🌐 2024 Annual Summary
This passage is translated from its Simplified Chinese edition. Original edition shall prevail if divergence exists.
My blog launched on November 30th that has been exactly one month 'til now. This very one month is short that if it were not for my blogging, this piece of time would flow away in silence, like those short pieces of time in the past, unaware. However luckily I determined to start a blog and during the past month I didn’t rely on video games as my spiritual drugs. Expedition into the upcoming unknown realms has already taken most of my concentration free to use.
I believe that energy is in shortage for modern humans. This times lacks no information. But, infomation receivers lacks capabilities to extract valuable knowledge and wisdom, which results in abundant waste of time and energy. Most people choose to stay still in comfortable circles, brainwashing themselves in infinitely looping short videos, flirting and irritating on social media. This is a form of spiritual self-castration. Modern people face an increasingly tense contradiction: on the one hand, there’s an information explosion; on the other, there’s the loss of subjectivity in the face of this overload. This loss of subjectivity manifests behaviorally as “amusement,” a trapping in an information cocoon, and being led by the nose by the information being fed to us; technically, it manifests as low media literacy and a deterioration in the ability to retrieve information.
In my humble opinion, we living in modern world has sold out our subjectivity for admission fees to stay inside the comfortable circle, willing to degenerate into a vassal of fragmented information.
I think I am a survivor against this castration wave. I can proudly declare that I never watch Tiktoks and microblogs thus I elade drwoning myself into tedious doomscrolling and chronic mental suicide.
It is not an alarmist propaganda that I define this kind of pastime a chronic suicide. First, you can try if you can complete an article on one topic you are interested in, then check your word choice and logical structure; or rather there’s no need for actually an article, all you need to do is to list a clear and detailed mind map for it. I think this is the most direct means of detecting the extent to which thinking has been eroded by fragmented information. Second, find one or several opinions you oppose to or hate, write down your refutation and see how logical your argument is, whether it points to the opinions or their publishers, and whether it starts from the fact or a priori moral, religious, or political views. I believe this method is the most direct way to diagnose if your cognition is flattened. Last, evaluate your patience doing these tests can you know the breadth and inclusiveness — that a narrow mind usually demonstrates weak logic in expression, extreme exclusivity of cognition and intolerance of thought.
I hold a firm belief that most people get a desperate answer. Nowadays, when information resources are abundant, the public’s abilities of searching and information processing are declining into a barren field. The poverty in materials are able to solve via personal efforts and social assistance. But how about the poverty in mind? For the ordinary, leaving the comfortable circle, in fact, is no different from committing another kind of suicide — maybe sometimes, people need to be blinded by the immediate; they may need bias and prejudice in order to preserve psychological stability and sustain a sense of communal identity. Thus, they choose to ignore whatever lies beyond their cognitive horizon — and in this process, social media serves as an instrument. The demand for amusement, in turn, fuels the reproduction and amplification of low-quality content, creating a vicious cycle.
Admittedly, there are indeed a considerable number of content creators on fast-paced media platforms who produce educational and informative material, and their contribution to public enlightenment should not be dismissed. However, I would like to ask: how much substance can a creator truly deliver within a medium that lasts only a few minutes — or even less? How can the reliability of such content be verified? Can such brevity accommodate rigorous argumentation? Can the content be presented systematically, or can viewers engage with it through a coherent intellectual process? Qualified science communication is not merely about clearly telling the audience what something is; it must also teach them why it is so.The latter — the cultivation of an entire mode of scientific reasoning — is of far greater significance. If science popularization fails to promote scientific thinking, it cannot possibly raise public literacy. Evidently, the lack of media literacy has become an urgent and pressing issue.
On December 2nd this year, Oxford University announced the Word of the Year: brain rot.[1] This is a vivid description of how long-term addiction to the social media has eroded brains. More importantly, this result, drawn from expert pre-selection and public polling, proves that people are beginning to pay attention to the negative effects of excessive entertainment, and more and more people are realizing that low-quality information is gradually corroding their minds.
