An information apocalypse is coming. How can we protect ourselves? | David Shariatmadari

Dear Young People,

Get on this. Get ahead of it. Be able to recognise the fakery and protect others from it, because the ‘dark side’ of this technology is already here and if we’re going to get through dark times, it will be because good people made sure reality didn’t slip down a rabbit hole. Thank you.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. […] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. […] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture

Marshall McLuhan

Wouldn’t it be brilliant if they allowed the stars of these sf/f shows to attend Comic Con in clothes that don’t make them look like misplaced ingenues in La La Land?

thetrippytrip:

This is disgustingly ableist. Disabled people have worth, their labor has value, they’re working just like everyone else so they should get paid as much as everyone else. Why are we debating this??? It’s common sense!

We have to call out the media so much for this.

It’s exhausting.

It is also absolutely necessary.

akireyta:

lipstickinmyvalentinowhitebag:

for upcoming protests: DON’T talk to the press unless you’re leadership/ you have spoken to organizers beforehand. if you’re not leadership, tell press to talk to leadership.

press will edit and twist your words against you.

this this this

the reporter may seem nice, but their words go through several layers before they hit the press and they WILL skew your message. Anyone sticks a recorder in your face, say “talk to the leaders”

If you’re old enough, go back to 2003 and watch some old media footage of anti-war protesters. Media then skewed protesters in the most awful ways. Instead of recognising people as people, as your neighbours, as people you work beside, they tried to paint protesters as ‘other’ as ‘out of control’ or ignorant about ‘the facts.’ Media would look for the most outrageous-looking persons, ones who had the most extreme viewpoints, or even people who just happened to be there – and use this brush to undermine and diminish the message. Media fell in line with what Bush and his cronies wanted and it created a chasm of mistrust.

Once again, the media falls in line. The BBC is doing it, all the American networks are doing it. If you attend a demonstration and someone from the media tries to interview you, please follow the above and tell them to speak to the leadership. It won’t matter how well you speak. If you can speak intelligently – chances are, they won’t even use you.

Must-read:

Forces that drove the election’s media failure likely to get worse.

“…Facebook has become a sewer of misinformation. Some of it is driven by ideology, but a lot is driven purely by the economic incentive structure Facebook has created: The fake stuff, when it connects with a Facebook user’s preconceived notions or sense of identity, spreads like wildfire. (And it’s a lot cheaper to make than real news.)”

We don’t need a nihilistic media. We don’t need a Pollyanna media. We don’t need a lowest-common denominator media. We don’t need a grotesque fear-mongering media that claims to be offering ‘truth’ in total defiance of the facts so readily available.

We need a media that doesn’t flinch on reporting the facts of all sides. We need a media that raises our intelligence. We need a media that rejects random, paid ‘opinions’ designed to distort understanding. We need a media that recognises a bully and stands up for common sense. We need a media free from greed and the influence of politics, money changers and every other demanding industry that seeks to upset a challenger.

Twitter, with its real-time access, has shown a path to a people-controlled media, a real media of real people. Like every other great idea, it has fallen astray to celebrity and corporate hype.

Network (and, to a lesser extent, Broadcast News) offered us a lesson in where a greedy, opportunistic and politically enslaved media would take us. These films have turned out to be uncomfortably prophetic. They have also helped to spell out the reality that a warped, irresponsible media will influence a suggestible audience.

The world is anxious enough as it is. We deserve better. Question is: do we sit back and hope they see the light and change themselves or do we push back?

There’s a great line from Network when an old-school producer tells his younger replacement: “You are television incarnate…indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.“

Life has its empty, uncomfortable spaces. We must all face the inevitable alone. Yet, for the most part, we cooperate and we overcome so many difficult trials. We can be better. We have to demand it. We have to push back from the indifferent, the insensitive, from the banal. We have to.