i just read your post on hyper-reality and found it incredibly fascinating and useful, thank you! i was wondering if, perhaps, you might have some tips on how to spot it on social media? i already watch my emotions as much as i can, but are there common social cues that might hint at hyper-reality being present/used?
this is an excellent question. we don't so much have a well-organized mental list of things we look for, as we have over time gotten halfway decent at it through practice but in ways we don't have random access to remember when we aren't prompted...
most things we might list off if our brain were organized tidily, would be too small to be high-value signals, on their own, it's really the combination of factors for us
one thing we do see a lot on social media is encouraging binary or reductive thinking:
- either something or someone is ALL good, or they are ALL bad. no in-between.
- anyone who does not enthusiastically support the topic of the moment is hurting it, and should be opposed!
- this famous person is totally gonna do something sweeping that changes everything - they can do that, because they're more a myth than a person!
things like that.
we're going to get very abstract for just a paragraph here, at the risk of sounding a little silly. feel free to skip it :)
here goes: everyone loves a story (we have a personal sort of somewhat-serious belief that in a sense, people are stories), so the thing to watch for is getting caught up in artificial, all-consuming stories that want to be your whole world. that's a point that's perhaps applicable to topics besides hyper-reality, so we should emphasize that, like... interacting with stories outside yourself is normal, that's what life is, but just be cautious about getting swept away in them unless you're certain it's what you want. okay.
if there is a real-world situation where discussions of it are making you feel the same way you might feel while watching a Hollywood movie, that should set off some alarms
dunno how much sense that makes, but hope it helps. we think we said it better in the earlier post, but this is a different angle and you asked, so here it is :)