Clinton Smith provides this rant on the death-throes of 20th Century media and the personal slide-effects of the con called connectivity. Is his tongue in his cheek? Let's hope so.
As technology drains our awareness of our intrinsic being - we become increasingly agitated and stressed.
Speed kills, they say. This includes communication speed because it is out of rhythm with our nature and genetic heritage, with the tempo of seasons and days.
Nietzsche wrote, 'Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.'
MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED
Universal connectivity has done more than replace the post office. The HHD has turned us into frazzled victims of the 24-hour news cycle. Or is it the accuse, abuse cycle. Or the confuse, bemuse cycle? It has made our already intimidating environment even more uncertain. It has nurtured hackers, scammers and terrorists and even threatens to steal our identities - an ironic outcome for a celebrity-besotted society.
The stream of bites that induces the adenoidal Jihadist to shoot up his local school, the bullied girl to slit her wrists in the toilet, the paedophile to groom pre-teens, also permits the fake bank site to steal our cash and automated stop-loss orders to dump our stocks in an instant.
The current 'Look-at-me!' generation sees the web as a way to fame and riches. But, in a moribund civilisation that feeds us deception and lies, that demeans and exploits its citizens, this is a wistful hope indeed. We long to become movers and shakers but our guts tell us that wish is a chimera - that the more we blog and promote ourselves, the more irrelevant we become.
There is a telling metaphor for those who achieve notoriety: 'The higher climbs the ape, the more it shows its bum.'
Spinoza related inner freedom to sustained, directed attention. We anxious dupes are a long way now from that ideal. Our attention is not directed but distracted by multiple identifications. Our potential selves are atomised. We are fag-ends of our former selves.
MEDIA MASSACRE
With endless variations for entertainment on line, networks are in free-fall. The hopeful statement, 'content is still king', still stands. But the problem is affording that content when assailed by revenue decline.
It is interesting how many of the despairing now retreat into interactive games. With these, they can literally amuse themselves to death - as several Japanese teens did when they became too obsessed to move or eat.
Some philosophers assert that people are becoming machines. That wouldn't be so bad. A machine functions reasonably at least. But we are increasingly dysfunctional, as evinced by rampant chaos and stupidity. Wiring the world has not improved it but accelerated the old basic flaws that have made us the single out-of-control life form on the planet.
Heraclitus advocated the search for Being, the unity behind diversity, but from this we flee. We are so enraptured and shredded by the manufactured aids to distraction that our vestigial sense of being is undetectable. As we frantically strive for visibility, or to climb higher on the heap, we forget we are inwardly dying by degrees. And outwardly, too. Each minute shortens our lives. Each step takes us nearer to the grave. Our dream of apotheosis will become, inevitably, feebleness, disease, pain and death.
THE POST-LITERATE AGE EXTENDS
As U-tube and Internet surfing become presiding visual distractions, print book publishers and retailers are in crisis, although children's books still sell. Even W. H. Smith, doyen of the airport lounge blockbuster, has mostly retreated to magazines and gee-gaws. Newspapers run at a loss. Magazine sales are down 27% and some are being bundled at a discount - three to a plastic outer. So will newsagents survive? In Australia, lottery sales provide up to 80% of their revenue. But if those sales are syphoned off by supermarkets, newsagents will wink out like bookshops.
Libraries? The net has duplicated their basic use, including their reference function. Many are converting to centres for craft training and lifestyle courses.
WHAT HAS THIS TO DO WITH GEOGRAPHY?
Not much. But one point should be made. As sages from Seneca to Leunig proclaim, the greatest advantage in a brutal society is anonymity. Perhaps happiness consists in being, not famous, not powerful, not admired, not universally adored but irrelevant.
Consider the old Japanese saying: 'The nail that sticks up is hammered down'.
Keep your head down and no one can shoot at you.
Forgive me for diverting your attention to this page. Because, objectively, or you might say psychically, attention is the most precious thing you have. That is if you have it, now, at all.
Please, safeguard your attention.
Go thou, and squander it no more.
