[MD] Sharing My Testimony

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Khaled]
Now imagine all those others trapped in mono cultures, and 
as they look around all they see is images of themselves. A hall of 
mirrors if you
will. Reinforcing that they are right and all the others are damned 
to go to hell.

[Arlo]
Hall of mirrors, I like that. One of the things that has been widely 
seen has been the adverse consequences of media proliferation. I 
usually call it a "fractured mediascape" or "fractured mediasphere". 
Basically, in the past, you had large, conglomerate media sources 
shared by all. This was, at the dawn of the media explosion, (nearly) 
universally panned as problematic. Everyone cheered as media channels 
appeared that catered to specific "interests". This was almost across 
the board heralded as the advent a new Golden Age of Information. 
More people had access to more channels, which meant ("of course") 
more and more exposure to diverse ideas. Looking back now, with the 
applause dying down, we witness the ever-narrowing, 
ever-marginalizing, ever-decreasing circles that constitute a 
person's own personal mediasphere. We expected these new channels to 
bear an expansion of the Mediasphere, but instead it has trapped 
everyone into their own, very narrow, very self-stroking, "fractured 
mediasphere". To use your metaphor, we took a giant mirror that 
reflected everything and have given everyone their own mirror that 
reflects only themselves.

This is not to say the larger Mediasphere, the "giant mirror", was 
without flaw. One of the main reasons the emerging proliferation of 
new channels was cheered was that the old sphere was difficult to 
access, cumbersome to find areas of interest, and difficult to extend 
(if particular areas of interest were desired to be more thoroughly 
examined). There were "too few" voices, too poorly organized. We have 
exchanged that for a veritable cacophony, and people have responded 
to *that* by entrenching themselves in very, very narrow channels.

Since I am "venting", another problem with the "old Mediasphere" was 
that modern life was demanded more and more of our time, and hence we 
had less and less time to spend assimilating or evaluating 
information. In the past, people actually read the NYT cover to 
cover, in the present this was too much, we demanded quick 
soundbites. And so USA Today was born, and we cheered this. CNN 
Headline News came on the air, and we cheered. No more did we have to 
sit through long news stories. Bam! Bam! Bam! We got the soundbites 
and were out the door. But the soundbites kept getting smaller and 
smaller. Complex international or national situations were reduced 
from 10,000 words, to 1,000, to 100, then to 10... and these days we 
rapidly approach 1. In this Age of Condensing, we rely on others to 
filter and evaluate and synthesize and analyze all the information 
for us. To get back to Bloom's Taxonomy (not my personal favorite, 
mind you, but one of the more well-known learning taxonomies), we let 
others perform all the "high-end" stuff that would take up too much 
of our precious time. We content ourselves to be informed by small 
soundbites. And we, in turn, pride ourselves on our "knowledge".

You can parallel this with one of the more pressing problems in 
education, which I have mentioned several times and John recently 
brought up as well, namely, even education is pressing "soundbites" 
rather than the higher-level thinking skills (analysis, synthesis and 
evaluation; a la Bloom). Education has always reflected the greater 
structures of society (it was Fordist production that sent our kids 
into neat little rows, all facing forward... Fordism transformed 
education into an assembly line, in the same way in transformed all 
aspects of our lives; from how we eat to how we "heal" (nod to John's 
great comments on holistic and alternative medicine)). Indeed, 
although many call this a "post-Fordist" society, I'd say we are only 
in such a transition (again, our approach to healthcare is very, very 
Fordist in model), and this is a cause of a lot of turmoil. But now I 
digress....