Activity

… what conditions could bring about your observation of the phenomenon of speaking in strings of rumors and rumors of rumors?
1) our inability to communicate clearly (due to poor education)
2) our inability to interpret the world (due to 1 and various intervening factors [e.g. the providing of premisses – mostly meaningless – by media] )
3) living in a culture of secrecy and being confronted in our daily life by an ever increasing police state
… I’m sure the list of contributing conditions to “speaking in rumors” is well known to the Giza Community. Given that our understanding of the situation is relatively clear, and has in fact been so for some time: What can be done? I am continually haunted by Postman’s thoughts about the question,
“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action…You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
… except possibly to go shopping.

from Warren Zevon’s “Transverse City” (1989) – album inspired by William Gibson

A question to consider … What might contribute to the observed phenomenon that the majority of communication seemingly
appears in the form of rumours and rumours of rumours? (As an aside – Is this an attempt to once again create a “confusion of tongues”?)
1) … is it the case that education has been in such an awful state for quite sometime that we have now reached the point
that the majority no longer has the skills (particularly the usage of language) to communicate clearly?
2) … are we no longer able to clearly interpret the world? If so, Why?
3) … is it the effect of living under increasingly greater surveillance?
4) … is it problematic that the premisses (it is interesting to note here that spell check tried to correct the spelling of premisses,
it is ignorant of the history of logic, but apparently knowledgeable concerning listings of real estate) from which we reason about
the world are given to us by media?

I am quite confident that the Giza Community could expand this list of contributors to the rumour form of communication.
We know for the most part, and have for some time, more or less, what contributes to this phenomenon.
We have the understanding … we should now move on to acting on the conclusions based on our understanding. There appears
to be contentment in continuing the debate concerning “Panama” while ignoring the boots on the ground occupation of it.
(No political comment or moral judgment of any kind about T. Roosevelt intended here.)

I continually return to, and am becoming more haunted by, this quote from Neil Postman, “How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action…You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
…or possibly, as we have been admonished to do so before, we can simply go shopping.
Down in the Mall by Warren Zevon from the album Transverse City inspired interestingly enough by Zevon’s reading of William Gibson.