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.

[2] Comments

Airports became a frightening place for me at some point; gone were the magical days of running rampant through the terminal getting free food vouchers from tired and stranded passengers or hanging out in the smoking box with the drunk guys and their cigars and finding little booze caches in potted plants… The pleasure of saved flight meals have long since dissipated along with my being eight… I suppose it’s because I never actually flew much and so every time I was in the confines of an air terminal it was unfetted from the processes required to pass through the gate and end up on the right plane…

Not that Greyhound was without its minor tragedies… The bus has always been cheaper and in some ways a richer life experience has been enjoyed en route to anywhere USA stopping every hour and a half for five minutes at rest stops, every couple of hours at truck stops in the middle of God’s Country… Spending the night in Sacramento was bad but not nearly as bad as being bumped off two buses because of scheduling fuckups… Had it been my mom (who had always dutifully saved her in-flight meals for me knowing my stomach was more secure under the threat of poisoning) standing there with a backpack and the threat of a couple more hours waiting there’s no way in hell she would’ve been bumped… She would hem and haw, make rational arguments, speak authoritatively, wave her arms in the air, demand to see some manager and end up with the rest of her trip enjoying free drinks and a free voucher for her next trip… I just shuffled around the wrong line to wrong line and listened as the loud speaker decide that I would not, in fact, meet anyone in Portland…

Despite my penchant for wearing a lot of black and listening to God-awful music I’m not really anti-authority… The revolution will find me hanging out somewhere else thinking everyone’s stupid or an asshole and wondering if I should make popcorn… I actually work best under some form of structure and those most obvious to me are the little rules which define how it’s not their fault when my bus is overbooked and I wait or when they switch gates five minutes before boarding and I missed the single announcement because I was in the bathroom… After weaving my way through the check-out line with my little boarding pass I always, ALWAYS, am convinced that the portion the security checkpoint requires isnot what I received and when I finally get my shoes back on and collect my change I always fret about the terminal convinced that they switched the gate and I’m in the wrong line… But I’m too terrified to look stupid so I never ask the people behind the counter– instead I evesdrop on nearby conversation until I’m satisfied that the people around me, a pox upon them, are who I will be sharing the next several hours of my life among…

If there was a huge divine arrow reaching down from the sky with “here” in neon indicating where I am to stand I will be comfortable, I think… Clearly marked signs are a blessing, maps rule my world, ambiguity causes severe acid build-up in my stomach and finds me nauseated… Anything which requires forms in triplicate and providing pertinant information is something I duck not really because I think corporate America is fucked and I won’t sully myself but because I’m really just concerned that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and won’t sully myself…

Suppose you can only hide for so long… In the past month I was the lucky recipient of our power bill as one roommate moved out… She called to cancel and I called to take the flag and for the most part things seemed to go well… After a couple of weeks passed the date of the switch occured and I still had not received any information about the account which was odd to me since they told me I needed to make a deposit… The lights remained on but I still haven’t given anyone any money so I grew concerned… Everyone told me it always takes forever and not to worry and who needs electricity anyways… I can’t live like that…

I call from work one day and sit on hold for fifteen minutes… The process of getting to be on hold involves listening to a recording ask questions which you are to respond to by saying insipid things like, “billing”, “service outages” or other power related topics… My coworkers were polite enough to not take any notice on my frantic whispering… The trick, I’ve discovered, is to just squeeze the life out of the zero button until they put you on hold…

An operator answers and I explain that I’m weirded out by not having received any bills or account information or anything… They look up my account and everything seems to be in order– it just takes up to two billing cycles to have anything mailed out… This rings hollow to me but I try to keep in mind that the person on the other end of the phone is most likely serving time in a minimum security women’s prison and thank her very much… She turns out to be right– a bill with my name incorrectly spelled arrives within a week…

So I wanna pay my deposit and sign up for an online account… Simple enough, I take the steps and fill out the forms and click to finalize the process… PG&E will not recognize my personal information… I check the account number they’ve assigned and re-enter it… Nothing… I remove the dash… The site suggests I include the dash… I re-insert the dash and still nothing… I try to replace the dash using another dash on the keyboard… this does nothing to satisfy PG&E’s website…

