Top 10 Bizarre But True Drugs And Their Effects

JAMIE FRATER APRIL 1, 2009

Seeking the ultimate high, people have ingested all kinds of bizarre chemicals and plants through history. Fortunately they have related (those who lived anyway) their experiences so we can now recount them to you. Prepare to be shocked by some of the contents on this list – you will almost certainly not know the drugging abilities of the majority of these. They may not be the most pleasant alternatives for when you run out of weed, but they certainly work. This list starts off with quite a bang, so get reading.

10

Anafranil (clomipramine)

Anafranil is an anti-depressant that causes people to have orgasms every time they yawn. Yeah. No joke. A 1983 article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry found a case of a woman in her twenties who came every time she yawned! She even used it to her advantage: “She found she was able to experience orgasm by deliberate yawning.” This is one drug that had better not be outlawed. Now I just need to find a doctor willing to prescribe it!

9

DDT

Yes, this pesticide – which has now been made illegal in many countries, can produce feelings somewhat like Ecstasy (Hear that environmentalists?? You inadvertently banned a great hallucinogenic-drug!) A popular cocktail was made during the ’50s (called the Mickey Slim) was made by adding a small amount of DDT to gin! In the image above we see two women getting utterly stoned on DDT.

8

DIPT

DIPT is a tryptamine that affects auditory (sound-based) functions. Users experience things such as voices on the radio being lower in pitch than usual, music sounds distorted, and some people experience light hallucinations. The drug can cause the odd feeling of being bloated, but if you take an antacid immediately after consumption, it usually solved the problem. During the drugged experience, some users also claim to hear a constant ringing in their ears – this can (unfortunately) last for up to two weeks.

7

Saffron

Saffron is a flower used as a food additive. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances states that the orange-yellow flower “…is known to have…narcotic effects similar to those of opium.” Saffron actually has an ancient history of use as a drug – the Ancient Minoans used to drink a tea infusion of it to get high and the Persians and Greeks considered it an aphrodisiac. The Romans and Egyptians used it in various medicines.

6

Catnip

It’s not just for cats anymore! Many who have smoked it say that it gives a mellow, pot-like buzz. Though most warn that you should not get your hopes up too high. It leaves a minty aftertaste and is apparently much easier to smoke than pot (and doesn’t cause coughing).

5

Xenon (Xe)

Xenon is a heavy, odorless, inert gas that can be found in the Earth’s atmosphere, lasers, gas-discharge lamps, medical imaging, in the process of creating nuclear power, for protein crystallography, in the production of MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), and for anesthesia. Naturally, most anesthetics – like nitrous oxide and Novocaine (which is made from cocaine), have hallucinogenic side-effects. It’s effects are said to be like that of nitrous oxide, except without the auditory-effects and the “headachiness”. One anonymous user on the web-site “Lyceaum” said that it gives the user an ability to, “…zero in on ‘singularity’ thoughts and memories and hold them for ‘sentimental orgasms’…”

4

Various Venoms and Poisons

Many poisons (such as arsenic and strychnine) and venoms have been known to have hallucinogenic (and sometimes beneficial) effects! Mountain-climbers in late-19th-Century Austria regularly consumed arsenic to, “…obtain healthy and sturdy looks…to appear strong and robust…”, and to “…facilitate breathing while climbing…” (Baron Ernst von Bibra.) In the 1902 book, “Morphinism and Narcomanias From Other Drugs”, it even says that a person can develop an addiction to arsenic. As for venom, The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances states that “…Holy men in India smoke cobra venom for its psychoactive effects. [T]heir dried venom glands or crystallized venom is often mixed with cannabis.” The Encyclopedia also reveals that ten Native American tribes in California were known to swallow live ants as a way of inducing hallucinations! The ants bite the stomach-lining, injecting their venom, and can be vomited while the ants are still alive.

