How much of what is in your mind do you know the origin of? How many of the things you say can you also describe why you are saying them, and why you thought of them in the first place?
I am of two minds about this Nepali 10 rupee bill. On one hand, I feel more at home in a country where disaffected youth like to vandalize currency. On the other hand, the slogans these vandals used are clearly lukewarm refries of old "revolutionary" propaganda.
The vandals received signals about change, about uprising and revolution, and instead of taking those signals to heart, flipped them. Perhaps these money scribblers were working on a bigger movement, an evil plan of their own...but I doubt it. Likely, the evanescent thrill of writing "The F Word" was good enough... This is the danger of signal repetition. Sometimes it feels better to pass something on than it does to ponder whether the message is worth passing on at all.
In a wonderful scene from the movie Waking Life, a woman describes the "byzantine conduit" of experiences, memories and references a single word (like "love") must traverse in our brains for us to "understand" it. Our brains are labyrinthine networks, and though they work fast (200 calculations per second per active neuron), the signals we perceive are complex, and they take time to process. With accelerating modes of communication, we devote less time to processing signals. Ideas only have moments, and can only reach the nearest, most tread corridors of our minds before they're yanked back out and passed along, contemplated so little that they might as well just have bounced off the walls and echoed.
As we increasingly feel pressure to be fast at communication, we are transformed. Under increasing pressure the idealists, artists, contemplators, theorists...thinkers... are transformed into megaphones.
Marketing sensei/blogmaster Seth Godin recently wrote a post called "The Danger of Repeating Signals," in which he described a scene from The Count of Monte Cristo. In the scene, a man characterizes himself as a machine, not to be blamed for what he says, for he is only passing on signals, and if he passes them on accurately, how can he be judged for the content?
I'm also guilty of mindless signal repetition. When I forward links, I hardly stop to think whether what I'm sending is trustable, or even worthwhile. I assume that by transmitting the information, I will be providing the same basic, sensorial reaction to it that I had, to the target of my forward. This is dangerous. When I do it, I stop thinking. I become a node in someone else's meme-distribution network. I am used by people who are consciously/unconsciously trying to propagate memes and "go viral" on the Internet.
There are times when most of my communication goes out in the form of links. I bookmark URLs prodigiously, and often I find it easier to 'curate' a list of links on a subject than to actually say what I think about it.
Eventually, maybe I'll become too lazy to even think what I think about it in the first place.
Then what...?
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| Ah yes, punks. "Rock the nation." That'll tell 'em. |
I am of two minds about this Nepali 10 rupee bill. On one hand, I feel more at home in a country where disaffected youth like to vandalize currency. On the other hand, the slogans these vandals used are clearly lukewarm refries of old "revolutionary" propaganda.
The vandals received signals about change, about uprising and revolution, and instead of taking those signals to heart, flipped them. Perhaps these money scribblers were working on a bigger movement, an evil plan of their own...but I doubt it. Likely, the evanescent thrill of writing "The F Word" was good enough... This is the danger of signal repetition. Sometimes it feels better to pass something on than it does to ponder whether the message is worth passing on at all.
As we increasingly feel pressure to be fast at communication, we are transformed. Under increasing pressure the idealists, artists, contemplators, theorists...thinkers... are transformed into megaphones.
Marketing sensei/blogmaster Seth Godin recently wrote a post called "The Danger of Repeating Signals," in which he described a scene from The Count of Monte Cristo. In the scene, a man characterizes himself as a machine, not to be blamed for what he says, for he is only passing on signals, and if he passes them on accurately, how can he be judged for the content?
I'm also guilty of mindless signal repetition. When I forward links, I hardly stop to think whether what I'm sending is trustable, or even worthwhile. I assume that by transmitting the information, I will be providing the same basic, sensorial reaction to it that I had, to the target of my forward. This is dangerous. When I do it, I stop thinking. I become a node in someone else's meme-distribution network. I am used by people who are consciously/unconsciously trying to propagate memes and "go viral" on the Internet.
There are times when most of my communication goes out in the form of links. I bookmark URLs prodigiously, and often I find it easier to 'curate' a list of links on a subject than to actually say what I think about it.
Eventually, maybe I'll become too lazy to even think what I think about it in the first place.
Then what...?
Chase:
ReplyDeleteWhat now passes as "links" we used to know as footnotes, and a writer could get in BIG trouble for not using them, by way of being called out for plagiarism. Some fair share of the time the jive would have been OK, had it only been attributed. It wouldn't be original, but little or nothing is, anyway. Post-graduate degrees, notable Masters and Doctoral degrees, reputedly (I never had interest in either) consist of acquiring more and more knowledge about less and less substance, which logically concludes in knowing everything about nothing. Your readers can decide for themselves how much about how little they wish to know. So, link on! --Merle