Sleep

Saturday, 27 November 2010

Because i do it myself, i know how it works: i write about a hundred things and i have not the time, the oversight, the interest and the energy to do justice to all the subjects that i touch upon. Mainstream media work the same way as i do in this blog.
Recently i had an argument about this. There was a rather alarming article in the newspaper (NRC) about some bombs, that were found in the mail in the States. It was said that there were terrorists behind these bombs. I didn’t trust the information in the article. After this article, no more articles were published on the subject. The argument was about the fact that i said that this not an exception: the information in the mainstream media cannot be trusted.
After the argument i thought a lot about the relation between how the media work and how people think. We are brainwashed, i have no doubt about that. But to what extent? What do we really know and how much of what we think we know is only information that has no basis in reality? I think that many people would be shocked if they found out how much of their thoughts are not true at all. But how can i ever show this to anybody without getting into arguments?
The amount of information published in newspapers that never gets a follow up is mind blowing. Human beings have a very short attention span, a very short short term memory and often a very superficial interest in what they hear and read. In the argument i said that we are in a deep sleep: we live in dreams about reality, but we know very little of it. And the media keep us in that sleep. And this blog is also becoming a sleeping pill. I don’t like that, but i don’t know hat can be done about it.

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