Multi-Tasking - excellent editorial on our digital age and news

[The Straight Story]

Multi-Tasking
By Bill Walton
BayToday.ca
Monday, January 17, 2005

Writer BioThe Digital Age has brought us to a new level of multi-tasking that supposedly improves how we act and react in the social milieu of the present age. When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, digital multi-tasking meant being able to pat your head with one hand while rubbing your tummy with the other. And that accomplishment certainly brought kudos from my peers. Of course we all multi-task as we see, hear, talk and walk around. Some of us can even chew gum while doing this.

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In the age of ten second sound bytes, are we truly multi-tasking if we are accepting all these bits of information as fact without questioning the veracity of any of them? Or are we becoming so reliant on tidbits (and Timbits) that we really don’t know what is happening around us? Are the people feeding us these little snippets of information any better informed than we are?


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What concerns me is that as we, the fortunate few in the world who have access to the digital world, depend more and more on these short sound and information spurts, that we are thinking less and less about that information. Were the 49% of Americans who voted for George in the last election misinformed that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks or did they believe it because someone, someone with a political agenda, slipped that into the initial newscasts after the attack? That it was later refuted had no impact on these people because they had heard and stored those first bytes of information.

How many American soldiers have died in Iraq? How many Iraqis have died? Google that information on the internet and tell me what this disparity in information tells you about the conflict in Iraq. What time is it? Is it still snowing outside? Was that last email from your boss? A true multi-tasker will have answered the last three questions without a pause, all the while considering what the heck is happening in Iraq based on one of the pop-up screens that gives CNN’s view of the war.


http://www.baytoday.ca/content/editorials/recent.asp?w=13

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Time after time, this was the technique used to blur the lines....

Were the 49% of Americans who voted for George in the last election misinformed that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks or did they believe it because someone, someone with a political agenda, slipped that into the initial newscasts after the attack?<<

Shrubby used the words 911 and Iraq and 911 and Saddam in the same sentence, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over .

[UL_Approved]

2. Digital brainwashing

I know several people who cannot stand up to somebody who speaks on television. They take every word as gospel, and can change opinions if poked and prodded enough by newscasters. This is a terrible use of media, but it has been discussed before. This and many more methods of manipulation are discussed and laid out in 1984, by George Orwell.

Getting people in an agitated state causes them to grasp at the first thing that seems safe. You program people by putting them under duress, depriving them of information, and then start forking out bullshit. This is used in any brainwashing that has been used.