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Archives for: January 2006
2006-01-26
Describing the overflow of media and the erosion of standards, from 2000's The O'Reilly Factor :
Because of computers, cable, and satellites, you have more choices than ever before. Traditional TV and radio broadcasters are panicking. The daily news flow is no longer controlled by a few middle-aged white guys in Manhattan. Newspapers are dying off one by one across the country or diversifying into other lines of business.
Because this situation is also opening up all kinds of opportunities for other news and entertainment sources, that's good news for you. The bad news, which is going to become more obvious very soon, is that this huge increase in competing media outlets has already caused standards to collapse. It will only get worse.
Picture what happens when a torrential rainstorm causes the glutted streets of Chicago to overflow and flood the streets. Got it? Well, you're looking at the current media landscape. There's a lot of untreated waste floating around, some of it toxic.
From now on, you will have to put on your waders and look carefully to separate the truth from the lies and distortions, the skillful reporting from the idiotic.
A few things:
Perhaps I am too eager to capitalize on any metaphor entangling sewers with the current state of infomedia, and thus rehash an easy target whose ideas have been denatured widely through the blogosphere.
However, O'Reilly speaks generally in truisms that are barely debatable, saving his opinion for the details ("streets of Chicago"? why Chicago?) or short asides without room for debate (Why are standards innately the tide holding back chaos of information? Are they not also limits on the choice of opinions viewers can second or reject?). His sewers metaphor is a function of the same mentality: he compares the increase of media sources to the sewers - an overflow - but the comparison is pejorative.
We here at Sewers are part of an attempt to take back the validity of the sewers (the underground, the understanding, the sects beneath the senate seats) as a positive or at least equivocal image counterbalanced with the Tower (the established order, the strongest meme, functionary power, hubris towards the infinite) in its erect or fallen state. If Bill were in Babel he may have seen the need for the great building project, because at least it would be some solid project to distract the myriad workers from Babel's greatest error. Let us speak as if every word is a brick - and hurl them at windows, or place them one beside another to build a greater and more impregnable network underground, or build a ramp toward clean air. Hell, even throw them back to the builders. So long as we feel their weight in our grasp, and their potential towards destruction or order.
2006-01-21
Ours is but to do and die
and post pictures of our kitties looking at pictures of kitties looking at pictures of kitties ad infinitum. Seems like pretty good microcosm to explain the larger internets.
So it may only be one image evoking another, but my last post made me think of a site that I've known for a few months and have been remiss in posting.
The Infinite Cat Project, now 1200 cats strong, is a combination of cuteness-craving cat fanciers, internet-meme bandwagoners, and photo hobbyists.
Here's an example, #690, with Amplitude [felis catus] foregrounded:
Ours is not to reason why
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward;
Into the valley of death rode the four hundred,
but the other six stayed on the cliff
and clapped, and ate chips
through the spectacle - here told quite splendid
Tennyson reading his version - ripped from the wax
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