A stupor of homogenous thinking took hold this week. I am even tired of magazines. I decided that the prevailing culture dominated by inbred circus media was getting me down. I always worry when I return to questioning the existence of museums. I was weak and embattled. Had Medialomania beaten me? Is Medialomania contagious? What is Medialomania?

I looked up “medialomania” on Google and got five hits back. Two of which were domain name advertisers. One other was German and I can’t call the fourth. The fifth? Well, I stopped caring because something has to have more than five hits on Google to be anything.

However, when I do that search post publishing, I will find myself on that list with the only firm definition of “Medialomania”. I hope. Is this not a good test of Google’s panopticism? Or should we all just wait for Wikisearch? (Which currently hosts an expired blog by a former board member). The details may play out in a soap opera script, or may not….

So allow me.

–noun
med.i.a.lo.ma.ni.a [mee-dee-uh-loh-mey-nee-uh]
1. Psychiatry, – institutional Psychiatry – the symptom of media corporations observable in offensive delusions of importance. Mediolomanic institutions will often get embroiled in adolescent ratings battles. Medialomanic activity increases proportionally to group size. Behaviours extend to racial profiling, empty headlines, long-sightedness, lack of context and human interest stories. – cognitive psychiatry – within human individuals medialomania is evidenced by mutations of institution medialmonia, that give rise passive rose tinted consumption of the world and its events.
2. Journalism – communicative psychology - the obsession of largess media with doing extravagant or grand things, eg graphics and scrollling headlines and a clock and a busy news room behind and five monitors and a nice silk tie, or “oo, look honey, she’s done her hair differently tonight…”.

-adjective
med.i.a.lo.ma.ni.ac [mee-dee-uh-loh-mey=nee-ak]
1. Of, pertaining to, or suggesting megalomania; a person. group or corporate boardroom that displays the symptoms listed above.

[Origin: Wednesday, 28th March, 2007; media- + -lo- + -mania; media- + -lo- + maniac]

I recently subscribed to the feed from the grandly titled Institute for Public Accuracy. I know nothing about the editorial team but I have enjoyed their strong opinion and bare journalistic swagger.

This week I discovered photojournalist visionary, Fazal Sheikh, who is making the sublime legible. Edward Burtynsky is as brilliantly shocking as he is aggrandised by media elites. But aren’t there thousands of people doing work as human? Let’s see it. Let open source reign. Lets see the facts laid bare and let them be unobscured and unfiltered. I’d rather discomfort and awareness than sensation and numbness. A wise man once said, “If you are to choose between security and liberty, always choose liberty”. Journalism is not entertainment. Entertainment is predictable and voluntary. Journalism, with the world as its looking glass, is every possibility simultaneously and your a fully subscribed member.

If entertainment is security and journalism is liberty, then the only question remaining is which do you choose? Allow the medialomanic corporations to continue their circus, just don’t turn on your TVs.

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Thirty years of working just to put food on the plate. Once you went to Paris but the place wasn’t that great.

Before the European adventure became a right of passage for recent college graduates visiting Paris seemed to be strictly a behavior of the ultra-rich, idealistic artistes and Joe-Schmo working-man after securing a good percentage on a mortgage and a decade straight of enduring helpful suggestions from the wife about how to blaze through the meager savings desperately accrued through hard labor and drinking the cheaper beer. Most never made it across the Atlantic and it’s a wonder that Hawaii hasn’t become the island version of Las Vegas. (more…)

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We here at Hesitating have a special fascination with the emergence of online worlds — brightly colored simulacrums of human experience that take place in fantastic settings. Arguably the most popular, World of Warcraft has generally been omitted from some of the headline grabbing developments in the online community. This is probably due to its core gameplay and straightforward goals that keep players distracted from silly social experimentation. Second Life, perhaps the game most covered by the media, is more a hotbed of real meets virtual clashes and experiments since its in-game economy can be transferred into real currency.

This year, however, a real death mourned online in WoW sparked a fair amount of controversy. It started in a forum when a ‘friend’ of the deceased announced a funeral for March 4th at 5:30 server time. The girl who had died apparently had a stroke, and the forum was filled with half heart-felt condolences such as, “death is never fun” and “Are you fucking serious? Dude….I was in a guild with her… /cry,” along with a smattering of frowny-face icons.

One prescient post bet money on the funeral being disrupted by someone in the game. The following is a video made by the guild Serenity, who did in fact crash the procession. It’s a little long, so be patient.

