Disclosure

Hey Ethan
Inspired by your blog and writings by other experts and academics (and my own experience living in Tanzania), I am writing a paper about the transformational impact of mobile phones in Africa. While the impact is great, I do not see it as a silver bullet for African economies given their other governance, infrastructure, etc problems. I have also read that there is an “interoperability” problem in some countries where, it is said that “…In most
sub-Saharan countries, rival telecom companies do not allow customers to place calls to competitors’
networks, with the result that many people find it necessary to carry multiple phones on separate networks…” While I realize in many parts of the world there are restrictions on using other network to “roam” not being able to place a call to someone who uses another operator is a serious impediment to communication. Do you know if this regulation still applies in many African countries? I have searched, and researched, and searched again, but only came up with one claim about this restriction.

Thank you in advance. I love your blog…read it every day. It’s my little trip back to happier times when I was doing more doing than thinking. Hopefully one day I will get back there.
Thanks
kjm

Some thoughts from a psychiatrist/psychotherapist’s POV re why the recent abundance/inundation of information has led to individuals narrowly choosing “echo chamber” sources, instead of widening our worlds. It’s more than just “tribalism” and “the tendency to opt for the familiar” although that’s a beginning. Whether a Facebook post or an Ebola story, every information cluster/unit has emotional evocative potential- the intensity, complexity, valence and other qualities of which are determined at the point of impact- particular to each individual who opts to receive. As with music, an individual’s reponse to other forms of information is influenced by multiple factors and dimensions- such as temperament, culture, aesthetic sensitivity, context and history. There is a reflexive tropism- so rapid it must be unconscious and associational- that determines whether the information is chosen or blocked. It goes far beyond just the quantity of information and the individual’s tolerance for stimulation and “overwhelm threshold”.
One of the Buddhist “5 precepts” has to do with not ingesting substances that cloud the mind, and modern teachers include all forms of information and sensory input as potentially being in that category.
In my psychotherapy practice we explicitly discuss what clients are watching and reading and otherwise choosing as admissible sources of input. The choice can mitigate or reinforce suffering. For trauma victims, watching slasher films might seem an obvious thing to avoid- but the well-known phenomenom of “traumatic repetition” speaks to how such victims may be powerfully drawn to do exactly that.
So why (and how) we narrow the bandwidth of what we allow into consciousness is a very important question, which warrants exploration in depth.