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Signal and Noise [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-11-01  

The universe of information is divided, as I see it, into “signal” and “noise”.

“Signal” is useful or otherwise desirable information, whereas “noise” is useless information that interferes with, or distracts from, reception of “signal”.

With the proliferation of media channels over the decades has come a greater and greater volume of “noise”. The veritable firehose of “noise” presented to the average American in the course of a day has come to obscure so much “signal” that many of us have no idea what is really going on in our neighborhoods, communities, regions, the country, or the world.

Do you remember the “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” scene in “The Wizard of Oz”? This is an example of “noise”, the elaborate audio-visual fakery depicting “Oz, the great and powerful”, obscuring “signal”, the charlatan at the controls manipulating the protagonists’ perceptions.

Today’s “Oz, the great and powerful” is Donald J. Trump. This man is the personification of “noise”. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie or an attention-grabbing outrage. Nothing that has anything to do with him is truly newsworthy; he was invented by the media — the same media he dubs “enemies of the people” — to boost their ratings, and, therefore, profits. Les Moonves, the former president of CBS, declared Trump “damned good for CBS”; that’s why media outlets give him so much of their attention and airtime.

Nothing concerning Trump, his family, his lawyers, or his so-called coup is really newsworthy. None of it is worth any of our attention; it’s all “noise”. A hundred years from now, when historians discuss the decline of American power and the country’s role in bringing on the climate change crisis, Trump’s name will barely figure; if he’s mentioned at all, it will be by scholars asking how the attention of so many millions could be distracted at a pivotal moment in the history of modern civilization by a con artist. They’ll ask how perhaps the greatest constitutional crisis in America’s history could be almost universally ignored by a people obsessed with one man’s outrageous utterances and legal troubles.

The problem with this country today is that “noise” is drowning out “signal”. There’s too much being fed to our eyes and ears that is, essentially, bullshit, and the time we spend watching and listening to it is time taken away from things that are really important, things we are missing entirely. We are stumbling about in a fog, as likely to turn the wrong way as the right, kept largely clueless by the incessant “noise” surrounding us.

It’s time to tune it all out.

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