Post Paradigm
The digital revolution has decimated print media and network television and changed the way we receive information. These days a wise man would be foolish to limit his input to one editor's opinion, to squeeze his information-gathering and entertainment into a time slot dictated by a television executive. The ten o'clock news has fallen by the side of the road along with tree-gobbling newspapers and the dial telephone. Citizens can record the day's events on mobile phones and post them on the net faster than media empires can move their monstrous behinds. Though the traditional news media have deep archives for context and experts to offer sophisticated analysis, they don't broadcast the news itself, but an ongoing aftermath of opinion, a sort of journalistic masturbation. Meanwhile the tom-tom drum of worldwide events is available on the screen of a small device that a Saharan camel herder or a Tajikistani nomad has access to. An African migrant on a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean has a cellphone.
Visual entertainment media is a sector that has grown steadily since the invention of moving pictures. In a sense, it has been around since men painted on the walls of caves to tell hunting stories. And thanks to our hunting and survival skills, the moving image has a visceral effect on our attention. It draws us in like a cobra. There is a place to contemplate the image of a man on a cross, but big media tempts us with a compelling and lazier way to get the message, by telling the story with heroic characters blazing across a screen. Media conglomerates have the resources to raise production values far beyond the capabilities of an individual with a mobile phone, so it is more satisfying to watch the big boys. Unfortunately, the nuances of the lessons are scrubbed away in the process. Entertainment spectacles encourage us to sit back and take it in, no effort required. All the work has been done. Watch, don't think. While we're watching we're offered a special deal on reclining chairs that will allow us to lose the excess weight caused by our sugar addiction and inactivity. Moving visual media fascinates us, whether it is the latest streaming blockbuster, a collection of funny videos, black and white wartime footage, a classic movie, or shakey mobile clips from the streets when revolutions take place.
More information is available to more people more of the time than ever before, which has caused a leap forward in our understanding of each other. We can see a person in the Siberian countryside preparing vegetable stew, or another in Tokyo making rice cakes. This low-level information exchange helps us realize that we are not so different from each other no matter what our governments and its media would like us to believe.
These days, if an alien landed in Africa, the event would be on social media within minutes. When the traditional news outlets pick up the story they will speculate about what it means, but the news of aliens without the analysis would be enough to turn many of our neat scientific theories on their heads. We know things within minutes of them taking place, and everyone can know them. Governments may block internet sites but that is as futile as trying to stop the tides. Information and images leak through barriers in spite of efforts to destroy the evidence. People have eyes and memories.
Although the technological revolution has changed the way we see the world, there is also a risk of being plunged back into a new dark age as I described in a previous essay called Book Burning. We hope that this doomsday scenario never happens as we give thanks to digital mobility and the strides it helps us make in knowing each other on an individual level. Travel broadens the mind, but when we are not allowed or able to move, we can instantly connect to see how each other live and die in our simple profound universes. We still need businesses to provide the infrastructure for communication, the smart-phone manufacturers and satellite launchers, but the platform providers who host content should have no political axes to grind. Currying favour has always been the lifeblood of traditional news peddlers. The freedom of information that the world wide net offers, has ripped the shabby cloak away from the man who would be king, and shown him to be a money-grubbing petty dictator who will sell out to the highest bidder. Give me a phone and a walk through a favourite city, or sit down in a Greek mountain taverna, listen to an interview with a rebel from a previous generation, see a cartoon to make me laugh and remind me how human I am, or watch a refresher on how to fix a bicycle tire, and I can dial the roar of media hysteria back to its proper level.
Apart from the phone's original function as a connective device that has upended perception, it has also wormed its way into so many aspects of our lives it has become another appendage. Phone books don't exist anymore. There was once an industry of data collection, printing, delivering, and recycling that has come to a halt. I no longer have an address book - everything is on a phone and backed up online. I don't need a timer to know when the laundry is finished or an alarm to wake me up. If I want to make a note of anything my phone is always at hand. I don't need reference books like encyclopedias, or any books for that matter. I read my news from a variety of sources without consuming a single tree. I don't need a bus schedule, plane, or train times as I can follow transport on a digital tracker. I can take photos and show them to my friends or to the whole world. I can monitor my heartbeat or the intake and burning of calories. I do my banking online and purchase goods that are delivered to my door. I can translate from Korean to French, check medical results, identify pieces of music, and so much more. The magic in a pocket that digital media offers is a science fiction dream, but for those who cling to the traditional, the beeps, alarms, and ringtones of personal devices are an electronic death knell. The old guard can't accept what history teaches, that once the genie is out of the lamp, he can't be stuffed back in.
The bad news is that we didn't know when we let the genie out of his bottle that he would have a flea in his ear. Now that flea has grown a million-fold and become an infestation of individual users who believe that their ignorance has the same value as knowledge. The algorithms that are programmed into hosting sites cater to individual users by suggesting content that is similar to the user's viewing choices, so will show only that to the viewer and leave aside the larger picture. This has created a society of individual insects without the sophisticated organizational skills of a honeybee, who are more like wasps who will attack and dismember each other. They have no group-massage instinct toward the greater good, only their individual survival. The Internet brings a unique and beneficial connectivity to our hive, but we must be on guard against the deadly wasps in their single poisonous nests.