3

C-4 Explosives

As everybody knows, C-4 is a very effective explosive (1.34 times more explosive than TNT!). But is it a drug? According to the book titled Uppers, Downers, All-Arrounders, it is! The authors state: “Modern veterans have been known to ingest C4…for their psychedelic effects. Tremors and seizure activity can result, but usually not an explosion, as it takes a blasting-cap to set off the chemical.” No joke. In fact, the Marine Corps training document on explosives includes the following caution: “Do not ingest any explosive material!”

2

Urine

At one time, Eskimos and tribes in Siberia were known to consume the urine of another person who had consumed fly agaric mushrooms (amanita muscaria). They did so for several reasons: Firstly, since there wasn’t an infinite supply of mushrooms, this approach help to conserve and economize them. Not only would drinking the urine of someone who had consumed the mushroom get you high, but also drinking the pee of the person who had drunk the first “batch” of urine would get you high! And so forth and so on, going up to 5 different “generations” of people! An added benefit was that pre-digested mushrooms didn’t cause as much nausea and cramps as just eating them directly. They loved this high so much, that they would butcher and eat reindeer who had also eaten fly agaric for a contact-high!

1

Salamander Brandy

No, it is not an alcohol made from salamanders, but rather from what they produce. Salamander brandy obviously can’t be found in your local liquor store. It is non-commercially produced in Slovenia. There are at least two ways of making it – both of which involve animal cruelty: (1) The salamanders are hung from their back legs, and brandy is poured onto their bodies, and drips into a cup. (2) The salamander is placed on a sieve, and brandy is poured onto them until they drown. The point of this is to infuse the alcohol with the poison salamanders produce when they are defending themselves. Nonetheless, it is said to produce symptoms like LCD and Ecstasy combined, in addition to the effects of the alcohol (although, the alcohol content is particularly low)!

Bonus

Old Books

Alright, it’s not exactly old books – it is the fungi and molds that occasionally grow on them! Some of these molds and fungi are said to have hallucinogenic effects. Don’t go eating pages of old books right-off-the-bat, though. They usually also come with side-effects, such as nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and confusion!

Source: The Disinformation Book of Lists

JAMIE FRATER

Jamie is the founder of Listverse. He spends his time working on the site, doing research for new lists, and cooking. He is fascinated with all things morbid and bizarre.

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - patience  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkW27a8m1mY

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - non judging 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNICQ-x_Gek

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - gratitude and generosity. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M-ZJLmP4b4

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - trust.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9HhURnnlh4

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - non striving. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl0DreXY4JI

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - acceptance 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOGsj0Aklx8

Mindfulness 9 attitudes - letting go. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBCithP9JrM

Papyrus Reveals New Clues to Ancient World

James Owen
for National Geographic News

April 25, 2005

Classical Greek and Roman literature is being read for the first time in 2,000 years thanks to new technology. The previously illegible texts are among a hoard of papyrus manuscripts. Scholars say the rediscovered writings will provide a fascinating new window into the ancient world.

Salvaged from an ancient garbage dump in Egypt, the collection is kept at Oxford University in England. Known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the collection includes writings by great classical Greek authors such as Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides.

  Using a technique called multi-spectral imaging, researchers have uncovered texts that include
• parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, the 5th-century B.C. Athenian playwright;
•sections of a long-vanished novel by Lucian, the second-century Greek writer; and
• an epic poem by Archilochos, which describes events that led to the Trojan War.
Christopher Pelling, regius professor of Greek at Oxford University, said the works are "central texts which scholars have been speculating about for centuries."
Researchers hope to rediscover examples of lost Christian gospels which didn't make it into the New Testament, along with other important classical writings.
The papyrus manuscripts were found at the site of the disappeared town of Oxyrhynchus in central Egypt more than a hundred years ago. The text in much of the collection has become obscured or faded over time.
Researchers at Oxford University are now employing a digital imaging process that's able to reveal ink invisible to the naked eye. They say the technique should boost the amount of writing available to scholars studying the collection by around 20 percent.

