Sunday, May 27, 2007

Window Vista


media is message

I am reading Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Though I am reading them very late, I had heard about it and its proposed theory long back and believed in it too. Their analysis and proposition that media is programmed by people who are powerful (either by wealth or intellectually) is very rational and one does not find it difficult to believe in it.

I have been always worried about how the misinformation by these people even in very subtle and minute way might have deflected thinking of people in general in a great way if we have to believe in butterfly effect. How regrettable that a pristine linear progressive line of thinking get deflected by such carefully constructed misinformation and strays away from it course as long as it keeps on progressing …..going totally out of sync skewed forever? Or may be the discount factor I apply on the information I get itself is “flake” and I myself skew that line of thinking feeling that the original line would be incorrect and hence taking the skewed line as something rational and true while the original line of thinking was right?

I often think if the elaborate musing on Maya done in Bhagvadgita is just too true to be a mythological scripture? Or if I have to give a better postmodern explanation then what Marshal MacLuhan said about “media being massage” is correct? Or even the complex explanation by Jean Baudrillard abut Simulation and Simulacra is more fit to explain this all? While I find these authors very difficult to read, I loved the visually appealing metaphor given by the Wachowsky brothers in the movie Matrix very lucid. Baring the ubiquitous black phone to get back in the so called real world the whole concept Matrix is just too right to accept and believe in totality.

The only thing that gets simple in the world is physic (like water flowing down) and laws governing planets and universe in macro level. But same can not be said about biology, human and society which grown complex from simple ever since eons when they started their march.

We only have to have certain basic facts on human nature, biology, functioning of brain and nature which are exceedingly and exponentially complex, ever changing and unreliable to know the staggering amount of total probability available in the world. While the nature and functioning of brain are real, unbiased and truthful in itself, human being (who are very complex in themselves and create society which is even more complex) can feed the total social system with misinformation is though real, is not biased and false.

Why just about the whole system or the world? I am worried about the coffee mug with a design that does not exist. Just because I can not make it, I have to choose among the one designed by someone. I always feel why someone decided that only a few dozen designs are enough for people to choose? What about the number or design that does not exist? Why I do not have that? In same manner I feel why this information or some information or this argument or that argument. What about the third side?

Howard Bloom wrote in the book "You Are Being Lied To" that "Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist." He should have also considered others' misleading influences.

Am I coherent? Or even rightly worried?