A Flood Of News

“A contemporary dictator would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: He or she would only have to see to it that news organizations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that kept changing, without giving any sense of the ongoing relevance of an issue that had seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colorful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most people’s capacity to grasp political reality — as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it. The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of, rather than a ban on, news.”

The News

Alain de Botton

A story about our saturated culture of information today. Information, like academic disciplines, has become engaged with smaller and smaller topics so that we have more and more news and information about increasingly less and less topics. We know more and more about less and less. Like some explorer with a microscope examining smaller and smaller things and getting farther and farther away from large scale considerations. One becomes – like a brand today – increasingly separate and differentiated form the other products out there.