Deciphering Technique
Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford, directs the research. He says the digital imaging process was first developed for researchers who studied Roman texts buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy in the first century.
"We're applying it for the first time to non-carbonized ancient manuscripts on papyrus, which was the paper of the ancient world," Obbink said. "Most of our collection comes from rubbish dumps, so it's been in contact with soil for thousands of years and can be quite dark."
The imaging process works by using different filters to isolate the waveband to which the hidden writing responds. "Some [text] respond[s] in the ultraviolet range, some in the infrared range," Obbink said. "The technique involves finding the exact right point at which the ink reflects at maximum contrast against the slightly less dark surface so you can read it."

Obbink says the research should add to the body of known work of standard classical authors such as Homer and Sophocles, as well as that of lesser known writers "who didn't survive either through accident of time or because they weren't as popular."

Sophocles wrote 120 plays, but only seven survived, among them Oedipus Rex and Antigone. "We have samples of all the rest in these papyrus fragments," Obbink said. "We're filling in the gaps incrementally. You're never going to get each and every word of 120 plays, but you will get a slice of what was available during the centuries when these rubbish mounds built up."

  The fragments may also shed new light on texts that have survived only by being repeatedly copied over thousands of years. "These older [papyrus] texts can be more accurate, or preserve completely new readings," Obbink said.
Similarly, Biblical scholars can expect valuable new material to emerge as some gospels that weren't included in the New Testament didn't survive. "The texts that are in the Bible were selected out of a much larger body of work that once circulated," Obbink said. "We have samples of that material here."
Roman Period
He says the Oxyrhynchus collection holds a lot of information about the rise of Christianity during the Roman period. (Egypt became part of the Roman Empire after Cleopatra's fleet was defeated at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.).
"[Christianity] starts out as a small social phenomenon, then just takes over everything," Obbink said. "You can see other cultural sea changes taking place—changes in taxes, changes in rule. It's all reflected in the papyrus."
Oxyrhynchus, 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of modern-day Cairo, rose to prominence under Egypt's Greek and Roman rulers. The town's papyrus-rich garbage heaps were excavated in the late 1890s by two Oxford University fellows, B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt. Researchers have been painstakingly piecing together the Oxyrhynchus papyri fragments ever since.
So far 65 volumes of transcripts and translations have been published by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which owns the collection.
The latest volume includes details of fragments showing third- and fourth-century versions of the Book of Revelations. Intriguingly, the number assigned to "the Beast" of Revelations isn't the usual 666, but 616.
About 10 percent of the Oxyrhynchus hoard is literary. The rest consists of documents, including wills, bills, horoscopes, tax assessments, and private letters.
"It contains a complete slice of life," Obbink added. "There's everything from Sophocles and Homer to sex manuals and steamy novels. But it's in pieces, and it all has to be put back together."

   http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0425_050425_papyrus_2.html

Upon Entering The Heaven

Upon Entering The Heaven

Momma's Bible - Hilarious!

 Momma's Bible - Hilarious!
Four brothers left home for college, and they became successful doctors and lawyers.

One evening, they chatted after having dinner together. They discussed the 95th birthday gifts they were able to give their elderly mother who moved to Florida .

The first said, "You know I had a big house built for Mama."

The second said, "And I had a large theater built in the house."

The third said, "And I had my Mercedes dealer deliver an SL600 to her."

The fourth said, "You know how Mama loved reading the Bible and you know she can't read anymore because she can't see very well. I met this preacher who told me about a parrot who could recite the entire Bible. It took ten preachers almost 8 years to teach him. I had to pledge to contribute $50,000 a year for five years to the church, but it was worth it. Mama only has to name the chapter and verse, and the parrot will recite it."

The other brothers were impressed. After the celebration Mama sent out her "Thank You" notes.

She wrote: Milton , the house you built is so huge that I live in only one room, but I have to clean the whole house. Thanks anyway."

"Marvin, I am too old to travel. I stay home; I have my groceries delivered, so I never use the Mercedes. The thought was good. Thanks."

"Michael, you gave me an expensive theater with Dolby sound and it can hold 50 people, but all of my friends are dead, I've lost my hearing, and I'm nearly blind. I'll never use it. Thank you for the gesture just the same."