My first reaction – before even seeing the video – was: “That’s fucked up.” But I was already chuckling in spite of myself. The lackluster sympathy on the original forum already demonstrates the structural holes in anonymity when it tries to support a weighty topic such as death.

Also, in a game where you were pretending to be in a different world, with different creatures and rules, who’s to say that a funeral slaughter is disrespectful? Maybe a precedent has been set and from now on it will be a sign of respect to the dead to hack all their mourners to pieces. Once the knee-jerk reaction towards offense wears off, it all seems strangely appropriate. If someone was a big enough fan of the game to have friends put on an online funeral, then that person would probably appreciate this type of event were they still alive.

To me, online worlds are exciting not because of the graphics or worlds you can explore, but because common human events such as funerals, weddings, sex, commerce, etc. are being conducted for the first time in these electronic petri dishes. There is no precedent or guidelines to follow in these online firsts, and the things that people choose to keep or throw away from the real-world counterparts is thought provoking. And in these decisions, precedents are being set. What if twenty years from now, when we go to the funeral of a friend online, we feel a sense of closer as the death squads flank us and we are forced to fight for our lives?

What say you, oh loyal readers?

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I’ll sit and write a substantial fresh from my ass unsolicited and uneducated opinion at a later time– sorry for all those breathless in anticipation…

At work someone mentioned a website which can track people through their cell phones… Seemed a little unlikely but then we tried it out and, well I guess it’s not unlikely at all… So there’s yet another piece of information out there in the world about each and every one of us (except me) that can be used to track, evaluate and exploit… Check it out:

phonetrace.org

Not sure about the particulars but don’t use dashes between the segments of your number and include the area code… I think it works for all carriers but again I’m not sure… Also I would suggest using someone else’s number because the site’s free and they gotta be making money somehow… As tasty as the banner ad is it’s probably not quite as lucrative as collecting and selling people’s numbers…

[5] Comments

Do you hear that? The slow rumble in the distance? It’s the thunder of information you’d rather not be privy to. And it will soon be all around you. In this second-wave tech bubble we’re in, the name of the game is communication. Due to the fact that very little is actually communicated, I would be more inclined to refer to it as information access.

Sites like Twitter are emblematic of this trend of information streams that you can choose to drink from or not. Nothing is required of you, no obligation of eye contact or civil acknowledgement. Just dip into someone’s life for a moment until boredom starts crawling up your leg like the icy hand of death and quickly move on.

Scientists have also apparently invented an invisibility cloak that, when further refined, will keep visible light from reflecting off the object it surrounds. One of the developers even had the roombas to speculate that future cloaks could theoretically mask an area from “acoustic waves, so as to shield a region from vibration or seismic activity.”

We are being weaved into a thick fabric of information that is already forming tectonic meta plates on top of the conventional ones. I could see a point in the near future where I’d be more excited by an informational cloak that would make me invisible and immune to the seismic meta activity than one that protected me from meatspace dangers.

Imagine localized alert systems that instantly send mobile messages to everyone within the area affected by an earthquake. The alert would divulge the epicenter of the quake and the recipient’s distance from it, probably on a comprehensive map on a mobile phone or other device. Now imagine that each of these informed persons is a red dot on a different map. There would be little, if any, visible shifts in terrain from afar, but you could see all these tiny red dots moving away from the epicenter, resembling a seismic ripple.

Or maybe a quake is a bad example. Perhaps people realize the futility of trying to escape from it. But what about a gunshot in a crowd? Or simply in your neighborhood? I’m sure there’s someway to detect gunfire in the air just as we’re able to detect shifts in the ground? The immediacy, customization, and localization of information and the ways you choose to receive it are forming a very real meta physics that is closely tied to more concrete physics.

I predict that the next media boom after blogs will be the separation of information into meta layers contoured to geographic and meta locations (primitive example). Say, for instance, that you’re monitoring the people who are likely to vote democrat and who are likely to vote republican in the next election. They are represented and red and blue dots on a map. Say the Foley scandal hits and you see a ripple effect of red changing to blue around the country. The epicenter is not a location but the news source that broke the story.

Now you have a ripple effect of distribution that you can then track on a map. You will be able to see the networks of readers for various media providers and study the meta physics of events. With proper visualization and interface, this can provide a far more comprehensive sense of global and local affairs in seconds, rather than trolling through headlines via RSS.

I would find the dead zones and move to one.

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