Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	September 2, 2008

The Mainstream Media and the Information Divide Are you watching, listening to and reading the news in the mainstream media and just finding it all inane, meaningless? Do the things they tell you are important mean nothing to you? Perhaps you're too far ahead of them. This shouldn't be surprising. We've all observed how the "digital (technology) divide" has widened to a chasm. A small group, maybe 5-20% of the population, now uses the Internet instead of the TV, radio, newspapers and magazines as their source of both information and entertainment. That group has grown more and more sophisticated in the use of Internet and similar information and communication technologies, and are now more vastly informed, more able to get the information they want when they want it, and more connected with others all over the world. Meanwhile, the other 80-95% of the population, including the majority of young people, is stuck at the starting gate. They have no clue how to use these tools effectively, and as the tools get more advanced and dependent on an understanding of earlier tools, the chances dim that they will ever cross the digital divide, which just gets wider and wider. The same phenomenon is happening, I think, with information. Those of us who have learned to use these tools effectively are vastly more informed than the majority still relying on mass media sound bites and press releases. So what's happening now is that the mainstream media are effectively speaking a completely different language from that those of us on the other side if the "digital (information) divide" have learned to speak and understand. It is as if the mass media audience is still learning and listening to nursery rhymes, while the rest of us have learned not only to appreciate finely crafted music, symphonies, and international styles of music, but, through participation, have learned to compose and perform it as well. No surprise then, that when we watch and read and listen to the mainstream media we are appalled by their dumbed-down, absurdly oversimplified dichotomies -- good vs bad, right vs wrong, left vs right, and at how easily they are distracted from what's important by what's 'entertaining'. Ooh, look, that politician mommy has a baby, and a baby having a baby!  The information divide now presents a chasm, an ocean between two ways of perceiving the world on virtually every issue of consequence in our society. Some examples: Issue How the Mainstream Media Frame It How the Indymedia Frame It Education How can we improve school quality and discipline and reduce dropout rate. Should we home-school children? How can we create an environment for lifelong self-directed community-based learning, and hence unschool us all? Health Care How can we get more drugs and more medical care for more people for less money? How can we 'cure' more diseases faster? Once the health care system is bankrupt, how can we create a mechanism for self-managed illness prevention, self-diagnosis and self-treatment to supplement  lean, decentralized, community-based health care? Overpopulation How can we keep illegal immigrants out? How can we encourage people to reduce birth rates quickly to bring human population back to sustainable levels? Right to Die How do we prevent people from committing suicide? How do we provide dignified and respectful ways for people to end their own lives when they choose to do so? Oil How do we keep oil prices low so we can keep driving our cars inexpensively and so the economy can continue to grow without change? How do we prepare ourselves and future generations now for the coming catastrophic economic depression and then create a resilient and sustainable new economy not dependent on oil, or on growth? Climate Change Is climate change real, and if so when do governments have to start doing something about it? How do we begin now to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, no matter what the cost, and how do we prepare to adapt to the coming droughts, flooding, epidemic diseases, famines, 20m sea-level rise, desertification, the end of water, and constant, severe weather events that we will almost inevitably face? Iraq Should we vote for the guy who promises victory in Iraq is now in sight, or the guy who wants to fix the country's economic problems? How can we quickly extricate ourselves from the ill-conceived, fraudulent, disastrous and unwinnable Middle East wars with the fewest casualties to our troops and Middle Eastern civilians, and the least dangerous and shortest civil war that will follow our withdrawal? Do we owe it to those poor suckers on the other side of the information divide to teach them to understand and appreciate more than the pap nursery rhymes they're fed by the compliant, lazy mainstream media? What is our responsibility here? To me it's no different from fighting the war on poverty. Intellectual poverty is as tragic and dangerous as physical poverty, and the dumb schlock that most people have become addicted to, and accept as information, is precisely analogous to the lousy, nutrition-free, chemical-laden toxic fast food that so many of the physically poor consume, because, like TV news, it's cheap, and easy. It's a national, and global, disgrace. Bill Maher said that the job of the media is to make what's important interesting. The mainstream media find it much more profitable to make what's superficially interesting, or at least entertaining, appear to be important -- by repeating it over and over ad nauseam. The indymedia are left to do the important job, and considering their resources they do it damned well. Those of us who are too far ahead have a responsibility to be gracious about what we know, and generous and patient in sharing it with others. We too can try to make the important things interesting, not by dumbing them down, but by showing how and why they matter, in terms that those stuck on the other side of the information divide can appreciate and act upon. These sad consumers of mass media nonsense aren't, for the most part, stupid, they're just ignorant, uninformed, and/or uneducated. As much as the conservatives of the world want to blame them for that, that isn't their fault. Their intellectual and imaginative poverty is just as much an unnecessary and curable disease as the illnesses that stem from physical poverty -- the diabetes and nutritional disorders and inflammatory diseases and addictions. Instead of railing at their sickness, let's work to make them well. Category: The Media 11:58:31 PM  trackback []  comment []

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