However this can be a long progress. The closed nature and strong stickiness of media platforms hinder the flow of valuable information. After establishing a relative user scale and information monopoly advantage, the platform’s pursuit of commercial interests has led to the deterioration of the quality of platform content. Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined a word to vividly describe this phenomenon, which is enshittification. Doctorow proposed in a column in the Financial Times:“‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything.”“One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittocene.”[2]
Humorous words foreshadow an equally humorous and absurd future. People living in the times of information lose control in information. How tragic. Among several information revolutions, this is the only time that the spread and abundance of information result in ignorance and division. In the past, thinkers believe that it was elites’ monopoly on media for knowledge. But today as such monopoly disappears, we find that things have changed. It is the literacy of the ignorant themselves cause the ignorance. To break the circle, we require every media worker, content creator and educator’s joint efforts.
The mission of DailyMinz is to undertake my own reflections, driving me to identify problems, refine my knowledge, and deepen my thinking. I’m happy for readers to participate, discuss various issues together, improve together, and contribute to the goal of breaking this cycle.
Blog’s Annual Summary
Although the blog has been running for only one tewlfth of a year, please allow me to follow the tradition to do a “summary.”
Content Updates
This year, the blog has published 6 posts in total (this one excluded). Among these, there are 4 announcements and 1 translation; 2 posts are long articles.
Original contents:
Though the former post was catergorized under “Announcement”, as a record of my build of a multilingual site, I believe it is qualified to be in the list. The latter one is my boast the most. ('cuz on earth you have written only two original posts!) From now on, long in-depth articles are mostly following this paradigm.
Plus, the posts published might be modified, especially the recent updates. This is due to my bad habit of not thinking carefully before posting and then making afterthoughts after posting. I hope you can forgive me… However I swear that these modifications are usually about wording. When it comes to the substantial changes to the content, I will make a prominent mark at the corresponding place in the post.
Sitework Look-back
Internationalization Project
Although I have found ways to build a multilingual site, synchronizing cross-language changes has become a tedious task due to the frequent configuration changes. Secondly, the original articles in other languages were translated by Google and proofread by me later, but even so, using machine translation is still a very insincere thing, so I suspended updates in other languages until I can free up my hands to complete the translation of existing articles.
Additionally, due to cultural and social differences among readers who speak different languages, some articles may become “exclusive” to a particular language and no longer be translated. If you’re interested, you can help us translate! To reduce maintenance pressure, blog posts will generally no longer be updated synchronously after the multilingual content is relaunched.
Currently I’m writing a tool to assist the maintenance of multilingual sites. An incomplete demo has been uploaded to GitHub.
Visual Changes
Some default pictures are changed. Default banners are sourced from Microsoft 365 Stock Images. The icon of the site is my doodle… Doesn’t count.
Technical Adjustments
Added giscus comment plugin based on GitHub Discussion. The advantage is serverless and that it doesn’t require third-party service registration. The disadvantage is that only GitHub users are permitted to comment while no support for anonymity.
Added RSS feed.
Added timeliness reminder, implememted via JavaScript injection. If an article was published more than 180 days ago, a reminder will be displayed in the header. The copyright information in the footer has been slightly reformatted, and the total site uptime has been added. This countdown begins when the first article is published, by subtracting the starting timestamp from the current timestamp and converting it into a human-readable time format.
2025 Outlook
A massive series is in the works… Originally planned for Christmas 2024, but unfortunately the breadth and depth of the content exceeded my expectations, so the project schedule has been significantly extended. However, slow work produces fine results, and I’m confident I can deliver something that will shock you all!
Translation of China Pathfinder series is still in the run. In the future there will be more valuable articles translated in a larger range.
Several long articles are in the works, which topics are respectively —
- Duolingo’s Revelation…
- Needham’s Grand Questions
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)…(Abandoned)
The abandoned post plan has been merged into another one:
Random Thoughts on Creativity: What Education Methods Bring Up to Us (in Chinese)
Topics are more than just topics! DailyMinz also wishes to deepen the discussion in order to have a glimpse into the nature of this world and offer you with more universal inspirations.
A new column has been scheduled, which is Books Share. Good books are solid bricks of the stairs toward wisdom. I hope to share every jotting with you all.
Postscript
It’s a pity that since the blog is only new and the content is thin, this year’s summary can only be done in such a hasty manner. I am really unwilling to accept this. I will continue to work hard next year to provide you with richer and more in-depth content!
References
- ‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024. Oxford University Press. Last accessed: Dec., 31, 2024. https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/ ↩
- ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. Financial Times. 🔐https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5. (Archived, Internet Archive) ↩