The Age of Infotoxin
Aug. 23rd, 2002 01:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nfotxnOften people ask me what my nickname "nfotxn" means. It's a truncation of the term "infotoxin" which is best described in this essay. It's definitely a good read IMHO and stands for a lot of the things I believe in, even in the uncertain and generally faithless times of today.
Yet few of us have much of a sense of urgency as we go about the ordinary routines of our day-to-day lives; but it is literally the summation of these day-to-day acts over the expanse of hundreds of millions of people that is generating the profoundly brutal ecological consequences which are the legacy of existing generations. Indeed, a sense of urgency is difficult to maintain in the wake of seven hours a day of televised mind-clot; even when you catch a harsh glimpse of a denuded rain forest, a beached whale, an oil-covered bird, a blackened middle-eastern sky, a glowing waste dump, Aussie melanoma, or a starving child, within seconds your mind is emblazoned with rapid-fire sequences of a new car high on a desert plateau, animated tooth-paste and toilet-bowl cleaner, affluent-looking yuppies playing volleyball on a beach drinking caramel-colored sugar water, a "public service" announcement from an oil company on how they are doing magnificent super-human things to preserve biodiversity.
We are each a part of Mother Nature, and she is not happy at all. "Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the sons of the Earth. The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. All things are interconnected like the blood which unites one family. All things are inter-connected... Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." All around the world her myriad species of florae and faunae, her mountains, plains, forests, oceans, atmosphere, and ecosystems are suffering immense degradation at the hands of only one of her children: homo sapiens, "man, the wise." How is it that we have gotten so far out of balance? If we're really so wise, why is our stupidity so incredibly salient?
Mankind is unique among the kingdoms of terrestrial life-forms (but in many ways not quite as unique as we like to think!) in that, because of the expanded neurocomputational capacity of our brains, we have been able to create a wide spectrum of tools, or external hardware, as well as very flexible and adaptable systems of communications technology, or symbolic language. Our ability to perceive, model, and communicate about our world has enabled us to modify and control many dimensions of our physical environment; and the evolution of writing, printing, electronic communication, and the digital computer, as hand-maidens to the scientific and industrial revolutions, have accelerated our cultural evolution and enabled us to make giant leaps towards complete dominion of the Earth and her inhabitants. The reason. and the irony is that our space-age machines and futuristic technologies are being operated by beings... naked apes .who have been running on the same "wired-in" instinctual behavioral programs for the last 100,000. Old habits die hard, and us with them!
We have become masters of information-processing and model-building. High quality information and clarity, meaning, and relevance in communication have always been the primary tools we use to navigate our lives, individually and collectively. What we learn, what we are taught, what we come to hold as true, what we see, experience, and remember the knowledge we possess and have access to... form the substrate from which we make every choice, every decision, at every level and at every instant of our lives. And out entire human socio-cultural "reality" is created by the sum total of these choices, decisions, and actions/inactions. Our "reality" is a very dynamic and complex matrix of interacting processes; and we have enormous access to an incredible array of educational tools and an almost infinite reservoir of assorted information. But most of us here in the western world are chronically exposed to and influenced by the same limited subset of the totality of available knowledge and information: that delivered to us by the vehicles of global mass-communication.
Abuse of mass-communication and the concentration of its control, coupled with the persuasiveness and ubiquity of its technologies, messages, and implicit value structures, operates in conjunction with unconscious, instinctive processes within the human mind to generate an overall psychological condition of unreality, denial, and paralysis. This syndrome prevents us from facing honestly and directly the profound complexities of life today and from implementing and acting on the best and most valid knowledge we possess, and compromises our own mental and physical health as well as exacerbating the already-critical ecological problems in every corner of the globe.
When communication breaks down, meaning fails, and quality disappears; when public discourse is reduced to trivial banter-bites and dogmatic recitation ; when 70% of the news is fabricated by public relations firms ; when the average American sees approximately 21,000 commercials a year on TV ; when malignancy and violence are continuously shoved down our throats...because it sells!...we are living in the Age of Infotoxin!
The Age of Infotoxin
By Jeff PhilipsYet few of us have much of a sense of urgency as we go about the ordinary routines of our day-to-day lives; but it is literally the summation of these day-to-day acts over the expanse of hundreds of millions of people that is generating the profoundly brutal ecological consequences which are the legacy of existing generations. Indeed, a sense of urgency is difficult to maintain in the wake of seven hours a day of televised mind-clot; even when you catch a harsh glimpse of a denuded rain forest, a beached whale, an oil-covered bird, a blackened middle-eastern sky, a glowing waste dump, Aussie melanoma, or a starving child, within seconds your mind is emblazoned with rapid-fire sequences of a new car high on a desert plateau, animated tooth-paste and toilet-bowl cleaner, affluent-looking yuppies playing volleyball on a beach drinking caramel-colored sugar water, a "public service" announcement from an oil company on how they are doing magnificent super-human things to preserve biodiversity.
