We all live in social bubbles.

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We all have a certain number of people that we classify as US. They are in our bubble. The people in our bubble are US. Everyone else in the universe is outside of that bubble. Our name for such, if we are being honest with ourselves is THEM. Everyone outside of our social bubble is THEM.

We think of US and treat US differently than we do THEM. We can’t help it. We do. The rules are different.

That’s the way it is. It’s hardwired into the human mind. It’s instinctive.

But wait...it’s even more interesting. There is a variable.....another ‘dimension’ if you will.

Each and every human is unique. The social bubble size is not the same. Some few have a social bubble which contains so few of US as to be counted on the fingers of one foot. Some, equally few, have myriad. It’s one of the laws of large numbers (a math thing and math is hard). It’s a Bell Curve thang.



In the illustration at the far left the social bubble size is zero...at the far right it is YUGE. The median size is a couple of hundred or so US.

Each and every human is like that. Try to visualize. Let’s say Fred has a social bubble size of one hundred. One of those one hundred, call him Ishmael, in his social bubble, has a social bubble size of one hundred and fifty. Obviously all of the same people in Fred’s bubble are not the same as those in Ishmael’s bubble are not in each social bubble because the size is different. Likely as not even if the bubble size is the same the people are not the same, but then again..they might be.

SO.... social bubbles of variables sizes are englobed, embedded and extruded in other social bubbles, a social foam..



But WAIT!...enter the Internet....another dimension.

Some, many, users of Social Media, have never encountered each other in the RW (real world)...their interaction has only been online. Are those who they spend long hours interacting with US or are they THEM?

Some of the interaction is very intense, some of it is very different from the widely known platforms such as FaceBook. Some have their own economy, Steemit for example or Second life, but that’s beyond the scope of this rant.

That’s JUST social media...There are also gamers.

wikipedia says...

• Online games are ubiquitous on modern gaming platforms, including PCs, consoles and mobile devices, and span many genres, including first-person shooters, strategy games and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).

Games number in the thousands, and that number is growing rapidly. Gamers number in the tens of millions, and that number is growing rapidly. (incidentally the market value is in the Billions of dollars, and that number is growing rapidly)

World of WarCraft, Age of Empires, UnReal Tournament, StarCraft, WarHammer, AirWarrior, FinalFantasy, Ultima Online, Tribes, .... and thousands of other games are NOT like your grandma’s game of checkers.

THEIR very realities are different. Their milage WILL vary. Will not their definition of US and THEM vary as well?

Technology and the internet are getting more and more ‘Real’ by the second. There will come a time when it will be difficult if not impossible to tell Artificial Reality and the ‘Real World’ apart.

Even now ...for example, with today’s tech.

Imagine if you will a full body VR suit. There are sensors and effectors over every part of your body. What ever your body does your Avatar does, what ever your Avatar ‘feels’ you too feel. ( to a variable degree of reality...which is improving daily)

Imagine that you are wearing an Artificial Reality headset and that you have earphones

Imagine that you are wearing that sensor suite while floating in a sensory deprivation tank....totally isolated from the RW. Your reality is the Artificial one, the Virtual one, the cybernetic one.

That day is now...we have THAT technology. It’s improving at warp speed.

How will that affect your Social Bubble? How many dimensions are there?

Now tell me about politics. Those who would impose upon us their definition of reality tell us that there is a ‘right wing’ and a ‘left wing’...and that all human political philosophy is on that scale..

Really?

A two dimensional line in multi-dimensional reality?

Not only a Failure of Imagination but a failure to accept reality.

Insane.