A Commonplace Book

...we go about our business or we take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish--I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.

The uneducated, who by and large do not follow current events closely, are simply not responsive to the same stimuli as the better-educated and more affluent, who do tend to follow the news. At the moment, Republican and Democratic leaders, the nation's cue-givers, are in agreement and supportive. And informed citizens have no independent flow of contradictory information.

"TV news seems to confuse more than it clarifies," the study [by the Center for studies in Communication of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst] summarizes. "Even after controlling for all other variables, we discovered that the correlation between TV watching and knowledge was actually a negative one. Overall, the more TV people watched, the less they knew. The only fact that did not fit in with this pattern was the ability to identify the Patriot missle. this is a sad indictment of television's priorities." They add, "It is extremely disturbing that this public expertise in aspects of military technology is not matched by any clear understanding of the circumstances that lie behind their deployment."

My heart rouses
    thinking to bring you news
      of something
  that concerns you
    and concerns many men. Look at
      what passes for the new.
  You will not find it there but in
    despised poems.
      It is difficult
  to get the news from poems
    yet men die miserably every day
      for lack
  of what is found there.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions and rugs and fact information at the expense of what really counts for more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

Plato: In that period it was believed that people should know of events far away, whether real or imagined.
Sidonia: Presumably this afforded them great benefits.
Plato: On the contrary. None at all. In fact it led to anxiety and bewilderment. But they persisted in belief that it was necessary for them to suffer in these ways.

Plato: It seems that they wished to learn of wars and murders; every kind of violation or despoilation delighted them. Information taught them to dissemble their pleasure, however, and in its service to retain an enquiring or sober countenance Nevertheless they dwelled lovingly upon death and suffering.... [T]hey simply seemed to amuse themselves by reading about the misfortunes of others. This was the essential principle of information.

We're perpetually warned about the contemporary rise of cynicism, but a parallel American contagion, often infecting the same citizens, is credulity. The postmodern cynic cum naïf mistrusts the government, the media, and the other élites even as he recklessly embraces this or that line of grassroots make-believe. You believe that a majority of women were sexually abused as children? You believe that Ben Franklin was an anti-Semitic propagandist? You believe that you have seen a documentary videotape of government doctors performing an autopsy on a captured extraterestrial? Whatever.

This laissez-faire ultra-populism finds its perfect medium in the Internet. Not only is every citizen entitled to his or her opinion but he or she is entitled to deliver it instantaneously, studded with chunks of fake information, to the whole world.

...[One site] contains dozens of dense, competently written reports on subjects as various as the Hale-Bopp coment, AIDS, and TWA flight 800, and its frequently updated pages look as professional as those of brand-name news-media sites; the articles assert, however, that the comet may be travelling alongside "a gigantic spacecraft," that H.I.V. grew out of a "U.S. biowarfare program," and that Flight 800 was brought down by "a rift in the space-time continuum."

Thanks to the Web, amateurism and spuriousness no longer need look amateurish or spurious.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

People ask: why isn't there more good news? The stock answer to which is: Because good news is boring. But actually, common is the more accurate adjective. The norm is for the earth not to quake, the train not to wreck, the teens to grow up to be taxpaying adults.... Bad things make news because bad things are uncommon.

"The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance." (Swann)

[W]ords are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control....

The Mayan control system, where the priests kept the all-important Books of seasons and gods, the Calender, was predicated on the illiteracy of the workers. Modern control systems are predicated on universal literacy since they operate through the mass media....

The mass media has proven a very unreliable and even treacherous instrument of control. It is uncontrollable owing to its need for NEWS. If one paper, or even a string of papers owned by the same person, makes that story hotter as NEWS, some other paper will pick it up. Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.

There was a time when gaining attention for saying something stupid required an institutional standing -- a prominent pulpit, a denominational leadership position, a following of more than a few dozen people meeting in a warehouse. In the Internet era, attention for stupidity is a democratic right, rewarded for audacity and timing alone. The new media provide a platform without filters for those without credentials -- people who, in previous times, could not get a letter to the editor published in the shopper's gazette.

At one point, a reporter yelled to Jones, "Are you just toying with us to get attention?" -- the most blindingly obvious question in recent journalism. Another yelled: "You're just using us! We should all leave!" Fearing they might miss something, no one left.

...It is the globalization of insanity... the propaganda of the idiotic gesture....rule by the most creative and outrageous lunatics

In the networked public sphere, the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult) but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.

This can be done in many ways, including inundating audiences with information, producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus, delegitimizing media that provide accurate information (whether credible mass media or online media) deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt by aggressively questioning credibility (with or without evidence, since what matters is creating doubt, not proving a point), creating or claiming hoaxes, or generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate, especially on social media which tends to be harder for a government to control like mass media.