Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Censorship Through Inclusion – Or – TOO MUCH

“There is too much going on to know what’s important too many viewpoint to know who’s right to much going wrong to fix any one thing. There are too many people voting. No single vote matters. Too much awareness of one’s own mortality to get out of bed in the morning. Too much quality entertainment to feel that as an individual you will be able to create anything of importance. Too much crappy entertainment to do anything but waste one’s life filtering out the irrelevant too much complaining about the people complaining too many channels on the TV. Too many ingredients to know what’s really in something. Too much corruption, deception, disease, death and other stuff.” – Shannon Wheeler

How much is too much – Shannon Wheeler the creator of ‘Too Much Coffee Man’ the worlds first superhero who gets his powers from caffeine and cigarette abuse. Often satirizes how much is too much, even the name of the strip has the moral if your going overboard you might as well go to excess. He makes a very sharp and paranoid point at the state of media today.

“I feel overwhelmed and powerless”

“Our government wants you to feel overwhelmed and powerless. That’s why there is so much information on everything. Back in the day, it was hard to find stuff out. They tried to keep secrets. So when something was found out everyone would get upset. They’ve learned that if they release an excess of information to include everything, the truth and the lies, the right and wrong people will overload they’ll give up trying to understand any of it. It’s censorship through inclusion! And it makes me sad.” (Too Much Coffee Man’s Amusing Musings pg.12-13)

It’s supposed to be funny, and it is, but even funnier and sadder because it is true. You have more information available now than ever before. There’s your local news, and 24-hour news channels, and some markets even have 24 hour local news, like Central New York’s own News 10 Now. There are news websites, and news pages on search engines like Google and Yahoo. Then there are blogs, millions of blogs like mine telling people insignificant personal news of people and places around the globe. Sometimes the news channels even highlight blogs giving them even more news credibility. I love that any hack with a computer and half a brain can type up his opinion and get it on network news, but should every one with a voice really be heard? If everyone is shouting out his or her opinion is anyone listing?

I’ve written about my love/hate relationship with 24 hour news channels before. If you actually watch all 24 hours of news how can you know what is really important. You get on average you get about 40 stories an hour. Is the story that comes first most important? The story that has the coolest looking graphics? Or the hottest reporter? If you take a story live for five minutes does that make it the most important? If you go live to the scene with team coverage, and exclusive material does that make it important? There is no way to tell. Because when it comes down too it, I think of something my old news director said. “If you wanted to lead your show with the story that is most important to people every day, you would lead with weather every single time,” (thanks Lou).

So how much is too much? Because even the weather channel is 24 hours.

To check out more Too Much Coffee Man http://www.tmcm.com (Shannon I am a huge fan please don’t sue.)

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

This is a really nice article. I wondered where your source was for the 40 stories an hour reference in this? I would like to use that when I am talking to people and it would be nice to substantiate it.

Thanks again-
Mitchell

August 16, 2007 10:07 AM  

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