Now we want all our wars to end in three days because the concentration required to care beyond that is unimaginable.”
Rebecca Noblit-Goodall, Adbusters, December 31, 2003
Infodiversity
You are going to hear this word a lot in the next few years.
I hope..
Biodiversity is good. We know that if there is biodiversity in a certain geographical region, that the region is generally healthy. There is a balance of interests that allows all species to thrive and propagate within the same habitat.
However, if one species gains advantages as the result of human intervention or mishap, the entire ecosystem can become polluted or barren. Some species, for example, will consume all the grass and leaves, because of a reduction in the population of the carnivores that prey on them. The entire habitat can become a disaster zone. (See Yellowstone Park and wolves.)
Information technologies are the same way. If our environment is balanced with news and information from a diversity of sources– labour, management, government, academia, women’s groups, men’s groups, capitalists, socialists, environmentalists, even conservatives– we will have a healthy habitat that represents a balance of all the competing interests.
But what happens if the wolves take over all of the information technologies and begin to control the message. That is what is happening in the news and entertainment industries. Big corporations like Time-Warner are taking over more and more other media companies, including AOL and CNN.
So when you watch your newscaster and read your paper and think that you are getting information from honest people who have drawn their own conclusions about various events and are relating them to you– think again.
When Adbusters tried to show a documentary on deforestation in British Columbia on TV– even offering to buy the air time– they were turned down flat. No television station would broadcast their documentary. Why not? You can buy air time to sell cars and panty hose and diamond rings and even tampons. You can even buy air time to show ads for pharmaceuticals that provide relief for non-existent illnesses. Why can’t you buy air time to tell people about an ecological disaster in the making?
Because these media companies are not objective or neutral when it comes to interpreting events for you, the consumer. They want to decide what you should or should not see and they serve the interests of the moneyed class.
In practice, their standards seem pretty broad. They are always excited about showing you something that is “cutting edge”. But there are some things that they will never show you. And that is anything that challenges the idea that personal fulfillment and happiness can only be found in the purchase of more and more branded products and services.
Clinton Clinton Clinton!
Two events signaled a decisive change in the course of the Clinton Scandal and the impeachment proceedings. Firstly, CNN ran a little piece by a reporter who is actually OUT THERE covering congressional elections. He gently chided people who think that the Clinton scandal matters. He reported that the people are interested in Education, Health Care, and the minimum wage. Nobody is asking candidates where they stand on the impeachment, and Republican candidates are not advertising the fact that they are in favour of it. Could it be they have SOME shame? That CNN aired this report indicates the passing of a fantasy. CNN is not exactly known for their bold, independent analysis of facts. They tried to play up the scandal big time and now appear to have accepted the fact that most Americans just don’t see it as that big a deal, and regard the entire impeachment stuff as nothing more than partisan politics. In the latest poll, less than 11% think Congress should proceed with impeachment. That’s less than the percentage of people who think the Earth is flat.
Newsweek ran an article on the scandal this week that compared it to Watergate. It was a light, irreverent piece, that made it clear that there was no comparison. Watergate was about a lot of very serious criminal acts by the President and his top advisors.
Both magazines are playing to a very subtle thing: the winds of perception. What they are saying is that there is now a widespread consensus that the Lewinsky scandal won’t wash as justification for impeachment.
Something I’ve been saying since January.
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Conservatives like to rant and rave about the Presidency sinking to a new “low”, as if letting tens of thousands of people die in Rwanda or Bosnia wasn’t a “low”.
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Have you bought a magazine lately? Have you ever gone to a really good magazine store, where they stock everything? I walk down the display case, boggled. There are magazines on every conceivable interest, including “Feminist Lesbian Natural Healing Cyber Music Guide” and “Mollusk Interpretations for Franciscan Feminist Social Worker Anthropoid Researchers”. Is there too much information in the world? Is there such a thing as too much information? There is probably a magazine on “Information Overload”. I think there is: “Adbusters”.
You can’t keep up with everything anymore. You just hope that Time or Newsweek picks up the important stuff, and that TV movies give you the basic issue information that you need to make intelligent conversation at parties.
The Internet is like one of these magazine stores, except a hundred times bigger. A million times bigger. I think what will happen is that, after spending hundreds of years making new information, we will spend the next hundred years sorting information into useful categories and subsets.
***
They are everywhere now: cameras. Web-cams. Video-conferencing.
Some day-cares are now installing T-1 connections and “KinderCams”. Parents can check on their little ones through the internet, at any time during the day. Some people find this scary. They’re right. It is scary. We’ll deal with the scary aspects of it. It’s also great. As long as the workers know they’re being watched, I think it’s great. On the one hand, yes, we are being suspicious and cynical about people. On the other hand, we will know more. It is always better to know more than to know less. We may learn that we have been hysterically paranoid for all of our lives for no reason. Or we may learn that life is full of little complexities that are best left alone. Or we may learn that generally day-care workers do a good job. Who knows? We just learn. We have this voracious appetite to know and see and hear everything.
***
Shift Magazine printed a Q&A between some hackers and Senator Fred Thompson. It was pointed out that when the Volkswagen Company found a defect that would affect only three cars out of 8,500, they sent letters to every owner and recalled all of the cars in order to fix it.
Are you still waiting for your letter from Microsoft? Me too. Did you realize that the entire Internet can be brought down by hackers breaking into Windows NT computers? Is that a defect?