Once upon a time Noam Chomsky declared that the news media filtered out the left. It was a big part of that film about him in 1992.
I can’t remember if I realized it at the time, when the woman doing publicity for the film kept telling me she’d cancel the local paper, “nothing in it” or some years later when I got online, but old media has to filter, it lacks bandwidth. What it filters is secondary.
For maximum penetration, old media has to be broad, so the audience is there. Someone might want comics, others sports, but whatever, on the way they may stop and read something else. It’s that broadness which brings the viewers. Start narrowcasting, and it won’t go far. Some of the most useful stuff has been filler, raw material to interpret, not a talking head telling you what to think or do.
Most people don’t grasp this, so even after there could be a local, the internet congregates along narrow spaces.
I derived this from observing others, and probably somewhere some “expert” had already done a treatise on it, but it was my observation.
Yes, many people template. They move into a space by picking up buzzwords or reading the manual, but they don’t look at the situation. They can fit in, but they can’t challenge the status quo. If things don’t work out, it’s “but we followed the book”. If challenged with new ideas, they may say “we’re afraid of making mistakes”, which is valid, except they aren’t questioning the book, just accepting some perceived authority, which even at best might not fit the local situation. Or decision making is based on what others are doing “they did it there”, which isn’t making a decision, just following.
Or someone will read something and spout something back, as if they’re expert on the topic, you know because you read the same thing, or maybe said it yourself first.
There seems to be some common belief that “new thought” comes from some other, complete with some status to assure us he is knowing.
Yes, “geniuses” make leaps based on what others have done, but they are wide read, and synthesize from multiple sources. That beats repeating something you just read.
People can have “eureka moments”, because they are listening to the situation, and base response on that rather than apply some fixed solution. I did it when I was 16, I’ve done it because someone said something to me or in trying to explain something I have insight. You need stimulus to be “creative”.
I once made smoke come out of the ears of a psychologist, me saying a test was “too abstract”, so he proceeded to tell me about his degree etc. I had said something significant about myself, but he ignored it, wanting me to fit into a template.
For a long time, I thought the issue was situation, the school system or something making people follow templates rather than look at the situation. But maybe they lack “intelligence” or “creativity” to figure things by themselves.
There seems to be a dismissal of “creativity”, that it’s not valuable and thus anyone can take it. Yet if anyone can do it, why is it valued enough that others take it? If they have to spout what others have said, then it’s not something everyone can do.
Yes, some of it is quite easy, it comes to you while walking along the sidewalk, but it’s valuable because not everyone can do it.
In simple words, by the time someone writes a book or makes a movie that’s good, they don’t need to use characters that others have created. But first you have to understand what makes something good.
