who feel so rejected by society they don’t care what anyone thinks of them and revel in a lost, invented past. The other type is the ‘avant-garde’: reformers and activists who do want people to listen to them despite all the setbacks. ‘Those who belong to the avant-garde are committed to the future and thus by necessity, are also isolated; but their conviction that they are ahead of their time enables them to endure… The chance to change or mold public opinion is reserved to those who are not afraid of being isolated.’

Can we escape from information overload?

We live in an age of infinite scrolling and endless interruptions. So what happens when you unplug your life? Tom Lamont met the man who works in total darkness

Article

Nasal vaccine against Covid-19 prevents infection in mice

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a vaccine that targets the SARS-CoV-2 virus, can be given in one dose via the nose and is effective in preventing infection in mice susceptible to the novel coronavirus. The investigators next plan to test the vaccine in nonhuman primates and humans to see if it is safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 infection.
The study is available online in the journal Cell.
Article

This spectacular view of a Dolphin jump.

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.

But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."

— Marcus Tullius Cicero, from a speech given to the Roman Senate, recorded in approximately 42 B.C. by Sallust.

Mount Fuji, Japan

Social and Communal Harmony

#Buddhism

#Book
@IntegralLife

Social and Communal Harmony

#Buddhism

#Book
@IntegralLife

The 2-year-old Dalai Lama, 1937.

Coca-Cola comes to France, 1950.