My world has become smaller. It's the smallest it's ever been. It's smaller than me and so now it revolves around me.
I'm fascinated by the news media's new approach to journalism where they display tweets and Facebook posts as if they were newsworthy.
So now a paper like the New York Times tells me what's popular now based on the number of Likes for a particular story on Facebook. Or maybe they might attempt to pluck a gem from the murky twitterstream and raise it up for all of us to admire.
But this is not widening my view of the world. I don't care what people just like me like, as if people who have so much free time that they can share their favorite news stories on social networking sites have that much in common with me, who has, maybe 20 minutes a day to do this.
I guess this is the 21st century equivalent of the "man in the street" report. Although there is no man and there is no street.
I would rather have one genius tell me what to think than one million idiots. Do we have any geniuses left? Or has genius become crowdsourced and aggregated and averaged out?
This all appears under the supposed noble objective of getting us talking, conversing, hashing out our ideas. Like we all have useful thoughts to contribute and this benefits mankind or something. And believe me, that I've added myself to the list. But I suspect this is really another way to get us to view ads.
Intellectual wealth is much like monetary wealth... in that there is a small percentage with a whole lot of it and everybody else holds it against them. Sure we like to pretend that we appreciate intelligence, but more often than not, those people are torn down as elitist or just smug bastards.
ReplyDeleteSince the news media is now more entertainment than journalism, we get only that which appeals to the lowest common denominator... and damn, that denominator is LOW.
My blood pressure goes up every time I see anything related to TMZ...