"Dearest Melvin, you were the only son to have the good sense to give a little thought to your gift. The chicken was delicious Thank you so much."
Love, Mama

Zhou Enlai's witty interpretation of the zodiac to an audience of foreigners

Zhou Enlai's witty interpretation of the zodiac to an audience of foreigners

 

It was said that Mr Zhou En-lai was once having a meal with his European friends.

A person by the name of Klaus passed an impolite comment when he was drunk.

“You Chinese carry the signs of pigs, dogs, and mouse at birth.

“I can’t understand what’s going on in the mind of your ancestors?”

At that point, the distinguished group of friends started to laugh. They started to toast each other rowdily.

The cultured and serene atmosphere was broken.

Some people believe that when someone insults your ancestors, even if you don’t have a response to it, the least you could do is to overturn the table against him.

Fortunately, nobody acted rashly or in violence.

For a while, not a single word was uttered. It was probably because they have not come across this situation before.

Then, Mr Zhou En-lai stood up and spoke to everybody in a calm and peaceful way.

“The Chinese ancestors were very wise. They arranged the twelve zodiac signs in pairs. Six pairs in a cycle.

In this way, they expressed their hopes and wishes for the generation that came after them.”

By then, the room was in complete silence. There were some sceptical looks among the audience.

Mr Zhou En-lai continued, ” The first pair of animals is the rat and cow.

 

 

“The rat represents wisdom and the cow represents diligence. Wisdom and diligence must operate in harmony.

“If there is wisdom but no diligence in applying it, it’s foolishness.

“On the other hand, if there is diligence but no wisdom, it’s an act of folly.

“That’s why wisdom and diligence must go hand in hand. This is our ancestor’s first wish for us. The first pair of animal also represents the most important hope.

“The second pair is the tiger and rabbit.

 

“The tiger represents courage and the rabbit represents carefulness. These two qualities must work closely together.

“In that way, it can have a better chance to achieve success.

“Without carefulness, courage becomes recklessness. Similarly, without courage, carefulness becomes cowardice.

“This pair of qualities is very important. That’s why it is the second pair.”

Mr Zhou En-lai looked at the audience and then he added, “Therefore, when we demonstrate our carefulness, please do not think that we do not have the courage to fight for social justice.

“In truth, what our ancestor is pursuing is wisdom through integrity, harmony and balance. It’s never about a single hope or task.

When he saw that the audience was deep in thought, Mr Zhou En-lai continued, “The third pair is the dragon and snake.

“They represent strength and flexibility.

“Strength without flexibility becomes brittle. Without strength, flexibility becomes meaningless.

“That’s why strength with flexibility is an important lesson from our ancestor that has lasted through time.

“The next pair is the horse and goat.

 

“The horse represents the ability to gallop to success. The goat represents the ability to be considerate and have compassion.

“If a person only looks after himself as he pursues his goal and with no consideration for others, he will face obstacles from the people around him.

“Finally, he may not even be successful.

“However, if a person only looks after others and seek only to be amiable, he will not have a sense of direction. His goal will eventually be lost.

“That’s why the spirit of the horse and virtues of the goat must be applied in harmony with each other. This is our ancestor’s fourth wish for us.

“The next pair is the monkey and the chicken.

 

“The monkey represents agility.

“As for chicken, as there were no clocks in the days of old, it is needed to wake humans to start a new day.

“The chicken represents stability.

“The qualities of agility and stability must be tightly coupled together.

“If you have agility but no stability, your best plan will not come to pass. However, if you focused on having stability and refuse to change, you will not have a better future.

“When the two qualities are in harmony, on one side, there will be stability in terms of having, for example, effective system and collaboration.

“On the other side, there will be a release of unrelenting creativity and innovation to achieve progress.

“When these two qualities operate in synergy, it is one of the basic imperatives to achieve success.

“Lastly, we have the dog and pig.

 

“The dog represents loyalty while the pig represents good nature.

