Weekend Musings 28
Growing around grief and semiautomated social network
The growing around grief model was created by grief counselor Lois Tonkin.
Tonkin came up with the model after speaking to a client about the death of their child.
The woman told Tonkin that at first grief-filled every part of her life. She drew a picture with a circle to represent her life and shading to indicate her grief. It was all-consuming.
She had thought that as time went by the grief would shrink and become a much smaller part of her life. But what happened was different. The grief stayed just as big, but her life grew around it. There were times when she felt the grief as intensely as when her child first died. But there were other times when she felt she lived her life in the space outside the circle.
In the movie Land (streaming on Netflix) Edee suffers a personal loss and decided to move to the mountains to live a life away from society. It wasn’t easy since she had no zeal to live. Life takes a beautiful turn when she is about to die. Miguel, a local hunter saves her and teaches her how to live with nature.
Edee starts living and starts growing around grief.
Last year I accidentally landed in Tiruvanamalai and stayed in the beautiful town for 9 months. It was a meaningful experience. Now I am back in Bangalore. I want to find peace in my daily while living in chaos.
I have accepted my grief and it is what it is. Life somehow is growing around it. Yes, there are times I do feel his absence, smile, and patience to listen to me.
During his peak of teaching Buddha would receive an endless number of people from different societies to get ordinated. There were people who would also question can Buddha answer questions like what happens after death, where will Buddha be once he dies, etc. Buddha wouldn’t answer all these questions and only answer those that would relate to the practice and the path of awakening.
In one such incident, as described in the book “Old Path White Clouds” Buddha calls himself - Tathagata. One who has come from nowhere and will go nowhere.
In addition to this one of my greatest learning has been:
“I don’t control anything other than how I react to my emotions.”
For the last 2 years, I have been fortunate to work with an interesting bunch of people who are creative experts in the field of fundraising for NGOs across the globe. However, the agency has decided to wind up its India business and I was laid off last month. I am still with the agency till April and they have been really kind.
In the last two years, I learned to write crisp creative briefs, worked with intelligent international creative minds, and acquired new donors from digital for Indian and Asian NGOs.
Going forward I will be working as a freelance consultant who can do digital strategy and media buying(Meta and YouTube) for for-profit and nonprofit clients. If you think I can be of any help then here is my email id (prasantnaidu@gmail.com)
Has your social media activity gone down in the last few years? The only two networks now I use are Instagram and LinkedIn. However, I hardly create any content and am more of a lazy consumer.
According to the latest study done by Rival IQ between 2019-22, all industries have seen a drop in overall engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
And who is going to save the social networking giants from these falling numbers - AI? The news is that semiautomated social network is the thing that is going to be real. LinkedIn will be the first major social network to push AI-generated content to its users.
“AI-powered conversation starters” with the express purpose of provoking discussion among users. These posts are “developed” with the help of LinkedIn’s editorial team and matched with human experts who can then offer their thoughts on topics like “how to create a consistent brand voice on social media” and “how to monitor the online reach of your writing.”
Makes a strong case for “Generative AI” - the buzzword you will find everywhere on the internet.
Google and Microsoft are already integrating AI tools to make life more productive. Google said it would embed AI into its email and word-processing tools, Gmail and Docs so that it could draft emails, job descriptions, and other types of documents from simply written prompts.
Earlier this week Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched the ChatGPT4 - paid version of ChatGPT. Additionally, Microsoft is bringing AI tools to its Office suite - including Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.
Meta after giving up on NFT is focussing on its core products such as Facebook and Instagram. Meanwhile, Meta has emphasized that this year it is focussing on artificial intelligence, messaging, creators, and monetization.
AI is in but Metaverse finds no mention.
Meanwhile, it is working on a decentralized network; giving users the power to typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated.
I think there is a lot happening in the AI space and it is definitely interesting. However, you have killed the essence of social networking if you get machines on the newsfeed to increase engagement. Much like introducing bots in newsfeeds to increase ad engagement rates.
That’s all for now. Have a good weekend :)