Tangled, as told by the media and brain cells (rough draft)

Tangled, as told by the media and brain cells (rough draft)

In 1517 it took two weeks for Marthin Luther’s  Ninety-five  Thesis to spread over the whole Holy Roman Empire, it is consider a feat of its day. Today it would take two seconds for it to be online; and then sure enough it would be at least a couple of networks within a day or two; after that those ninety five would have reached the world. In two weeks time Luther’s Thesis’s would have been reproduced, analyzed, commented, translated in at least fifty languages; there would be MySpace pages, Facebook groups, blogs  and a couple of YouTube videos dedicated to them. Ultimately by two months the Reformation would have taken place in a lighting fast mode or died as old news tend to. Now a day the interconnection that technology has granted us, has tangled even more the messy web that is the Media; a spider web where hunters and preys cannot really distinguish themselves. It is always expanding, adding more to the threads of an imperfect system, which has yet to develop a system of self regulation.

There are those who believe that there is already a system trying to regulate the media chaos, in particular Steven Johnson, author of various texts regarding communications; Emergence one of his books discusses the connection of networks, from cerebral to mediatic, and the same time explains them. “Listening to Feedback” is a particular excerpt, which deals with the defective self regulating system in the media, which came to be thanks to the creation of the networks dependence on feedback. Before the Media was regulated by those who created it, which news came out was a decision made by an editor or journalist, now according to Johnson the decision is made by the “decentralized system” which; “rely[s] extensively on feedback, for both growths and self-regulation” (192).  Johnson compares the media’s decentralized system to the neural network of our brain, in where a spark of reaction from one neuron starts a chain reaction from all the other neurons. However, Johnson does not see the basic error in this, no system that goes into full blown-out activity do to only one of its components, is not regulating itself but simply reacting.

While Johnson calls this the reaction to positive feedback; “ the sort of self-fueling cycles cause a note strummed on a guitar to expand into a howling symphony of noise” (195). This can be understood as the excessive media coverage given to the Lindsay Lohan’s trail, or the Oil spill submarine camera showing the world how the oil keep gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Both this examples represent the two different types of “feeding frenzies”; first the Lindsay Lohan trail, the young and troubled actress’s trial was transmitted life by various networks and online site, everything about it or her was news, from her lawyer to her manicure everything was dimmed as news worthy, there was no apparent criteria as to what was actually news, everything was given the same relevance with no objective discrimination of the information been given to the public (Johnson, 192).

On the other hand there is the coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which’s importance can be understand  for the many ramifications of the event. However, the importance of the oil spill, it became what the American media, ate, breathed, drank and slept on, so much so that cameras where placed at the bottom of the gulf, just to see how the oil actually spilled into the water. The oil kept spilling and the information kept building, as Johnson relates the media to how neural networks work, where one neuron starts synapses and activates a reaction from billions of other neurons until fatigue hits them and the brain enters  the absolute refractory period, were no stimuli can affect it (198). The thing about this positive feedback is that the way the media does this refractory period is by over saturating itself on a subject and then jumping into another story, there is no rest, no analysis, no time to think was just happened through. In this rather accelerated process  the media weaves a web where it get tangled and need to kill its creating or die with it, then it rises to create the next tangled mess.