I thought I do another post today before getting my booster shot. I guess I want to explain some of my social media posts. I am going through some of my old stuff (still) in the house, trying to decide what to throw away during the current house renovation. If it was to my other half and sons, they would probably just throw most things away. But for me, some of these things are what made me as I am today. Particularly, the papers and books are valuable for me as an academic, though these are probably only useful to me and meant little for my other family members. Of course, my other half remarked, why not just keep electronic copies of them. I can't really answer this satisfactorily since it is just my reading habit to be able to bring them around (you could also do this electronically), read several related papers concurrently (one could open tabs electronically) and scribble notes of what I read (which could be done electronically on my tablet). To my defense, I have recycled some of these papers but perhaps not enough. Still have tons of papers around to my other half's horror and for this, my apologies to the whole family (that they need to deal with my mess).
It was in this situation of sieving through papers, I posted a few things on FB. One of these is on my favourite issue of PSI (Magazine of Physics, Science & Ideas), an IFM publication (supposedly replacing the earlier version of Majalah Fizik). In it, was an article of Frank Wilczek, for which I wrote to him (before he won the Nobel Prize), asking permission to reproduce his article and he replied positively (see pic below). In fact, I wrote to several other well-known physicists as well to get materials for this magazine, until it was decided that it was too expensive to continue publishing it (and I was having difficulties to get articles for it). In any case, I still value the experience of producing the magazine (do all the layout and typesetting myself - learned the fundamentals of what it takes to make a magazine interesting and pleasant (even to the point of understanding what blank spaces are meant for).
I also found a letter of invitation to a seminar (series) on the attempts of producing Nobel Laureates in Malaysia due to a challenge made by the then Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir (see pic below). The letter was with several other documents that eventually led to a proposal paper of having a National Physics Laboratory (I remember making the joke, better not take NPL as the acronym since it coincides with acronym for non-performing loan). Again, I value the experience of going through all this even with the non-realization of the idea. So when somebody whom I did not know made the comment that there is no historical value in the document, I was a bit slighted. This is where contexts play an important role in social media and this is often ignored. This is also why I try not to comment anything on somebody's wall or even wish a happy birthday, when the individual is not someone I know personally in the real world. To this, I remembered the joke about how ridiculous it would look like if people do what they do online to real people in the real world.
Sometimes what we do on social media, have unintended consequences. Recently I shared a post of a physicist whom I have great respect for, where he had commented on the recent paper of entanglement with the tardigrade. I was hoping that by sharing this, I can revisit his thoughts at some later convenient times. However, when I shared it, his own comments did not appear but the link of a blogpost to which he was commenting appeared without the context that I want. So when he commented on the post, I had to remove the post. Tried to reshare the post with his comments present but apparently this seems to be complicated. This is due to the fact that FB no longer had the option of sharing the original post - read https://www.technicallyproduct.co.uk/social-media/new-facebook-does-not-let-you-include-original-post-when-you-share-to-a-page/. Felt a little embarrassed by this incident.
Do we have to care on what we post on social media: yes and no. The complication lies in this is that our social media friends are not real friends in real lives. What we post, can be taken totally out of context. On the other hand, we would like to share with our true friends on what we do and what we think. There is no definite solution this; one just needs to be wise in our 'social media actions'. Social media is great since we as social beings have the need to socialize. Here's a great YouTube podcast by Huberman on
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