All posts by Ray Grigg

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The Quadra Project – Social Media

“We invent things, and thereafter they invent us.” This is a fundamental principle in the media theory articulated by Marshall McLuhan, but it is rarely considered because we are usually so enamoured by the ingenuity of our inventions that we fail to consider the ways in which they invent us.

A brilliant essay by Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”, in the May 2022 edition of The Atlantic Monthly magazine deserves careful reading and thought. Its insights do much to explain the factious irrationality that has been generated by social media, an adjunct of the internet that was supposed to facilitate and deepen communication, but instead has created angry disputes with irresolvable differences. What went wrong?

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Environment, History

The Quadra Project: Sounds of the Earth

On August 20, 1977, Voyager 2 was launched from NASA’s facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. And exactly 15 days later, on September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 was launched from the same facility. The timing was crucial because astronomical calculations had placed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in a lineal alignment that would only occur once every 176 years. With this alignment, each planet could accelerate the two spacecrafts to their next destination, reducing the travel time from 30 years to 12 years.

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: Dysbiosis

Dysbiosis is a new word for our vocabulary. It has been used before to describe a health condition created by an imbalance in the gut bacteria, which causes a wide range of gastrointestinal problems. Now dysbiosis is being used to describe a variety of our environmental problems.

It’s a timely word formed from two Greek roots. The prefix “dys” denotes difficulties, abnormalities, or anything that is uneasy, unfavourable or unfortunate. The suffix, “biosis”, denotes a state of living or a mode of life. Put the two together and we have a word that describes the malfunctioning of a biological system caused by some profound imbalance.

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The Quadra Project: Climate Karma

Karma, from the Sanskrit word “karman” is an amalgamation of “action, effect, and fate”. In the popular sense of the word, it has come to mean that actions have consequences, and that our individual human behaviour exists in a cause-effect relationship with a vague sense of a moral cosmos. Often described as the Principle of Karma, it means that personal acts motivated by “good” intentions are eventually rewarded in kind, and that “bad” acts are also rewarded in kind.

Although karma usually applies to the cause-effect relationship of our individual actions, it might also apply to our collective actions, a more expansive understanding that is worth considering, given the consequence of the unfolding havoc we are causing on our planet.

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Community, History

Quadra Project: The Authoritarian Reflex

German social scientists who had fled from the Nazi domination of their country were, by the late 1940s, trying to understand the causes of the political events that had resulted in the rise of such an authoritarian regime. Theodor W. Odorno, who by then had become an American philosopher and psychologist, led a number of research projects into this intriguing subject. Why would people be so subject to Nazi propaganda and to the power of centralized control, hierarchy, compliance and loyalty?

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