Wired magazine: the new FOMO (missing the news!)

Wired magazine for September 2017 headlines its issue with "The Great Tech Panic of 2017" and offers encouragement at the bottom of the cover with "How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Future." The magazine notices a growing angst even amongst the cyber-cognoscenti. You probably know something about computers or you wouldn't be glancing at this blog. And, even though we have the computer literacy skills, we still glance constantly at the cellphone like we're stuck on a desert island looking for glass bottles floating by with messages from the mainland.

We didn't learn from Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman's  advice-- "What, me worry?" And Alfred definitely has the look of a hacker, or computer whizkid of some kind.

Wired mentions several different kinds of scientific, brain-study explanations for FOMO, fear of missing out:

* Social driven FOMO stems from a person's primitive desire to belong to a group, with each snap, tweet, or post a reminder of what separates you from them.

* And, this other type of FOMO, the all-news, all-the-time kind,... could also derive from a primitive behavioral instinct-- surveillance gratification-seeking, or the urge that drove our cave-dwelling ancestor to poke their heads ou and check for predators.

We even have a Category 5 presidency, as pointed out by Mike Lupica of the The New York Daily News. President Trump makes news and follows it at the same time-- watching cable TV, getting angry and tapping away on his Twitter account. The guy creates an infinite loop of his own making. But, Donald Trump demonstrates a healthy response by letting out his feelings. Keep reading and you'll learn why it's important to express yourself.

Wired explains that human being are "meaning-making machines" and suggests a solution. This may sound counter-intuitive but... Wired says you should get more involved! The best response? Smartest thing to do about "coping with overload.... is... adding to the stream." Take at your keyboard and start tapping!

Here's Wired suggestion:

* Finish every post before moving on to the next one, but not before commenting, tweeting, or posting your thoughts about it...You can only comment so many times-- but you develop a better sense of which issues really inspire, enrage of matter most to you.... You'll realize, sooner than you imagine, that you're not missing out on anything.

As the old cliche goes-- the best defense is a good offense. Tell the world what you think.

And, if that fails... there's always Plan B. Find the the adult beverage of your choice and watch the world go by-- out the window. Remember to drink responsibly. Never mix drinking and driving-- or drinking and texting!

Trump, New York City and the Tabloids

New York City is the city of a million stories. The

tabloids help explain the rise of Donald Trump: pages full of celebrity gossip, divorce, crime, sex scandals, and scantily clad Page Six girls. Tabloids speak very directly. Like Trump, they have strong opinions, pull no punches but are sometimes sketchy on the details. They go for emotions. Large print headlines jump off the page and many photos stimulate the reader.

We are not talking NY Times, the paper of record. Too intellectual. Trump calls them the “failing New York Times” but secretly wants their approval. Trump rises from the NYC tabloids--the conservative New York Post and the liberal New York Daily News. If it bleeds it leads.

Credit Donald Trump with one sign of genius, his decision to stick with New York City. New York struggled in the 1970s when things looked bleakest—gangs, graffiti, and unemployment. Why did he stay? Trump is a sucker for a story and Gotham thrives on stories. And New York City has many celebrities of various stripes. Trump loves celebrities, more than almost anything else.

And then New York made a comeback. Ironically, immigrants played a big role in invigorating the city. Creative young people returned to the Big Apple, especially Brooklyn. Gentrification followed. Crime decreased. Wall Street’s massive profits trickled down across the city. The Big Apple was back. Trump Tower stood proudly in the middle of the renaissance.

Trump learned from the tabloids. It’s all about exposure and building a brand. All publicity is good publicity. And Trump got a regular gig on television—The Apprentice.

When it came time to run for President, Trump figured out the cable news game better than Hillary. Say outrageous things and arouse emotion. Tabloid newspapers influenced cable TV with its confrontational style. Donald Trump’s oxygen became cable TV. He loves being the performer and the watcher. He digests CNN programs  and reacts. As President, he sealed the deal by mastering Twitter. Trump’s tweets became his own media outlet.

We usually get the President who figures out the media environment more accurately than his/her competition. Trump wanted to be the most famous man in the world. Mission accomplished. Trump now controls the news cycle—24/7. He cannot be moved off of Page One.

Stop Making Sense: politics as theater

Stop Making Sense... for the game has changed.

It may be worth mentioning ... with the computer there has risen the possibility of extending consciousness itself as a technological environment. If this is to be done, it cannot be done on the basis of any existing notion of rationality.-- 1971 (Marshall McLuhan)

Marshall McLuhan died in 1980 but remains the only man who understands the computer/ internet age, an age he predicted with absolute accuracy. McLuhan knew that computer technology would shift the individual's "central nervous system into the electro-magnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well."-- 1964.

That means your brain and central nervous system are right there in the cellphone you are grasping. You have uploaded your thoughts and emotions into Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. You are vibrating with the universe. The world is one big city. The global village... as McLuhan so aptly named this world we now inhabit. You, and all of us, and Trump, our tribal leader, are family.

So this new world has you scared. We are all sitting around the electronic campfire and people are shouting weird things into the air. These thoughts, the fake news, the insane fears, the terrorism, the 11 year old boy in the Bronx using a knife to protect his mother from an intruder to their apartment... all of that, along with the Kardashians, Sean Spicer, Melissa McCarthy, etc., all spinning around your brain and spinal chord thanks to that powerful computer in your hand. You are the right, you are the left, you are all of it.

And most prevalent of all images is the image of Donald Trump, that orange-haired image has been burned into your consciousness. His name is on everybody's lips. The cable news follows his every exhalation and exultation. You wince-- how did he work himself into your consciousness? You and I are Trump.

I notice that Trump remains ahead of the men and women of the news. They are stuck in the print era like newsmen out of the screwball classic His Girl Friday. All they lack are Cary Grant's fedora and the clever lines of dialogue. The television newspeople-- still called "the press"--  struggle to find rationality in Donald Trump's ravings and whine about fake news and alternative versions of reality. The game has changed and Trump rubs it in with references to "the failing New York Times."

The New York Times worldview, the serious, sober reporting from the Gray Lady, falls to pieces in the lightning war of electrons-- the all spin, all the time world in which we presently live. If you are waiting for Truth... fuhgeddaboutit. 

Truth has given way to theater and image-making. Trump knows it and discovered it from his experience with the New York City tabloid newspapers-- not the New York Times.

Every day another drama-- just like the tabloid covers of the New York Post (conservative) and the New York Daily News (liberal).

The difference between now and just a few years back is the depth of our involvement. The Social Network has us all involved. And it moves at the speed of light. Just ask Bill O'Reilly. The master of the "No Spin Zone" got spun like a top and left by the curb by Fox News. I don't think O'Reilly got fired because Rupert Murdoch and his sons found new moral convictions about the rights of women. The global village decided to shun O'Reilly. Twenty-first Century Fox quickly jumped aboard.

The Fox News empire knows that the electronic network electrocutes quickly. They didn't have time to take a poll-- they stuck their fingers in the air and felt the electronic wind blowing hard against O'Reilly's bullying, sexist tendencies. They didn't want to piss off a whole gender-- and O'Reilly hit the road, $25 million in his pocket to ease the pain. And, in some strange way, we feel Bill's pain. After all, we got to know him so well.

An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness.-- 1964 (Marshall McLuhan)



references:
The Talking Heads album-- Stop Making Sense (1977)--
McLuhan quotes from Essential McLuhan (1995)-- p. 296.
"Piss off a whole gender..."-- this line taken from Aziz Anasari's monologue on SNL