We are each a part of Mother Nature, and she is not happy at all. "Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the sons of the Earth. The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. All things are interconnected like the blood which unites one family. All things are inter-connected... Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." All around the world her myriad species of florae and faunae, her mountains, plains, forests, oceans, atmosphere, and ecosystems are suffering immense degradation at the hands of only one of her children: homo sapiens, "man, the wise." How is it that we have gotten so far out of balance? If we're really so wise, why is our stupidity so incredibly salient?
Mankind is unique among the kingdoms of terrestrial life-forms (but in many ways not quite as unique as we like to think!) in that, because of the expanded neurocomputational capacity of our brains, we have been able to create a wide spectrum of tools, or external hardware, as well as very flexible and adaptable systems of communications technology, or symbolic language. Our ability to perceive, model, and communicate about our world has enabled us to modify and control many dimensions of our physical environment; and the evolution of writing, printing, electronic communication, and the digital computer, as hand-maidens to the scientific and industrial revolutions, have accelerated our cultural evolution and enabled us to make giant leaps towards complete dominion of the Earth and her inhabitants. The reason. and the irony is that our space-age machines and futuristic technologies are being operated by beings... naked apes .who have been running on the same "wired-in" instinctual behavioral programs for the last 100,000. Old habits die hard, and us with them!
We have become masters of information-processing and model-building. High quality information and clarity, meaning, and relevance in communication have always been the primary tools we use to navigate our lives, individually and collectively. What we learn, what we are taught, what we come to hold as true, what we see, experience, and remember the knowledge we possess and have access to... form the substrate from which we make every choice, every decision, at every level and at every instant of our lives. And out entire human socio-cultural "reality" is created by the sum total of these choices, decisions, and actions/inactions. Our "reality" is a very dynamic and complex matrix of interacting processes; and we have enormous access to an incredible array of educational tools and an almost infinite reservoir of assorted information. But most of us here in the western world are chronically exposed to and influenced by the same limited subset of the totality of available knowledge and information: that delivered to us by the vehicles of global mass-communication.
Abuse of mass-communication and the concentration of its control, coupled with the persuasiveness and ubiquity of its technologies, messages, and implicit value structures, operates in conjunction with unconscious, instinctive processes within the human mind to generate an overall psychological condition of unreality, denial, and paralysis. This syndrome prevents us from facing honestly and directly the profound complexities of life today and from implementing and acting on the best and most valid knowledge we possess, and compromises our own mental and physical health as well as exacerbating the already-critical ecological problems in every corner of the globe.
When communication breaks down, meaning fails, and quality disappears; when public discourse is reduced to trivial banter-bites and dogmatic recitation ; when 70% of the news is fabricated by public relations firms ; when the average American sees approximately 21,000 commercials a year on TV ; when malignancy and violence are continuously shoved down our throats...because it sells!...we are living in the Age of Infotoxin!
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no subject
Date: 2002-08-23 06:06 am (UTC)Re: You call that communication?
Date: 2002-08-23 09:45 am (UTC)"every cell in our bodies is pulsing with uncertainty"
(Puh-leeze.)
"Literally, we are standing at the edge of history."
(Obviously this person doesn't know what the word "Literally" means. How can you literally stand at the edge of something abstract like history?)
"Mankind is unique among the kingdoms of terrestrial life-forms"
(We're unique among the kingdoms of terrestrial life forms, but perhaps there are species on other planets that are just like us?)
The whole thing reads like a muddy mix of Greenpeace press-release material and Macluhanesque psychobabble.
Re: You call that communication?
Date: 2002-08-23 03:40 pm (UTC)I know the way you function David. You're very succinct and literal, which is great. It makes you a very rational and discerning human being. BUT the rest of the world doesn't function like you, infact it's likely a very small minority. What this piece of writing attempts to do is engage people on both an intellectual and emotional level. It may be cliché but it's also effective across a wider audience, this is why cliché come into being.
Maybe further distillation on the topic is required.. actually I know it is because this piece is over 5 years old now. Lots more writing has been done on the topic. But as stated in my entry it still does sum up a lot of my feelings. Lots of which I've come to understand as a direct result of being both middle class, somewhat intelligent and bored.
Anyhow, hope I provided some insight.
Re: You call that communication?
