I went through a period of about 8 or so years when I posted a lot on social media to share my creative work. To be honest, when I posted, it was almost always proceeded with a sense of regret because not a lot of people in my circle were posting art on social media and I’m not the type of person who particularly likes to stand out, not that there’s anything wrong with that: I think I’m just more of an introverted person. It probably wasn’t great for my mental health.
Nevertheless, I noticed that what kept me posting was that my thoughts were from a place of love and desire to help and connect with others. The artwork was meant to be a message communicating that I was alright because my network included many in the healthcare fields who actually cares. This sort of got me thinking about the opposite where some individuals may post out of hate, an emotion that as a neuroscientist I know to be intricately intertwined with the emotion of love–the two emotions come from the same or interconnected regions of the brain.
There’s been numerous research that have shown that social media could be used as a tool to track individuals with mental illness and, purportedly, catch crime before they occur. I won’t dive into the ethical considerations of all this because I don’t really understand them. I think posting on a regular basis is the foundational act behind the practicality of this desire to use social media as a tool to monitor those who may be in need of some assistance. This is I’m sure an emerging area for artificial intelligence research.
The Ivory Tower 
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