Watch This Space (and that one too)

The proletariatisation of the media is becoming a hilarious joke. The more I read the more I imagine myself to have gone crazy - a bit like Russel Crowe's character in "A Beautiful Mind" (John Nash). Not that I ever was a nobel prize potential - I don't think they have a category of Popular Blogs and Whippersnapper Rants yet - but the crazy feeling of being submerged by uncategorized information is constantly there.

One minute it is Big Brother who is forming your agenda - what news to read, what channels to watch, what is news, what is hearsay, what is good music, what is bad music, what is real football, what is to be relegated to the obscurity of the unknown mass. The next minute you are being awarded the Time Magazine Personality of the Year for being able to type a few lines of nonsense per day and for hoping to change the world. Because you are the news.

The world's economists have discovered that we have moved beyond neoconsumerism. We are now no longer governed by emotions when we consume. We are robots that are credit card happy. Our debt is huge, long live the debt! The world's tv channels and the film directors now orchestrate exercises in moral education that are either very well hidden in the subteleties (not) of Oprah style talk shows or in the plotlines of teleseries that stink of post-9/11 values.

More and more kids grow up having their ideas of the world honed through two different boxes - the tv and the computer screen. Superman, Batman and Spiderman all had to return in different guises. Religion is no longer what it used to be. Travelling abroad means touching the reality of terrorism and alerts with your own hands and leaving your shoes on the security scan device. The greatest philosopher of the modern age is Homer Simpson and we can now shop from our homes without ever having to meet anyone and engage in useless mall-talk.

There's enough stuff in there to write a novel worthy of Foucault's Pendulum. Or maybe its just a load of gibberish spurting out of the mouth of a XXIst century homo sapiens who might suddenly be exposed to far more information than he could ever handle. Would he swap his place with the feudal peasant working on his lord's demesne for some wicked Baron with the ius primae noctis over his sister? Of course not....

We all would rather be here - threatned by Usama and his followers, frustrated by George and his merry band of losers, governed by ever-more unreasonable politicrats, bled dry to watch our favourite sport, slaves of the credit card chips and travel taxes, still trying to understand what exactly is brewing in this modern day melting pot and still obstinately following the same old football team wherever the conspiracy theorists will condemn it to play.

Thank God for Blogging. Otherwise I know of no other time when I could have said all that and still have the undivided attention of the listener.

"When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around."