I call back and this time hold the zero button until the friendly automated operator offers to put me on hold for the next available female inmate… From previous experience I know that there will be an option for a call-back which guarantees I will not lose my place in the hold line… Being at home and not at work this is an option I don’t believe but am willing to try, mostly because it prolonges my time of not having to speak to anyone… The automated voice tells me I will receive a call in 18-20 minutes… How exciting…

After ten minutes I get a phone call which isn’t from the female inmate but was always expected with some confused anticipated or fear… I explain the situation and promise to call back just as soon as I receive my call-back… She understands and hangs up… I continue to wait for a period of time… I try to read but keep checking the clock… I wonder how I would take someone telling me they were waiting for PG&E to call them back in 18-20 minutes and they’d call me back… Sounds bad…. I check the clock… I smoke a cigarette and get smoke in the house because I’ve left the window open to hear the phone… I check the clock… I return my phone call and make plans…

Coinciding with these exciting events was my trying to sign up for DSL through my online account which I was able to sign up for without experiencing any difficulties… Unfortunately trying to sign up for internet service through my online account– they require my line to be tested by an operator…

So I call the female inmates at AT&T but end up with a polite English guy who tests my line, assures me everything is fine and begrudgingly informs me that I can use the modem I have instead of paying $12.95 for them to ship me a new one which I can recoup the cost of minus shipping by mailing in a refund…

I thank him politely and go smoke another cigarette but this time on the roof so as to avoid the smoke and inside and everything… When I come back I call PG&E once again, hold onto zero and skip the call-back offer… I’m connected immediately with an inmate who looks over my account, changes my name so that it’s correctly spelled and figures out that the reason I couldn’t complete my application for an on-line account is because they never entered my phone number in my account info when I signed up for the fucking thing… She enters it and I thank her politely… I make a sandwhich… The phone rings– it’s my call-back…

[2] Comments

Election day is coming, and unless I miss my guess you have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on except that Arnold is poised to mop the floor with Angelides and his horrible commercials… When I was growing up my complete political perspective was shaped by Berkeley Breathed and my father’s high-volume diatribes syphoned through a couple 40oz of Rainer shot rapid-fire at the television… Now that I’m an adult I feel more compelled to investigate things further and for the past week or so I’ve been leafing idling through the California Voter’s Information pamphlet in between reruns to educate myself about the issues of the year…

As anyone who has ever cracked open such a guide knows the pamphlets are broken down into concise summaries of the ballot proposition written by some bureaucrat whose job is not likely to be affected by the results of the impending election… These summaries explain the core ingrediants of the ballot measure, the expected fiscal impact of implementation and, if you’re lucky, a breakdown of how this came to be on the ballot… Afterwards we’re treated to paid endorsements supporting or abhoring the proposed item… If you’re like me you mostly pay attention to who signed their name to these arguments and vote accordingly, kind of like how you watch the television adverts… Has anyone else found this year’s crop to be especially delicious? I swear to god the geniuses behind some of these are gonna take Madison Avenue by storm– one recently unleashed beast has obviously been based on the breakout success of popular herpes medication commercials…

Anyways, there’s many complicated issues involving state retrofitting projects, essentially the A-E props, which aren’t sponsered directly by Ghandi or Chrysler and, therefore, more difficult to navigate… Reading through the pamphlet yields that Prop 1A would prevent the taxes gleaned through the sale of gasoline and the tolls collected at weigh stations from being spent on anything other than transportation… By transportation they mean adding more lanes to more freeways, but that’s besides today’s exercise… The proponants, a shadowy congomeration of minds known as The One Plan to Rebuild California Now, complain about this legal loophole with which politicians (if anti-Semetism was still en vogue this would be interchangable with Jews) syphon off our hard earned dollars for their special interest cronies, yachts, illegal immigrant nanny/mistresses and prime rib dinners… The opponant to this measure is Jackie Goldberg who chairs the state assembly of education who argues that flexibility with tax revenue is key to budgeting and cites schools as what will suffer if the billions of tax revenue is locked into expanding all of Los Angeles’ freeways…

Who do you trust? The shadowy organization includes everyone running for office this term and everyone who has ever run for office holding hands with various city groups from the Mexican border to the Bay Area… Jackie Goldberg is a dyke from LA who teached in Compton until she decided it was time to become a Democratic State Assembly member… Can’t decide? Neither can I, so let’s look at the law they’re changing…

Okay, first of all you can’t get the full text online unless you’re prepared to download the fucking PDF file so we can’t do that… From what I recall the way things stand there’s an amount of revenue which is gained from gas and weigh station taxes which goes into a Transportation Fund… The California Energy Commision website is of no help… Don’t waste your time on the PDF’s… So I google: “california state budget” transportation revenue 2005 and get a page of various pages none of which appear to be actual budget data from the state… Let’s try “proposition 1A” california!

