Reflections on exaggeration

We need many filters to stay sane in this life. One of my key filters that I have to use in everyday life is dealing with exaggerations. Many of us exaggerate things for various purposes. Exaggerations could be mild, heavy or extreme. The mild ones are like making something more noticeable than usual. They could be seen as humour mainly to highlight a point and they usually give us good time with pleasure and learning. The heavy ones are sometimes bearable and sometimes go beyond the limit based on our mood or general tolerance level. The extreme ones are not easy to handle; especially the shocking images in journalism, visual media and meaningless broadcasts in recent digital social media. Showing an ant like an elephant is an example of this.

There are various interesting views on exaggeration from different perspectives that shed some lights on the topic. I like description of love by George Bernard Shaw in this context: "Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else". According to Kahlil Gibran "An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper". Interestingly Voltaire has a more positive approach to is with his definition "Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness".

From behavioural perspective it may turn to habit in some people as observed by Josh Billings who said: "There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying". It also reflects other habit patterns as pointed out by William Alger: "False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis".

What is your tolerance level to exaggeration and how do you cope with it? Hope you can join the debate to answer my question here.

Regards,
Mehmet Yildiz

Future of Communication

Yes, we will shake it like Shakira in Moscow today; I mean shake our thoughts like that!

Communications technologies, processes, approaches, and tools are rapidly changing. Internet and associated technologies added a mask, a painful flavour to digest, and a huge confusion! It is unknown where we are going! Let's do some brain and heart stretching today and see what we come up with!

We need to ask a few predictive warming questions to start shaking in the attractive rhythm, drums must start beating hard, hands clapping with passion, and move brain hips muscles slowly :

1. How likely to use digital tongues to speak, to taste the quality of communication!
2. How likely to sniff communication with electronic nose!
3. How likely to hear the most juicy global gossips with our digital ears!
4. How likely to have a digital brain embedded to our body using paper batteries I mentioned here yesterday.
5. How likely we will give meanings to life with our digital hearts!
6. Do you reckon we can figure out how to touch, hug, kiss each other digitally.
7. What is the position of digital or electronic spirituality in this rapidly changing universe.

What other digital occurrences and things we can introduce to our end to end communication process and tools? You are free to stretch your prediction up to 2050 safely and for the remaining years and centuries, I will facilitate another blog soon.

You may check this video to get some insights and inspiration before commenting on this post today, it starts with "man is god, anyone and everywhere!":


Regards,
Mehmet

Dr. Mehmet YILDIZ || IBM || IT Philosophy || Future|| Leadership || My blog || Twitter || Linkedin || Yasni ||Google || Naymz|| Superfan