Technology Tribulations: News Vs Social Media

Technology Tribulations: News Vs. Social Media

Oh the vestiges of when media had substance, well kind of...but the overall meat of then was that the idea or narrative was told through a prism that contained a sort of process. A process called critical analysis.

With all the different mergers, channel switching, cable start-ups which have become monster Goliath's in their 'supposed brand', one specific nugget bore through: A Current Affair and Hard Copy were the start of the this next wave of infotainment as it were. This was in the early 90's, before Fox News was a twinkle in the starlet eyes of cable television drivel.

Infotainment and current events today are blurred. I have a hard time discerning which is fact and what isn't. A lot of the material currently is visual and verbal diarrhea that continues unabated with passing this narration as fact.

The guilty parties are all there now, not much is left to gleam forth in regards to actual content. It's all about context, public opinion polls passed off as a kind of factual currency of the times. One needn't look very far to see the current narration being spewed forth.

Our elected officials have been complicit as well. They're invisible line of double speak, which alleviates no real concerns I have about forward progress in the scope that is supposed to be informed. I don't feel like I am informed. Most of what is news now is all kinds of bizarre, faux hair do's, and missing the mark of credibility.

Its like a thousands of voices are screaming for your attention at once, and nothing really is being audible to understand. So much of the sphere has this slightly angled dumbed down perplexity that I cannot possibly think or believe that I am the only one seeing this.

Not in the sense of complicated, but the sense that yes the news is dumbed so much that even trying to elicit some kind of ethos or pushing a kind of propaganda. Its a frenzy of sorts, when the next distraction takes on a bigger life than the story itself.

Social media showed a kind of grassroots aspect that drowns this out, but rather than showcase a kind of investigative process, its very knee jerk reactionary. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, and others have given a kind of ability to give the power back to the public.

Yet there is this very huge disconnect with how perception is shaped with the term 'informed'. While the world is changing from the old guard, many young kids, and 30 somethings aren't apathetic to these causes. But there has to be a level of seeing versus being the town cryer when it comes to how stories evolve, and the way they are broadcasted.

Because in the end the big monster in the room will take little sound bytes, and blow those out of the context away from the intended audience whom was at the gig witnessed. I really don't like the whipping up manufactured fear, or making singular situations become more than the construct it is. Some food for thought while watching the collapse of the old folding into the new.

B.