Okay, so we find the legislative analyst’s breakdown of the proposition which is nice… There’s a blog entry and some paid hack sites and then we have this official text from the state which discusses the precursor ballot measure, Proposition 42 from 2002′s election cycle… So here we learn that this issue was recently voted on, that the loophole has been exercised twice to balance the state budget and that both sums borrowed from the transportation fund will be repaid within a period of time with interest…

So remember when California couldn’t pay its employees and state buildings were unscrewing lightbulbs and shit? Some of the money dig out the shit came from the transportation fund… Fair enough– I can’t find it online but in the actual pamphlet there is mention of a 2/3 majority vote by the state assembly and approval of the governor for such a syphoning… So I guess with Prop 1A the next time the state can’t pay its employees– well how many are there? I can’t tell by browsing the DPA site… Frankly I have a headache already from this excursion and you’re bored to death and don’t care so why bother? So twelve more ballot propositions to learn about and all these motherfuckers running for office and then we’ll all be educated about the issues and able to make responsible, adult decisions…

[2] 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.

No Comments

If I’m not careful, one of these days I’m going to join a cult. I got about ten minutes into What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? before something seemed a little fishy. I paused the movie and did a little research and bam. What I thought was going to be a passively eye-opening brain-fest is some recruitment video for a faith led by a 35,000 year-old warrior named Ramtha.

The film basically makes unsubstantiated claims regarding quantum physics and spirituality that are presented as fact, and satisfactorily lead us to believe that we can manifest our world through positive thinking.

It’s tempting to believe that reality is simply a manifestation of our thoughts, because we can control our thoughts right? And it’s easy to bend the unanswered questions of quantum physics to be evidence of that conclusion, because it’s a blank canvas for your imagination with no real danger of being disproved. This in itself is relatively harmless. The real problem comes from a polarization of outcomes.

People like myself want to believe that these claims are true so much, that once you find out it’s a new age sect (read: cult), the spell of fantasy melding with reality is broken. I find myself hanging in the balance of despair at the thought that any fantasy is impossible in the face of accepting these facts. It’s my speculation that an inability to reconcile or cope with these feelings leads some people to move in the opposite direction and seek out even more fantastic claims that are so unbelievable, they must be true.

The consolation – and in fact what I believe to be a superior solution – is that the mystical or spiritual can be seen in very concrete examples. I’m constantly astounded by the wealth of information constantly flowing before our eyes, and all we have to do is reach out our fingers and watch it bend around our hands. Indeed, if you’ve ever shown someone how to email a photo who has relatively little knowledge of the internet, it can seem like magic to them. I’m not sure that it isn’t. I think that the explanation of something gives it power rather than taking it away. Is a space shuttle trip to the moon more amazing before or after you learn how scientists did it?

I’m surprised that the rise of the internet hasn’t heralded a mysticism of its own. Or perhaps it has and I’ve just never seen it that way. Or maybe the average person doesn’t know enough about how it works to appreciate how unknowable it is. It’s the realization that you’ll never read all the books in the world times a million.

Blogging can be seen as being a conduit for this unknowable stream; a network of priests preaching the gospel to those who will listen. Only this time it’s not abstract, you can see it, and it will answer your questions. Spam bots are creating other spam bots, and the net as organism is building its own anti-viruses. There are too many autonomous entities existing solely in cyberspace to name and they’re growing on a daily basis. Worlds within worlds.

At least this is my protection against the various cults out there. If I suddenly disappear you’ll know that I’ve found the truth and it’s not in books or the net, but actually purchaseable for ever increasing amounts right here in San Francisco.

1 Comment