Catalytic Fs of World Change: Fear
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my book Generation F.
Undoubtedly, the world has changed completely, overwhelmingly, and forever. And like a visible thread, these changes have been marked by three words — there could be many more, but I am sure about these three — and as historical chance would have it, they all start with the letter f.
This often chaotic “machine” also creates our immense… fear. This is why the second f-word, which defines several generations born and raised in our age and using social media, is fear.
fear
Fear is an emotion induced by a perceived threat which causes entities to quickly pull far away from it and usually hide. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger. In short, fear is the ability to recognize danger leading to an urge to confront it or flee from it (also known as the fight-or-flight response) but in extreme cases of fear (horror and terror) a freeze or paralysis response is possible.
Some psychologists such as John B. Watson, Robert Plutchik, and Paul Ekman have suggested that there is only a small set of basic or innate emotions and that fear is one of them. This hypothesized set includes such emotions as joy, sadness, fright, dread, horror, panic, anxiety, acute stress reaction and anger. Fear should be distinguished from the emotion anxiety, which typically occurs without any certain or immediate external threat.
It’s hard to tell whether this fear will intensify with time or simply vanish.
The same thing happened with the automobile and with practically everything created by man’s genius and made available for the use of all. I believe it is more likely to fade away, especially after I saw a statistic online saying that 7% of Americans check their Facebook profiles while having sex. But even without statistics, it is clear to me that the fears caused by this shared and public online communication are slowly fading away and that each of them is quickly turning into an advantage as long as we know how to manage it.
This is why I often say that
“FEAR MANAGEMENT” IS THE MOST DIFFICULT EXERCISE
in our active or passive participation in social media. If we do well, it would mean that we are all ready to engage in the uninhibited sharing of opinions, viewpoints, comments, pictures, and videos and to respond to those shared by others.
Fear will always accompany us when we discover new things, especially in communications. This is why I accept it as a logical element of our communication, and I am the only one “afraid” that we may give it too much importance; rather, it should be our signal that we are on the right path or at least that we have encountered something extremely interesting.
Generation F is about social media and the world, the people who run the world and how they feel, and how we feel during our transformation from Homo Sapiens to Homo Socialicus.