“If a person is loyal but does not have a good nature, he will be blindly following others.

“On the other hand, if he has a good nature but does not have loyalty, he will have no people and principles to guide him.

“That’s why whether its loyalty to a country, loyalty to a team, or loyalty to an ideal, you need to ensure that good nature is tightly coupled with and working alongside with it.

“In that way, you can have a deep-seated sense of loyalty that comes from the heart.

“This is why the Chinese believes that the outer core must be in alignment with the inner core (外圆内方,君子和而不同).

“At the inner core, we must have a pure heart that subscribes to high moral values. We must seek to live with ethos and positive principles.

“We must live up to our words and not do anything that will harm others.

“At the external core, we must be knowledgeable about the ways of the world. We must be wise in managing affairs around us.

“We need to focus on what matters in life and not be influenced by evil.

“We need to live with integrity and in harmony with others and the environment. We must not have any form of prejudice or seek to discriminate against anyone.”

At the end of his speech, there was complete silence. They say that you can even hear a pin dropped.

---------------------

周恩来妙语解释的十二生肖让全场外国人鸦雀无声

http://blog.sina.cn/dpool/blog/s/blog_c261868c0101e3wb.html

How to Clear Your Mind and Soul of Negativity

Edited by Nicoletta Z.,

Many people have been through a lot in their life time. Negative seeds have been sown into their hearts and as they grow up these negative seeds begin to grow and get stronger and more difficult to get rid of. Its almost like planting an Oak tree seed, and leaving it to grow: it will grow and become big and strong, and the roots go so deep into the ground it is almost impossible to uproot. If you follow these simple steps you can easily clear your mind and soul from negativity but you have to do it with an open heart, open mind and a spirit filled with hope.

1. 
   1
   Find faith in yourself. It is a good idea to get to know yourself above all. Forget about outside forces, pay attention to your life and your situation.
   Ad
2. 
   2
   JUST LET IT GO! People have the right to happiness (of course, that also includes you!), and just letting negative experiences be bygones helps quite a lot.
3. 
   3
   Let your mind, body and soul influence you along the path you should walk along.
4. 
   4
   Start to think more positively, and feed your mind and soul with positive words, positive people and positive things. But don't bury the thoughts in your heart where they mature into hatred and contempt. Share how you feel, with someone you trust.
5. 
   5
   If you feel weak or angry, go for walks at sunrise/sunset and breathe in the fresh air.
6. 
   6
   Take 5 minutes out of everyday to just lie down and reflect.
7. 
   7
   Try more physical/spiritual methods to calm down, such as meditation or or yoga, pilates etc.
8. 
   8
   Before you start working on your goals, read positive affirmations or listen to your favorite music. Do something to get your brain into a good, happy, positive mind set. 

 http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Mind-and-Soul-of-Negativity

Google Makes You Smarter, Facebook Makes You Happier, Selfies Make You A Better Person

Writer Sherry Turkle is using selfies to promote a popular argument: that technology harms the way we relate to each other. But she’s wrong and outdated--and listening to her makes us miss what’s really important.

By Jason Feifer

When you take a selfie, your soul is ripped away like meat off bone. You are a shell of a person, the selfie having captured the last life in your eyes. This, finally, is the deadening conclusion printed in the New York Times yesterday after our months of collective selfie obsession. “It does things to us,” author Sherry Turkle warns with a trembling finger, “changing not just what we do but who we are.”
This is a familiar form of scaremongering. Facebook makes you lonely! Google makes you stupid! Apple Maps make you go the wrong direction on the highway! That last one, of course, is true. The rest? They’re based mostly upon misinterpreted science--studies, say, that show neural pathways altering in response to computer use, just as the brain does when you learn to drive a car or play guitar. “Change” is not always bad; it can be natural. But just look at how Turkle casts it: It is an existential threat.
I know a few things about selfies. I launched a Tumblr called Selfies at Funerals, which was one of Tumblr’s most viral of the year. It culminated rather spectacularly with President Obama’s selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial. I’ve also taken plenty of selfies--not at funerals, but just about everywhere else, as has every friend and colleague. Despite what Turkle says, we are not victims because of it. Anyone who finds value in technology should resent the condescension.
Turkle isn’t the only one to make these arguments, but she makes them the loudest and most frequently. She has a book called Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, and she’d like you to buy it. You’re more likely to do that if you’re afraid of your cell phone, so she’s stirring unnecessary fear founded on either total misunderstandings or intentional ignorance. Which is it? To find out, let’s pick her latest piece apart, selfie by selfie.

