We Filipinos have long been enamored of our “free” press seeing it as a “heroic” institution that contributed greatly to “liberating” us from the “evil” dictatorship back in the 1980′s and still relevant today in our duty to remain “vigilant” lest our “democracy” be threatened.
More content does not necessarily mean deeper knowledge or better quality insight. Real insight comes from an ability to see patterns and relationships among bits of disparate pieces of information.
Contrast that with the way the output of many in the business of news “reporting” tends to cluster around a narrow band of shawarma topics — the latest tongue-wagging events (and the morons behind them) reported to the smallest value-crushing detail.
The venerable thinker Nassim Taleb makes an interesting assertion: that regularly reading a newspaper (or any source of current events) follows the law of diminishing returns. With every detailed update and bulletin you take in from such sources, you actually get less additional information for your trouble. With the explosion of on-line content on people and events, the average schmoe now spends more time scouring a multitude of references to get the “full picture”. The paradox here is that the rate at which a daily follower of current events actually increases his knowledge and understanding is reduced to smaller and smaller chunks.
The tragedy here is that people who are imprisoned in this race to keep “up-to-date” on what they think are the “issues” increasingly miss out on opportunities to gain real insight.
Same can be said for those whose core focus is to report on the minutiae of people and events. Their game is the scoop — getting the information and reporting it before the rest. Their value lies in how many steps they keep ahead of public knowledge. But as publicly available information — in an age of camera-phones, ubiquitous Internet access, and a new blogger being born every second (DJB‘s comment on November 10th, 2008 3:57 pm) — becomes commoditisized the scoop becomes less valuable. The gap between what the public knows and what a “professional reporter” whose business it is to monitor people and events for most of their waking hours produces becomes increasingly narrow — this gap has gone from being measured in days and even weeks back in the 19th Century to just mere seconds today.
As advances in technology such as Twitter make access to trivial factoids and soundbites that once formed the primary currency of news “reporters” more efficient, more subject to Darwinian memetic dynamics, and less subject to the interpretation (whether wittingly or unwittingly, but for the most part dimwittedly) of “journalists”, the more insightful sector of consumers of media will increasingly turn to brilliant synthesisers of the wealth of information out there. The value of these information synthesisers will be in identifying the underlying simplicity in the monumental convolusions that old lumbering traditional brokers of information make it their business to stir up.
Not to worry though. In backward societies like the Philippines, there is still a massive sector of humanity that relies on factoidal “news” for entertainment.
Indeed, as we are now seeing in Akomismo this most recent marvel of glossy marketing capturing the popular sentiment;
In business, you don’t need a superior product to succeed. All that is required is clever marketing and a throng of vacuous consumers.
And that is what true insight tells us.
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Yep…Flips don’t have quality insight. They miss the obvious, patterns and relationships. Insights are supposed to be the forte of our pekeng-peryodistas it turns out the bloggers are tying and connecting patterns and relationships point it out to them and make it as theirs …
Our pekeng-columnists goes into frenzy over politics. It’s easy for them. They don’t need to go out and bite the dust. They can conjure their own musings from their armchair. If they go hungry they can go for freebies in some political coverage …
Inquirer- and other columnists also go into movie reviews, restaurant or food-recipe reviews, and reunions of this- or that- college-batch.
The Marcos dictatorship was an evil regime that murdered and maimed thousands and imprisoned the nation. Most Filipinos are proud of kicking out the Fascist Dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Most of the world supported and backed that overthrow, which was due in no small measure to the heroism and dedication of the Mosquito Press.
For you to put them in quotation marks means only that you are either punctuationally challenged or intentionally supportive of the old fascist dictatorship. Considering your basically racist stance, I would not be surprised if you also support the formation of a new fascist dictatorship in the Philippines.
Though I doubt your sterile life and frustrated existence could mount to such an ambition.
I don’t think racism and fascism are very cool, not even to the Filipinos you love to berate, but I wonder how far you are willing to go to support such mental illness in yourself?
Here is what “the venerable thinker” Nassim Taleb said about Benign0 on his website:
“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know….”
And here is what Benign0 said just yesterday in The Perfect President:
“If we manage to find among our lot of 80 million souls a truly benevolent dictator, then there is no point in being a democratic country.”
Like Ferdinand Marcos maybe, or Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, paisano?
This is very disturbing…Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini also started out with dark and sinister umbrage towards Germans and Italians, respectively.
If there is “no point in being a democratic country” what are you doing here? Perhaps you ought to move to Iran or North Korea?
One of the greatest exponents of the Mosquito Press and a true freedom fighter against the fascist dictatorship of Da Apo, was Teddyman Benigno, in whose honor the character and icon, DrPacMan is hereby dedicated, for Teddyman himself began as a sports writer who covered another Filipino refutation of Herr Benig No (who plagiarized a great and honorable name but accurately used a zero to distinguish himself).
DrPacMan is a living refutation of misanthropic curmudgeons like Herr BenigNo. DrPacMan is the Guardian Angel assigned to watch over the dreary and dangerous ideas that Herr Benig No has been infected with and which use him as broadcasting station for racist palaver.
DrPacMan proves the Filipino is a worthy member of the human race, who is however forced to share the democratic space with would-be Fascists and apologists for dictators and tyrants like Herr BenigNo.
The ideological groundwork for a fascist dictatorship must never be allowed to get off the ground. The constant defamation of the Filipino nation and character by Herr BenigNo and his ilk deserve DrPacMan’s demolishing punches.
Nothing all too new – same carrying capacity cruising on the same old lane of all-too familiar language, mental constructs, semantics, the new science of rehashics.
It does not matter of course that much of what has happened since Edsa One represents failure and disappointment as the ancien regime was apparently restored and old politicos made their comeback. I have been an ardent critic of undemocratic changes of regime. But that the solution was not perfect, and only the semblance of Democracy was restored hardly matters. What was important was the overthrow of a fascist dictatorship that must never again be encouraged by people like you.
Some pigs like to hog the buffet table. They think the comment thread is too lowly for their thoughts, and won’t do others the courtesy of replying in the thread, but would jump on the table and expose themselves for what they are: swine!
No to Fascism! No to Racism! Never again!
You can see how far Benign0 has gone down the road to supporting Fascism on his website here where he celebrates the video of Marcos declaring martial and derides the restoration of democracy in this country.
It’s like a neo-Nazi calling for the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler. In Israel!
Pekeng DrPacMan aka DJB-in-Drag:
Don’t worry – ‘em DUMDUMS don’t know the difference between Fascism and Racism and Democracy even if they were staring it at the face – IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Stay happy, stay ignorant then you can keep on blaming government till the cows come home – blog content to your hearts desire.