BZZT - 21st Century Media

Concision has won.

If you are not concise, you can't be heard. There are 6 billion people on this planet and you can't expect to hold anyone's attention for more than about 30 seconds (oops - there goes another reader - already I've used too many words, taken too long to make my point).

BZZT

Couple the information age with globalization and suddenly we have so many sources to check for so many stories that we simply haven't the time to explore things in depth. We'd finish the book we're reading but we have a coffee date at Barnes & Noble and while we're there we'll likely pick up a new book or magazine.

BZZT

Even when we're stuck in traffic, we have this frenetic vibe that comes from too much caffeine and content. We're a nation of channel surfers, web surfers, replacing quiet Sufi wisdom with noisy surfer info, working our way down the food chain from wisdom to understanding to knowledge to information to data as we find ourselves less and less able to find patterns in the haystack, the do-it yourself worldview with easy-to-assemble instructions now in pieces in the floor, us with no instructions, and a sense that we'll never figure out how it all fits together.

BZZT

Something big is happening, likely, but we haven't time to sort it out. Instead we play an increasingly difficult game of keeping up with data streams, emails, instant messaging, phone calls, news feeds. We're living in an age where information has displaced understanding. We all speculate and when we're tired of listening to ourselves, we have hundreds and thousands of options from which to choose for professional speculation.

BZZT

Universities and think tanks and research labs are full of highly intelligent people who speak too slowly, who consider too many variables, who talk in careful and nuanced tones that make them undesirable for the ratings whores who've kidnapped our media. When a signal is pulled out of the noise, it all takes too long to explain.

BZZT

Our media was never designed to convey understanding anyway. It was designed to hold our attention between commercials, open up our minds to messages that look alluring before suddenly switching us from news about our finances to promises to cure erectile dysfunction, getting us just when we’re vulnerable and open to new information. The content is there just to soften us up, so to speak. It was never meant to be taken seriously.

BZZT

Already I've taken too long. Already I've said too much. Already, 83.2% of the readers who began this posting have clicked through to another site, one better geared to the mysterious impulses that Freud tried to explain, sites that explain conquest, competition, sex, social standing, and the celebrities who embody these and other impulses.

BZZT

Charlie surfs. Nowadays, everybody does.