Sc4logo-nv5-dk-ccw-377
Scene4 Magazine: Arthur Meiselman
Arthur Meiselman

What’s New?           

inView

November 2014

What’s the story? What’s the view? What’s the perspective? What’s the truth? (Strike that, this is not an epistemological lesson). The Arab Spring, the rise of a new Imperial China, the psychosomatic collapse of European and American capitalism, the once colonial now corporate slave-trade in Africa, the re-emergence of “God the Angry Father”, the Ebola plague, the ISIS plague. A disturbing and despairing panorama of the decline of humanity? Hardly.

 

George Santayana and others aphoristically proclaimed that to ignore history is to be doomed to repeat it. True? Perhaps, with a caveat that the human species is a collective of behavior, habitual, ritual, repetitive behavior—not doomed to repeat its history, rather self-programmed to recycle itself… and its history.

 

Nothing new under the sun? Nothing! What has changed is the level of transparency, the spreading discovery of what’s already there, what has always been there. Seven billion humans are experiencing (at least on this planet) the result of exponential evolution—a “black hole” of technology that sucks in all impressions and expressions and spews out a nearly unfathomable ether of information and disinformation. It overwhelms the dyke of the 24-hour day and floods into an archival sea at the abbey of Saint Leibowitz known as… Google.

 

The media is in this mix, and the mix is in the media. Forget about television, it’s a lost cause. Radio is actually a wee bit better. But even the vaunted BBC can no longer seem to find people who can write English to speak and newsreaders who can speak English for listening. So many of their voices are untrained and unbrained. They once seemed to listen to themselves, to understand what they were saying. Today they speak in a blur, enunciate in a blur, comment in a blur. France24 is not much better, but then again English is a second language for them. America is also losing its clear broadcast voice. Australia and India still broadcast as if English is a third or fourth language.

 

Ink print journalism has given way to digital print journalism and the inundation has caused them both to suffer. The blog "rains" supreme - unrestrained, unedited, everyman's misinformed opinion. The majestic New York Times regularly publishes quickly-edited ramshackle articles and columns written with elbows instead of fingers. The Washington Post is deteriorating into a product-placement digest where intelligent copy-editing is reserved for the obituary section. The London Times—never mind, that’s a Murdoch paper! Even my friend, Harper’s Magazine, increasingly allows awkward, quick-cliché writing in its essays where once it wouldn’t.

 

The degradation to ‘fast-food’ journalism is evident all over the globe.

 

Thailand's Bangkok Post and The Nation, purport to be world-class and aren’t. They both skew their editorial policy, trade in the gray area of editorial for advertising, are plagued with mediocre writing and hit-or-miss copy editing, and profile columnists who shouldn’t be allowed next to a keyboard, especially in this time of Junta censorship.

 

Edward Snowden is the new international truthsayer and Julian Assange the intercontinental naysayer. Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel are the chorus behind the deus ex machina of the NSA and its ilk. And Google? Google is the Egyptian Pharoah and the Exodus' Moses rolled into one money-printing, identity-shifting video game.

 

A disturbing and despairing panorama of the decline of humanity? Hardly. Evolution, my friend, like time, marches on. George Orwell remains the sane voice on the horizon. 2084 is only seventy short years away.

 

big-brother-1-cr

 

Post Your Comments
On This Article Here

Share This Page

View other readers’ comments in Letters to the Editor

Arthur Meiselman is a playwright, writer and the Editor of Scene4. He also directs the Talos Ensemble and produces for Aemagefilms.
Read his
Blog.
For more of his commentary and articles,
Check the Archives:

Search Arthur Meiselman

©2014 Arthur Meiselman
©2014 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

Sc4logo-nv5-dk

®

November 2014

 

Cover | This Issue | inView | inFocus | inSight | Perspectives | Blogs | inPrint | Comments | Contact Us | Recent Issues | Special Issues | Masthead | Contacts&Links | Submissions | Advertising | Subscribe | Books | Your Support | Privacy | Terms | Archives
Search This ISSUE

Search This Issue

Search The ARCHIVES

Search The Archives

 Share This Page

Email

Share in Facebook

Facebook

 


Scene4 (ISSN 1932-3603), published monthly by Scene4 Magazine - International Magazine of Arts and Culture. Copyright © 2000-2014 AVIAR-DKA LTD - AVIAR MEDIA LLC. All rights reserved. Now in our 15th year of publication with Worldwide Readership in 116 Countries and comprehensive archives of 8000 pages.
 

The Art of Capital for the Arts
Julius Krinski NUDITY - authorized edition -  Scene4 Books/Aviarpress www.aviarpress.com
Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole  ©2013 Scene4 Books  www.aviarpress.com
Character Flaws by Les Marcott at www.aviarpress.com
Bookends by Carla Maria-Verdino Süllwold - Scene4 Magazine - www.scene4.com
Thai Airways at Scene4 Magazine