Turkle Claim #1: Selfies stop us from connecting the right way

Last spring, I had the occasion to spend a day with the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari discussing our mutual interest in the psychology of texting. As we walked through Los Angeles, people approached him every few minutes not to ask for an autograph, but to demand a photograph. Mr. Ansari is gracious to his fans. He explained that instead of a photograph, he would offer a conversation. He inquired about their taste in music, what they liked about his performances, his stand-up, his sitcom “Parks and Recreation.” His fans were mollified but they were rarely happy. They had to walk away with nothing on their phones.

Let’s assume that Aziz Ansari does this all the time, even when he’s not trying to make a point with an anti-technology academic. That is unusually generous of him. And here, Turkle sets up her strawman: There is an ideal, pure, and uninterrupted way that people should connect. Let’s give it a name: The Perfect Talk. As you’ll see as we go through her essay, Turkle is always finding that technology blocks our capacity to achieve The Perfect Talk. That is the core of our loss, the thing technology has robbed us of.
In this instance, what is The Perfect Talk? It is a fan coming up and having a meaningful conversation with Aziz Ansari. Turkle doesn’t consider that perhaps fans don’t want to connect with him in that way--not because of selfies, but because actors and fans have a transactional relationship. The actor produces, and the fan receives. I’ve met many of my favorite actors and athletes, and though it’s fun, I often have nothing meaningful to say to them. I just want the experience of saying hello, and a memento.
A selfie beats an autograph, and sometimes it even beats a conversation. It just does. And that’s okay. We want different things from different people. We always have.

Turkle Claim #2: Selfies cause us to miss out on life

A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment. … The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.

Turkle claims an activity is either an experience or an interruption. It isn’t that simple. Have you ever pulled your friends together for a photograph, and struck a pose? Have you ever crowded heads with your boyfriend or girlfriend, making faces into a camera to make each other laugh? These aren’t interruptions of a moment; they are a moment. Some selfies are frivolous, of course, but so are some conversations. Technology can create togetherness. Turkle won’t concede this.
Then she raises the stakes: Selfies not only take us out of our experiences with others, she claims, but also rob us of the ability to reflect “on where you are and what you are thinking.” The funeral-selfie takers on my Tumblr may have seemed disrespectful, but consider, for a moment, that most were expressing themselves in the most genuine way they thought to. Childhood is solipsistic; we see the world through our own experience of it. The selfie gave these kids a moment to quite literally look at themselves in their environment, and reflect on where they are and what they are thinking. It provided what Turkle claims it stole away.
Yes, their selfies look different from whatever Turkle did in her introspective teenager years. But that doesn’t mean introspection isn’t happening. What does she want--for kids to sit still and meditate? What kid did that even before the iPhone?

Turkle Claim #3: Selfies change the way we communicate

We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything. I talk to young people about etiquette when they go out to dinner, and they explain to me that when in a group of, say, seven, they make sure that at least three people are “heads up” in the “talking” conversation at any one time. … All of this has become the new normal.