Date: 2002-08-23 04:19 pm (UTC)I don't disagree with his main point, which (let me distill it for you) is that mass communication is being (ab)used to give people what they want (escapist fantasies and comforting untruths) rather than what we need (the harsh truth about what's going on in the world.)
I just think that he's an awful writer. The author attempts to engage people on an intellectual level but fails because he introduces ideas that go nowhere, writes in a roundabout style, and distracts his readers with poor language and hard-to-follow setences.
It's completely possible to construct a manifesto that's self-consistent, well-written, and emotionally and intellectually engaging. To the extent that this is engaging at all, it's because the thesis shines through the author's cloudy writing rather than because his writing makes it clear.
no subject
Date: 2002-08-23 09:34 am (UTC)Not 13 words, but much more succint
Date: 2002-08-23 09:57 am (UTC)Re: "The world has become so commercial that it's hard to find the substance." (13)
Date: 2002-08-23 10:51 am (UTC)And 'most people are tired of fluff' is a generalization along the lines of what I mentioned earlier. My reactions to all these comments is largely in part to watching, for the past year, the media in all its forms, continually reduce and reduce and reduce. After a massive terrorist strike, for instance, when American vulnerability gets its fifteen minutes- what does it mean to chant "U.S.A." at any given opportunity? What is that saying? And more importantly, what is it NOT saying? Sometimes, in order to get your point across and in order to make it clear that you mean what you say, you have to skirt the rules you learned in high school that guaranteed your essays wouldn't extend the five paragraph standard. You have to rant and rave and use and wield the language that is quietly being stolen from us.
Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 12:06 pm (UTC)--William Shakespeare
Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 12:41 pm (UTC)But somehow, I think a socio-cultural manifesto has other concerns aside from charming the readers and otherwise being delightful.
I'm not saying this piece is the most effectively written one I've ever seen, I'm just against the very prevalent notion that using, really using, language--by means of employing rhythm, stacking up statements, rephrasing, illustrating, etc..--is unnecessary, or counterproductive. I'll take a three page explication over a "IMHO" sound-bite anyday, especially when it has to do with the headlock of U.S. culture and communication.
Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 01:41 pm (UTC)It is.
I'm just against the very prevalent notion that using, really using, language--by means of employing rhythm, stacking up statements, rephrasing, illustrating, etc..--is unnecessary, or counterproductive. I'll take a three page explication over a "IMHO" sound-bite anyday, especially when it has to do with the headlock of U.S. culture and communication.
I think it's a mistake to equating length with eloquence, as if three pages of text is better than a sound bite simply by virtue of its length. Three pages of text is only better than a sound bite if it's better at doing its job than the sound bite.
Compare Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address to Edward Everett's Gettsyburg Oration, for example. His two minute Address is much shorter and much more eloquent than Everett's tacky two hour Oration.
The piece of writing in question is full of grammatical errors and improper usage. It rambles from here to there, beating around the bush and getting to the point much later than it needs to. The author seems to think that a piece of writing is eloquent just because it contains overly-long lists of synonyms and run-on sentences liberally sprinkled with semicolons.
I'm not saying this piece is the most effectively written one I've ever seen
An understatement if I ever saw one. It's awful.
Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 03:02 pm (UTC)Creative reading. I certainly would never say something like that. And didn't. I'm talking about and responding to the specific c omment: if it can be said in thirteen words, why not say it in thirteen words.
I'm also suggesting that depending on what type of writing it is, the form can be influenced by (or even subject to) the content--i.e. a text such as this has one foot in the Rant category, and rightly so, as it holds a rather progressive, highly charged, cynical agenda.
Follow what I've been saying and nowhere will you catch me touting one type of writing as 'better' than another. What would be the use of that? I'm trying t o suggest that reduction, condensing, omitting isn't always the best policy. I'm not talking about how good this writer is, his skills in grammar, his style, or even him specifically. Originally, and so it will continue, mine was a response to the knee-jerk inclination to summarize, to wrap it up, get to the point.
That is not what writing is for. It's just not. Let's say that this Infotoxin essay is, for whatever reason, remembered. It would be remembered, like all other valued works, for the reflection it provides of its time--- in this case, the writer is waging an attack on a-too-busy-to-listen culture of directionless mediabrained bipods.
So it's gonna sound a little different.
s
Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 03:23 pm (UTC)Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 05:57 pm (UTC)That said, I still think this guy is a poor writer. I hate people who misuse the word "literally".
Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 06:09 pm (UTC)Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 06:21 pm (UTC)Re: Someone else said it much better
Date: 2002-08-23 06:10 pm (UTC)Brodie: It's about time you posted that.
Protesting the CNN aesthetic
Date: 2002-08-23 03:43 pm (UTC)AMERICA'S NEW WAR ON...