Ben's Share: They Are Putting A Black Hole Inside Your Head

Thanks Ben, I thought this was a very interesting piece and perspective. I hadn’t heard about the “information action ratio” idea before (how much action information actually triggers), and we’ve had a few conversations in Sydney around the question of whether following the news is always as beneficial as we assume. This feels like a really interesting addition to that broader discussion: https://thinkandthinkagain.org/in-the-open-1#previous-themes
I especially enjoyed this observation:
“Postman claimed that constant access to decontextualised information weakens the connection between information and action, making that relationship increasingly abstract and remote.”
It really made me think about how much information we consume that we can’t meaningfully act on, influence, or even properly process. Not necessarily because it isn’t important, but because the scale and distance of it all can leave us feeling strangely passive.

So much fruit for the picking on this one! Loved how Musso put Neil Postman's work into today's context, though I had to laugh (and respect!) that though he perfectly made Postman's enduring point — that the medium is the message — he did do without using the aphorism as a crutch.

By the way, I read a piece recently in which the author pointed out that the word distraction literally refers to a loss (dis) of control (traction). Together with this piece, I began visualizing the challenge of finding balance in today’s mediascape as someone trying to swim upstream against a raging river whose current is intentionally calibrated to prevent them from planting their feet on the ground. Either you exhaust yourself swimming in place, or you give up and get pulled further and further downstream, away from your home, at a speed that all surrounding scenery never renders beyond a constant yet ever-changing blur. 😂 🤯

The question I'm left with is more existential: if the endgame is capitalism's ability to mine the contents of our minds for profit, what happens when that natural resource runs dry?