Edward Curtin writes in The Online Double-bind that the addiction to news on the Internet is a mouse trap that is suppressing the "lower half-head, the one that’s still thinking lead-pencil thoughts, the slow and easy stuff," the part that still thinks.
We seek news-as-gossip as a cure for our atomized society, as an escape from the home or as drugs for office chatter junkies. News affects us differently, however, depending on what we do with it. Simply retell it and we trade in stuff and nonsense. News-as-gossip draws us together, often in shared prejudice, or in short-sighted approbation or condemnation.
Brawn not brain is triggered by adrenaline and, in turn, by emotion, according to common analysis. The brain is blocked by confusion which helps to stymie thought and this is Thierry Meyssan's analysis of propaganda as driving incoherence.
Censorship cannot limit the Internet completely - though not for want of trying. It's a different discussion but the CIA's full thought dominance as espoused by Director of Central Intelligence William Casey (1981-87) is lunacy. As 85% of intelligence comes from public sources (Andreas von Bulow) an intelligent person (not an unintelligence service evidently) can immediately spot the filter bubble.
Education rather than the Internet is to blame. Knowledge is a tool. Wisdom is the product. Information is just the raw material. Norman Dodd, Charlotte Iserbyt, John Taylor Gatto make a conclusive case that education no longer gives students the tools. Since I've quoted them before, I'll end with an interview given by Theodore Roszak who wrote The Cult of Information (1986)
In the talk with Jeffrey Mishlove, Theodore Roszak argues that cultures are based upon ideas. Most of the greatest ideas that drive our culture contain no information at all, such as the idea that all men are created equal.
Roszak explained that merchandising and advertising benefit from the idea of genes as information and our minds as computers:
"At the time the computer was gaining visibility on the social scene in the late 1940s there was a breakthrough in biology: the discovery of DNA... Researchers took the cybernetics information-transfer technology as a model for DNA. We now know that may not be adequate... Out of that came the image of DNA as a bio-computer and all of this lent credibility to DNA as an information processing mechanism. As we know DNA is the secret of life, it was like saying information is the secret of life.
"This is exactly what happened in the seventeenth century when scientists were looking for a model of the universe and they came up with the clock: we live in a clockwork universe and God is the great watchmaker in the sky.
"As of the 1950s the Great Watchmaker became the Great Cosmic Programmer and it became conventional for people to talk of their thinking as being programmed... This is nothing but an image or a paradigm or a model and it might not be adequate."
I know people who still have a lead-pencil mind
(who see and are motivated to sketch on paper) and I know people who now
exist almost entirely within the virtual realm, whose every conversation is
peppered with what they last saw or posted in the Ether.
If we are willing and able to make sense of news, it turns us inward. It draws on our private resources of knowledge. We question our own perspectives. It forces us to contend with a nightmare world in which we want to share what we know, while we cry out to automatons who can’t hear us. We sense danger ahead but can find no-one who will listen to our warning: the classic dream scenario.
That's the curse of the lone consumer. On the other hand, those who gorge on mass media are taken care of, presented with a seamless world in which no question is raised without a comforting answer at the ready. The mass media, meaning made-for-television movies, cinema, and the major news broadcasters and publications, weave fiction and reality together in a modern Bayeux tapestry that is a masterpiece of propaganda.
That's the curse of the lone consumer. On the other hand, those who gorge on mass media are taken care of, presented with a seamless world in which no question is raised without a comforting answer at the ready. The mass media, meaning made-for-television movies, cinema, and the major news broadcasters and publications, weave fiction and reality together in a modern Bayeux tapestry that is a masterpiece of propaganda.
In this world of total information awareness and full spectrum dominance, the news serves only to confirm what the consumer has already witnessed in the episodic reality of TV, on Homeland, 24 and
NCIS.
Social media makes it easy to extend this controlled perspective into cyberspace. Two thirds of consumers get their news from a single social networking site and for 85% of those it is Facebook (The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society edited by Larry D. Rosen).
I freely confess that at certain times I've been one of those people over-dependent on a single aggregator or news outlet, whether it be Zero Hedge or Reuters or the Financial Times, depending on the work I was doing at the time. Yet it was never exclusive. Brought up in a household with several newspapers, I was taught to compare. The Internet portal, by contrast, trains its denizens to live in a walled garden. Even if news stories are aggregated from different sources the resident of this garden will hardly look up a second source on the same story. No, they'll move on to the next news item.
