[NY_USA_Hacker]

Emotion? Of COURSE it's emotion! It's ALL about emotion; the rest is just window dressing. It's to grab you by the heart, the gut, or below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears.

It's from a 'culture' that is ingrained and self-perpetuating: In college, they majored not in math, physical science, or engineering but in the 'humanities', especially English literature. There 'truth' is 'compelling' and from emotions or beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, personal, relative, etc.

In particular the most desired form of the emotions is 'drama' especially as in formula fiction with good and evil, etc.

The foundation is 'art' as in communication, intrepretation of human experience, emotions. Or 'it feels good'.

This 'culture' is solidly in control of 'old media'. There are two big reasons:

First, old media goes way back, is sitll close to the old morality plays, and goes way back before the revolution in information safety and efficacy starting with, say, J. Maxwell and with grand examples in math, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, technology, medical science, and medicine of the 20th century. Old media is still locked up well before 1900, mostly 1800. The college humanities majors naturally gravitated to that culture and still do. There are more details in C. P. Snow's 'The Two Cultures'.

Second, "The medium is the message" has long held true. In particular, before the Internet, the 'medium' was print, radio, or TV, and there the number of 'channels' and the 'bandwidth' of each channel were so small that the audience had to be very broad and the room for details was very small. So, the 'message' was to low grade emotions and very short. And that's what the article of this thread is. Useful? Rational? No. Emotional? Trivial? Yes.

So, obviously 'new media' can exploit more 'channels', would you believe over 100 million blogs, and more bandwidth, how ahout over 5 Mbps download bandwidth? Then we can have 'streams of focused content for focused interests', over 100 million 'streams'.

Sure, anyone with anything like an education in math, science, or engineering good enough actually to make things work pays close attention to details, say, efficiency, cost, durability, power levels, etc. Else, computers would snap, crackle, and pop, airplanes would never get off the ground, bridges and buildings would fall, etc. But the English majors in the culture of old media don't care.

Old media is dying, and not just because Craig's List is taking their classified ads.

HN and your remarks are right on target for how old media is being killed and where new media will be better.

My view is that the biggest problem in civilization and our country now is the brain-dead, all-emotions all the time, dysfunctional, self-destructive nonsense of old media instead of the solid information we need to be responsible citizens and direct our government to a better future. E.g., only now, slowly, are we learning the real anatomy of The Great Recession. So, old media never got the word out. Cry about the pains after the disaster? Sure. Have the solid, crucial information to avoid the disaster before hand? NOT a chance. Old media is helpless, full of tears, devoid of rationality or responsibility.

With old media, it's surprising we haven't blown up the planet by now. Old media, I have a question: "Now, how does that make you feel?".

[Hawramani]

I don't see any reason to worry that the masses are being 'dumbed down' because even if there is such a plot it doesn't seem to be working. The masses have kept being the masses, and the intelligent intellectual types seem to have stayed as intelligent and productive as ever.

I would love to see data showing that there has been an increase or decrease in the ratio of intelligent to unintelligent people, but right now all we have are anecdotes.

[NY_USA_Hacker]

I didn't claim that the issue is a "plot" or 'intelligence'.

My main explaination was "the medium is the message", and old media found that pushing emotional content, drama, formula fiction, etc. got them the best ad revenue. I suspect it did. So, in particular, the 'medium' led to emotional, superficial articles such as in this thread, That was my explanation for the article.

[Hawramani]

I was replying to this:

My view is that the biggest problem in civilization and our country now is the brain-dead, all-emotions all the time, dysfunctional, self-destructive nonsense of old media

I don't think the state of the media is a problem. In my opinion the media reflects the nature of its consumers, not the other way round, therefore if there is a problem it is with the consumers.

[NY_USA_Hacker]

No, "the medium is the message", and not really "the consumers". Again, back to Ben Franklin, the "medium" was the printed word, and the media still has that. Last century we got radio and then TV. On radio, the number of stations is tiny: Drive across the US and see that mostly the content is pop music, sports, and religion. That's all folks. Long TV had just 3-4 networks. Yes, cable TV has hundreds of channels, but for information my TV gets just ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, PBS, C-SPAN, CNBC, BBC business news, and Bloomberg business news. That's still not very many channels.

If I were an executive at the head of one of those, then I'd likely go ahead and upchuck and put out the same total BS they do now. Why? Because it's about 99 44/100% light enterainment instead of information. They have an absolute phobia at getting at any very serious information. In particular, they have to stay way below the average level of HN. As I wrote above in this thread, apparently hated by several people, the contents has to be at the 4th grade except math at the 2nd grade and sex at the 10th grade.

You want to blame this low grade nonsense on "the consumes". Well, with more channels, e.g., via the Internet, we can get, e.g., HN, and that's MUCH better, more technical, more advanced, more thoughtful, and MUCH less just formula fiction entertainment.

With still more development of the Internet, we will be able to get some really solid information. Some such information leaks out in places now via university material, some quite specialized Web sites, some industry sites, and more. E.g., there's a Web site that wanted to talk about electric cars. So, I got into a big debate with someone. We had to get into capacitor math. So, I got out my college E&M text, read up on capacitor math, and typed in the math to support my position. The other guy didn't like my math. Finally the site moderator found a good expert on capacitor math, etc., had my post 'reviewed' and pronounced correct. Got'a tell you, won't see any capacitor math on ABC, CBS, ..., not even PBS.

The media WILL "reflect the nature of the consumers" when we can have enough channels and bandwidth to partition the consumers into many thousands of categories. Then in some of the categories we will be able to get some really good stuff. Actually we have the channels and bandwidth now, but the exploitation of the Internet is not nearly complete yet.