Great historical artists have attempted to depict what the Tower of Babel might have looked like. If it existed today, it might look like a cell tower.
The current news cycle is not just fast; it's in warp drive, hurling information at us so urgent that the words might become a hyperdrive blur on our screen. It calls for immediate attention and action, a relentless force that demands our engagement.
A reader might find themselves in a reality where genders are fluid and national borders are an outdated notion, or they may find themselves in a reality where every other politician is a Russian asset. The diversity of realities presented by the media adds to the complexity and confusion of the current situation, leaving us in perpetual uncertainty.
The News, with its multitude of conflicting narratives and the cacophony of voices, is the Tower of Babel of our age, a symbol of the fragmentation and confusion in our information landscape.
Time rolls on like a freight train, and even though right now, the station stops along the way seem to be all at a circus, with clowns of misinformation and acrobats of disinformation, the truth is said to be out there.
Like a choose-your-own-adventure story, the News now seems to be from one side of reality or the other, and the reader can pick at whim news articles that cater to their particular predisposition.
Is it possible that a person's politics is predetermined and fundamentally unchangeable, like a trait such as the color of one's skin?
What is the truth? It is becoming more like beauty in that truth seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Who can be blamed for this cacophony of competing information?
Information and its intentional misuse are not only concerning; they are becoming dangerously prevalent. Such manipulation calls for caution and critical thinking, a stark reminder of the power and responsibility we hold as information consumers.
The media has morphed from a purveyor of information into something that resembles a paid spokesperson.
The last thing on this citizen journalist's mind is regulation. Free speech is sacred, and we Yanks are seeing now why our forefathers had the good sense to flee England and come somewhere where it is not a crime to post memes.
An enticing ritual for many Americans is to start the day with coffee and some social media outrage. For many of us, our eyes open, and a hand reaches for the cell phone on the nightstand before so much as a " good morning " is issued to our mates. The algorithms feed us stuff designed to make us feel stressed or mad. We limp through the day with this dark cloud of evil ( or fake ) news hanging over us. Worse is when we turn to our social media platform of choice and disseminate the bad vibes and anger to our friends and followers, usually without thoroughly reading the article we are spreading, like a virus.
The fact is, conflicting headlines and stories can be found within the same publications. It's as if the News doesn't care that one staff member is putting out an article that directly contradicts another staff member's work: " If it bleeds "seems to have become " if it misleads... " because that is what leads.
" When all men spoke one language, some built a high tower as if they would ascend to heaven. "--The Tower of Babel fabel.
It is said that God observed man's unity and confounded their speech so that they could no longer understand each other. This may be a return to the idea that politics is more genetic than rational.
At our new Tower Of Babel ( a cell tower ), one can hear words about the same events but walk away with feelings that reinforce the ideas we started with. The Tower feeds all biases and prejudices. It's like getting a fortune cookie where you know what is printed on the tiny rectangular paper. Still, you open the cookie anyway because somehow it feeds a part of us that needs a constant stream of News and razzle-dazzled by these modern-day high priests of news-babel.
The Tower Bots ( the news anchors and personalities ) will say, for example, that Tulsi Gabbard is either a twenty-year military veteran or a long-time Russian agent. There is no possible way both things can be true. The one consistent hypothesis is that the broadcast information seems tailor-made to provoke outrage.
We are supposed to be either outraged that she is a Russian agent or outraged that such mean-spirited things are being said about her. Whatever the ingredients of this toxic tea are, the taste is becoming more bitter by the day.
How can so many be convinced that we have competing versions of reality? In truth, there can only be one reality, and our collective responsibility is to discern it from the myriad narratives and misinformation that bombard us daily.
The internet and it's vast power hunger data centers has become something resembling a cradle, holding up our civilization.
So much of our society relies on the data exchange of emails and financial transactions, downloads and zoom calls, that it's not hard to imagine the entire fifty two card construction to come tumbling down like a cardboard sidewalk domicile in a stiff Santa Ana wind if there were to be one little hiccup in our internet functionality.
When visualizing our information landscape I keep thinking of The Tower of Babel. The parable says that God decided to sew confusion amongst the Earth by making languages different and confusing so that people couldn't communicate. This is our news landscape today, where a search of any given subject will reveal conflicting results in different narratives.
Somehow, it is become the norm for sources in news stories to become unnamed entities: the articles will contain sentences such as, " four people familiar with the matter say..." as if having multiple anonymous sources gives the assertion some higher level of credibility.
And our society has made something of an altar of this information, paying certain news celebrities as much as $100,000 per day to explain the views and distribute the official positions of the military industrial and pharmaceutical complex. Things politicians say are discussed and dissected by panels of people who might brand themselves as journalists but whom stick to more of a team sport ethic. The news media people seem to have made an altar, or Tower of this cycle of information and disinformation and when one turns to this pillar of information one can get whatever kind of information suits them. It's almost as if this Tower has become a self-fulfilling information machine where people come to it not for news and information but for reinforcement of their existing biases and prejudices.
Surely there cannot be different sets of facts?
Attention has been focused on this Tower of Babel to the point where we are all confused and wondering if we're speaking the same language, or are we hearing the same language,
It comes with mild alarm that the entire of the mainstream journalism network is produced by no more than six corporations in the United States. There was a brief window, where the internet provided citizen journalists a competing voice with the mainstream narrative, but then Bill's passed by politician Consolidated the power and ownership of the media companies, creating a new information Monopoly that suffered a short-term death with the birth of the internet.
The scare availability of old paper copies of the Thomas Brothers maps are painfully noted when the telephones navigation begins to glitch out, and it's telling you to make a U-turn, followed by a U-turn. It's not hard to feel almost stranded if you are unable to get service on your phone and plug in an address and dutifully follow instructions.
Many of the opinions about our society are delivered to us over the internet, and physical newspapers seem to be simultaneously shrinking in size and aligning in direction of spin. What would the world be like if the internet stopped working tomorrow?