I freely confess that at certain times I've been one of those people over-dependent on a single aggregator or news outlet, whether it be Zero Hedge or Reuters or the Financial Times, depending on the work I was doing at the time. Yet it was never exclusive. Brought up in a household with several newspapers, I was taught to compare. The Internet portal, by contrast, trains its denizens to live in a walled garden. Even if news stories are aggregated from different sources the resident of this garden will hardly look up a second source on the same story. No, they'll move on to the next news item.
There is another reason I compare multiple sources: fear of missing out. I am aware that the main form of propaganda is censorship by omission which is much more insidious than bias. One can adjust for bias but if you never see the information at all...
Missing out, FOMO, is supposed to be an Internet phenomenon but it's not. I used to read newspapers as a student with a pair of scissors in one hand. I was a clipper, driven by a need to organize in my mind that which I read. And there is the difference. It is not about the source nor the type of information but what we do with it. By the way, as a newspaper addict of long standing, I can attest that the replacement of news by opinion was well underway in the 1980s, long before the Internet supposedly destroyed the news industry as a business proposition.
This person has let information drive his muscles not his brain. Instead of responding to news by thinking... who is behind that, why would they... his response is, "I must go there" (or not). War propaganda works the same way. News of a brewing war should trigger the brain to ask... why now, by whom, for whom. Instead in the masses it triggers, "I must go there".
Missing out, FOMO, is supposed to be an Internet phenomenon but it's not. I used to read newspapers as a student with a pair of scissors in one hand. I was a clipper, driven by a need to organize in my mind that which I read. And there is the difference. It is not about the source nor the type of information but what we do with it. By the way, as a newspaper addict of long standing, I can attest that the replacement of news by opinion was well underway in the 1980s, long before the Internet supposedly destroyed the news industry as a business proposition.
The Urban Dictionary: "Fear of missing out. This is common term thrown at one specific avetard, [who] has the biggest fear of missing out causing him to literally drive 5 hours at a random point in time just to avoid missing out on something. "Oh shit. What if they do something super lit and I'm not there?"
This person has let information drive his muscles not his brain. Instead of responding to news by thinking... who is behind that, why would they... his response is, "I must go there" (or not). War propaganda works the same way. News of a brewing war should trigger the brain to ask... why now, by whom, for whom. Instead in the masses it triggers, "I must go there".
Brawn not brain is triggered by adrenaline and, in turn, by emotion, according to common analysis. The brain is blocked by confusion which helps to stymie thought and this is Thierry Meyssan's analysis of propaganda as driving incoherence.
“In classical propaganda, the aim was to tell coherent stories, if necessary by concealing certain facts or falsifying them. Not anymore. Because we no longer try to convince with beautiful stories if necessary by getting comfortable with reality. [Instead] we are addressing an intermediate state of consciousness through which we convey messages.”
Censorship cannot limit the Internet completely - though not for want of trying. It's a different discussion but the CIA's full thought dominance as espoused by Director of Central Intelligence William Casey (1981-87) is lunacy. As 85% of intelligence comes from public sources (Andreas von Bulow) an intelligent person (not an unintelligence service evidently) can immediately spot the filter bubble.
Education rather than the Internet is to blame. Knowledge is a tool. Wisdom is the product. Information is just the raw material. Norman Dodd, Charlotte Iserbyt, John Taylor Gatto make a conclusive case that education no longer gives students the tools. Since I've quoted them before, I'll end with an interview given by Theodore Roszak who wrote The Cult of Information (1986)
In the talk with Jeffrey Mishlove, Theodore Roszak argues that cultures are based upon ideas. Most of the greatest ideas that drive our culture contain no information at all, such as the idea that all men are created equal.
Roszak explained that merchandising and advertising benefit from the idea of genes as information and our minds as computers:
"At the time the computer was gaining visibility on the social scene in the late 1940s there was a breakthrough in biology: the discovery of DNA... Researchers took the cybernetics information-transfer technology as a model for DNA. We now know that may not be adequate... Out of that came the image of DNA as a bio-computer and all of this lent credibility to DNA as an information processing mechanism. As we know DNA is the secret of life, it was like saying information is the secret of life.
"This is exactly what happened in the seventeenth century when scientists were looking for a model of the universe and they came up with the clock: we live in a clockwork universe and God is the great watchmaker in the sky.
"As of the 1950s the Great Watchmaker became the Great Cosmic Programmer and it became conventional for people to talk of their thinking as being programmed... This is nothing but an image or a paradigm or a model and it might not be adequate."
And as of April 2021, The Guardian was still pushing this broken analogy: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
Comments