Imagine having nothing to say.
Every day we are flooded by images, stories, tall tales, bad news, and shocking discoveries. We’re inundated with all the tales of woe and hope, floating through the airwaves and radio waves, over internet, cell phones, and spam lists. Yet, though information is ubiquitous to the point of sensory overload, we have little to say.
Our channels are all set, but we fail to use outlets, we miss precious opportunities to discuss, debate, defend.
Maybe we live in an irony, an era of diminishing freedom of speech, as the number of free, public media sources decreases, even as access and media outlets increases. Corporate media is more than an obnoxious trend; it represents a new mode of approaching politics, society, and lifestyle. The obsequious tendency of corporate media to bow under pressure from advertisers, powerful CEOs, and political figures represents a scary way of looking at the world. It is myopic, near-sighted and dangerous.
But surely, we all know this. This is not new information. The question, and the problem, lies in the irrelevancy of this information. While the independent and publicly owned stations and companies in general do a good job at being reliable and grassroots, these avenues still suffer a huge poverty. Perhaps it’s the marketing, perhaps it’s a lack of funds for these public media sources. We must acknowledge however, the simple fact that these media are not being used. The novelty of blogs, twitter feeds, and other media social networks represents the reawakening of accessibility, but sadly it remains that the most accessed sources of information still remain those companies that run the largest ad campaigns and, in general, are controlled to a large extent by those same advertisers. Is this a reflection on our culture? Do we really have so little to say, that we constantly resort back to these companies that employ headlines like “Would you spend $500 on socks?”, “Van Damme reportedly suffers heart attack”[1], and other journalistic gems.
Or is it a cyclical process? Do we read these headlines, and as a result, have nothing to say? Even so, where is the desire, as an inspired, informed citizen to question things that seem odd, to evaluate our own values in response to them, and seek out other communiqués?
Isn’t it funny when the most exciting thing you hear about in your day is that there is going to be a sequel to smash comedy film The Hangover? It is sad to think that our culture has spiralled towards this. We have to ask the crucial questions that are seemingly so close to the surface, yet for whatever reason, remain submerged in our ….subconscious? Unconscious? Non-conscious? As surely as Aristotle stated, the unexamined life is not worth living. In essence, our lives as citizens, even as humans, depend upon our continuous curiosity, a certain precociousness arising out of the awe that we even have access to these modes of communication. That we can retrieve at a click of a remote, mouse, or send button, we can transmit and receive information in seconds, from all over the world. This marvel warrants our attention! We can’t take for granted these things, the access to this onslaught of information, nor our innate ability to process that information. We can’t take for granted the social nature of humans, and the opportunity that affords us to discuss and debate, to progress and evolve.
