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

Tangled, as told by the media and brain cells (final 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 in a couple of networks within a day or two; after that those ninety five statements 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 the hot mess 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’s 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 at the same time tries to explains them. “Listening to Feedback” a particular excerpt, that deals with the defective self regulating system in the media; which came to be thanks to the creation of the network’s 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 regulating itself, rather it is 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 exemplified by the excessive media coverage given to the Lindsay Lohan’s trail; or the Oil spill’s 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 case, - she was been trailed for driving under the influence and drug possession-(Johnson, 192).  The young and troubled actress’s trial was transmitted life by various networks and online site, all about it or her was news, from her lawyer to her manicure, and everything was dimmed as news worthy.  There was no apparent criterion as to what was actually news; everything was given the same relevance with no objective differentiation on the information given to the public.

On the other hand, there is the coverage of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which’s public significance can be understood for the many ramifications of the event. However, the Oil Spill became what the media; ate, breathed, drank and slept on, hence also becoming what many American people prioritized. The frenzy was 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 gushing and the information kept building. Johnson relates the media with neural networks:  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, fatigue gives the brain a mandatory pause, but nothing fatigues the media (198- 199). The positive feedback system, for the media, translates into an inexistent refractory period, instead after saturating itself on a subject, there is a jump to another story; no rest, no analysis, no time to think was just happened through. In this rather accelerated process that the media weaves a web where it gets tangled and need to kill its creation or die with it, then it rises to create the next tangled mess. In the end it’s the lack of moderation and pause that endanger it.

There is an alternative to positive feedback, for Johnson negative feedback is what this self regulating system needs to work correctly; “It is, in other words, a way of transforming a complex system into a complex adaptive system”, and this can happen thanks to “homeostasis”, a balance achieved by the system’s ability to modify itself due to feedback (196). All this would signify that the all parts of the media would in sorts be dictated to action by something the outer response to it, if people became uninterested in the topic it would die or be reinvented. Ultimately the real problem would not be solved; yes some sort of homeostatic balance would be created from what the audience response was, giving a little of what they want and what the need. However, our web would still be a tangled and dangerous one, links nor topics would really matter; and this is because no matter how systematized we believe our world to be human nature does not always play by this rules of exact cause and effect. People are unpredictable; there are more than fluids and chemical reactions to how we work, so there is no use comparing the media to builder ants, because the media as a human creation has other elements to it, like ethics and responsibility.

There is too much unpredictability is this system to think of it s a fixed one. From the press to the internet, they all depend on people from the ones that create it to the ones that consume it. To exemplify this lets analyze the human reaction to Wikileaks. This website’s purpose is to leak to the people the information that its government keeps from them, information its founders believe should be public; no government should keep information from its people. Wikileaks then started posting secret information, from diplomatic cables to classified videos; the people around the world came in contact with information that had never been at their reach before. What has been the reaction to this? Well not one that can be understood by a system of feedback; it has been a human reaction: governments have denounced Wikileaks as an irresponsible organization; the American government accuses its director Julian Assange of promoting anti-Americanism, the diplomatic world is an upheaval. Asides from this negative reaction to it, wikileaks has contributed reactions such as the current Tunisian Jasmine revolt, it was the way American diplomats regarded Tunisia and it’s now fallen President,- his regim lasted more than3 in the disclosed cables that did it. It was the drop that spilled the cup; and probably not only the Tunisian one,  protest motivated by the Jasmine revolt have started in the Arab, the people in Lebanon and Egypt are been propelled not only by the information leaked on Wikileaks but by idea that if Tunisia could, so could they. This type of feedback cannot be processed; it is not something a fixed system can understand.

“When we come across a system that doesn’t work well, there’s no point in denouncing the use of feedback itself. Better to figure out the specific rules of the system at hand and start thinking of ways to wire it so that the feedback routines promote the values we want promoted”( Johnson 210).  This idea works for a set system, but the media is not a even a system, the internet is not what it is because due to the input data, zeros and ones are not why people use the internet. Yes it might be what allows the internet as a technology to function, but not why they use it; it’s the content that keeps the internet as media.  We usually associate media with interconnection and in many ways it allows that type of web to be created, however, the real web is based on a human structure. This means that there are not set rules there is constant change, transformation is always happening, and that is the only constant in a human construction.

The tangled web that is the media, is a human creation based on human interaction. Hence, it is a business, a public service, and so many other things. The only real way to improve media is to balance the industry and the ethics.  And that is something that not even the brain processes have been able to achieve, people still try to balance that in their everyday lives. The media is nothing more than an echo of what we are as humans, so that hot mess is just a mirror ; just like Wikileaks is the representation of an idea, just like news are echoes of human actions  and TV shows accumulation of popular likes and dislikes. There is no possible way a fixed system could have understood and processed the effect of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, or the velocity today’s media, it is a constant transition  sometimes chaotic others not so much.

Johnson, Steven . “Listening to feedback” Emerging. Barclay Barrios. Boston. Bedford/St. Martins, 2010. 190-204. Print