“Hear It Now, See It Tonight, Read It Tomorrow”

That used to be a common adage in the media world, reflecting the means of news production: radio (now), television (tonight), and of course, newspapers (tomorrow). Reading all about it the following day used to be totally fine, until not too long ago when information became instantaneous, rendering the newspaper an anachronism.

After all, when you read “today’s paper” — and yes, I have been reading the print edition since late childhood, basically — what you’re looking at is yesterday’s news. As I wrote in the last post, there is only today, but let’s put that aside for now. In the last few months, I got rid of my twitter account and turned off news alerts.

So far this has been a boon to my mental health, although I do miss at times the ability to dip into a real-time feed of what’s going on everywhere in the world, even though the human mind probably did not evolve to be able to handle that informational vortex. It is like drinking from a firehose, and you come away from it empty.

As someone who has had some experience with breaking news, I can assert that the news is broken, fundamentally, at a time when it is more needed than ever. The underlying business model no longer can sustain the journalistic enterprise, for the most part; even the so-called New Media appear to be failing, by some accounts.

With newspapers specifically, the last ones standing will probably be the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post (at least as long as Bond supervillain Jeff Bezos owns it). And meanwhile, local papers across the board are being gutted, to the shame and detriment of the Republic. We are in apocalyptic times.

When We Are In Spacetime

Janis Joplin accurately stated once in a haze that “tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same day, man.” Well, for the most part, yes, that’s true. The planet’s daily spinning around that axis creates a metronome by which we measure the days, as we feel the need to quantify and categorize everything, but are not real.

Tomorrow—tomorrow—will be “today.” Likewise, yesterday—yesterday—was “today.” In short, it is always today. As of this entry, that happens to be the 20th day of the 6th month of the 19th year of the 21st century, in the third millennium of the Common Era, but what does that mean? Just another spin.

By the same token, every passing year is just one solar revolution, one full pass around a thermonuclear fireball some 90 million miles away that is, in the scheme of things, on the far-smaller side of stars out there, hence its appellation “yellow dwarf.” It is a common belief that time somehow speeds up as you age. Does it?

The philosopher Duncan Trussell observed that “when we think about the future, obviously that doesn’t exist—there’s no future, nothing is outside of this point in time… Your whole past, the thing you’ve been using to define yourself as a person, you barely remember!

And the parts you do remember, they’re not really clear, so that’s gone… Anything that happened before this moment, that’s… gone, it’s just this, for real. There might be some neurological encoding but there’s no past, forget it.

Or, as the Flaming Lips knew, “All we have is now.” Ram Dass had the same message, rendered much more simply: Be Here Now. That seems to be the only way you can be. “Earlier” and “later” appear to be illusions of the mind, like “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” Since time and space are one and the same, there is only now and only here.

That’s Infotainment!

“The mass media in the United States are a blend of journalism and showmanship, information and entertainment, and professional altruism and marketplace opportunism,” declared a report sent to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence 50 years ago this month.

“These are obviously qualities which, if not entirely antithetical, at least cannot be relied upon to coexist in perfect harmony. When they clash, the discord is important, for, if one thing is clear about the American media, it is that they touch our lives in ways far too intimate and complex to ignore.”

The report contended that Americans had

become a nation of the entertained, and it is the media, for the most part, who provide our entertainment. Indeed, our appetites for entertainment, far more than our quest for knowledge, have brought the media from the economic position represented by the individual printer of two centuries ago to the status of a major business industry.

The report concluded that “the news media can play a significant role in lessening the potential for violence by functioning as a faithful conduit for intergroup communication, providing a true marketplace of ideas, providing full access to the day’s intelligence, and reducing the incentive to confrontation that sometimes erupts in violence,” which it identifies as “a subtle and uncertain mission.” Indeed it was, and so remains.

Regularly Scheduled Neuro-Linguistic Programming

It turns out that I still hate Tuesdays, even though the day of the week does not mean anything—nor does time, because it is an illusory social construct, but I digress. Was trying to come up with something to write about yesterday, yet my brain drew a blank. I find that I typically condemn myself for being “lazy” in this way.

Rebooting this old blog after several years absence is a strange experience, which has involved deleting early posts that didn’t “age well” or were simply embarrassing. There are probably extant posts that could be mortifying but I haven’t gotten to them yet, or maybe they are still defensible. Who knows? I blogged hundreds of things.

A lot of the “content”—using that word extremely advisedly since I generally loathe the word, to be honest—that I posted was, more or less, real-time commentary on current events or random musings about whatever came to mind. Trying to be more focused this time, more disciplined. My method has been too sporadic, scattershot.

We are who we are, of course, but everyone can change. Maybe. One thing I have learned since I last regularly kept up this blog, among other things, is that we are all meaning-making machines embedded in an existence that is meaningless—and, furthermore, its meaninglessness is itself meaningless. Hard to grok that, eh?

When we hear a word like “meaningless” and react by saying or thinking, “That sounds depressing,” we are giving meaning to it. Since the meaninglessness of life is meaningless, we are freed up to do whatever we want and we can realize more possibilities, even if they seem impossible. Anyway, enough with all that. For now.