It’s true, some kids can be rude. But they’re also rabid communicators. Turkle’s right: We’re witnessing a new normal. Here are some other grumpy seniors that stared down a new normal:
Socrates, who came from a culture with a strong oral tradition, was concerned by the rise of people writing things down: “[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
In 1906, composer John Philip Sousa feared how recorded music would destroy the ability to socialize at parties: “The country dance orchestra of violin, guitar and melodeon had to rest at times, and the resultant interruption afforded the opportunity for general sociability and rest among the entire company. Now a tireless mechanism can keep everlastingly at it, and much of what made the dance a wholesome recreation is eliminated.”
In 1925, Princeton University Dean Howard McClenahan tied the car to a moral crisis: “The automobile gave increased opportunities on Sunday and thus lessened the chances of church attendance. The general effect of the automobile was to make the present generation look lightly at the moral code, and to decrease the value of the home.”
History is full of Turkles, and naturally so. Hers is such a terrifying idea, and yet such an appealing one: If we are at the vanguard of social change, then we--that is, we the elders, roughly ages 30 and up, who can remember a time before the latest disruption--are the precious and special last bearers of humanity.
It’s flattering, but it’s untrue. We aren’t special. We just grew up doing things the way we learned to do them. Now we see the next generation acting differently, and we cannot imagine it working. We forget that this is how it’s always been. We forget that we experimented as well. We turned out okay.

Turkle Claim #4: Selfies stop us from seriousness

We have every reason to believe that President Obama revered Nelson Mandela and thought deeply about his relationship with what Mandela stood for. But when he took a selfie at Mandela’s memorial service last Tuesday, he showed us how he, too, lives in our culture of documentation. It is easy to understand how he, like most of us, did not allow himself an uninterrupted time of reverie.

Obama took that selfie--a groupie, really--two hours into a four-hour ceremony that was full of dancing and music. He’d written and given a speech. He’d reflected, and he’d shared his thoughts. He’d surely allowed himself “uninterrupted time of reverie,” either at the service or before. But now he was sharing an experience with those near him, and that experience was made possible by a camera.
Turkle imagines that any interaction with technology somehow negates all the time spent doing other things. She also imagines that we must devote ourselves in only one way to every task: At a dinner table, we are only serious and focused on conversation; at a memorial service, we are only mournful. That is not the way we live. It’s never been the way we live. And that’s the beauty of technology, which Turkle cannot see: We can use it for all purposes, to express joy and sadness, to have long conversations or send short texts. We made it. It is us.

Turkle Claim #5: The young will show us the way

I see the most hope in young people who have grown up with this technology and begin to see its cost. … A 14-year-old girl tells me how she gets her device-smitten father to engage with her during dinner: “Dad, stop Googling. I don’t care about the right answer. I want to talk to you.” A 14-year-old boy reflects: “Don’t people know that sometimes you can just look out the window of a car and see the world go by and it is wonderful. You can think. People don’t know that.” The selfie, like all technology, causes us to reflect on our human values. This is a good thing because it challenges us to figure out what they really are.

These quotes aren’t from teenagers who “begin to see [the] cost” of technology. They have grown up knowing nothing else. The change already came. What these kids are expressing is the joint frustration and wonder of youth, and nobody’s giving up their iPhones.
There is a danger in inaccurately interpreting the effect of technology on kids. The journal Pediatrics displayed this in 2011, when it triggered a media storm by suggesting that Facebook causes depression. In fact, says Massachusetts psychologist John Grohol, who sits on the board of the journal Cyberpsychology, the studies showed no such thing: They just showed that depressed kids use Facebook, as do happy kids. But the Sherry Turkles of the world only trumpet the negative. “So if a patient comes in complaining of depression, the doctor could say, ‘You need to cut back on Facebook,’” Grohol says.
That doctor would have identified the wrong culprit, because he was convinced it was the obvious one. That’s the danger of listening to Turkle.
Is it good that a dad pays more attention to Google than his daughter? No, of course not. That guy should put down his phone. But we should be careful about distinguishing between actual problems and perceived ones. The phone is not, by itself, the problem. In fact, if that dad closed his Google app, opened his camera app, and took a selfie with his 14-year-old daughter, I bet she’d be thrilled.
They’d have had a moment. Turkle wouldn’t recognize it.

[Image: Flickr user Sarah Van Quickelberge]

http://www.fastcompany.com/3023603/creative-conversations/google-makes-you-smarter-facebook-makes-you-happier-selfies-make-you-