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Here is a start to the morning chaos. It is a ‘Headline’ from the UK. We put it up front to set the stage while not immediately evoking an emotional response like our frantic current campaign.

Over in Britain, the new PM Keir Starmer is warning he will arrest citizens for “participating in violence online.” In one case, a man was arrested for daring to mock the transgender flag.

London Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley immediately backed him up, announcing he “will throw the full force of the law at people,” likening online speech to terrorism.

There was a marvelous image that circulated yesterday of a new Presidential nominee posing with a cross-dressed and improbable individual. We would use it here, except it is now gone from the annals of the search engine we have used for years. In itself, that is a reflection of an ongoing struggle with biology, which is wroth discussion after the woman’s Olympic boxing gold medal was awarded to a contestant who is arguably mostly male, but that would be a distraction.

Or maybe the point of the distraction. Anyway, the appearance and disappearance of objects that invite attention is the matter on which we want to shine our small feeble version of a spotlight today, you know?

Here is a Headline from the UK. We put it up front to set the stage but not immediately evoke an emotional response like the stuff in our frantic current campaign. Over in Britain, the new PM Keir Starmer is warning he will arrest citizens for “participating in violence online.”

London Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley immediately backed him up, announcing he “will throw the full force of the law at people,” likening online speech to terrorism.

In one case already, a man was arrested for daring to mock the transgender flag.

There was a marvelous image that circulated yesterday of a new Presidential nominee posing with a cross-dressed and improbable individual. We would use it here, except when we looked to show it to Legal to see if we could use it, discovered it had vanished from the annals of the search engine we have used for years.

And that appearance and disappearance is what we want to talk about this morning, since it is happening to us all and it is happening right now.

“Narrowcasting.”

We were doing something else yesterday involving the Creative, Marketing and Legal Sections at Socotra House. It was routine but slightly novel communication with other people of shared purpose distributed across radically different time zones. Communications were in scripted English with some participants not sharing the same first preference in use.

Well done effort by all concerned, with a sub-text of establishing a course of joint action. We avoided financing a few thousand copies of one of the new Socotra House publications to ensure wide distribution on the shelves of a concern that does that sort of thing. It used to be a profitable thing, though under stress these days.

We managed to communicate, at least broadly, what we were interested in doing. “Creation of a digital product- a version of a book- available in soft and hard copies with an audio track for those who multi-task in a variety of places, modes and speeds.”

Marketing insisted on that, and Legal mandated we put the new one-line disclaimer in italic small print atop the daily dross to protect from LawFare.

There is no time for a discourse on the transition in speed from pen & ink-to-Gutenburg-movable-type printing press to Microsoft Word processing. But we are now in a period of dramatic acceleration in how the light of attention flits across our senses.

The ability to focus and transmit exclusively to intended markets is part of what we have understood as “narrowcasting.” Psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider coined the term back in the 1960s, and it is useful now to describe something that is not “niche advertising,” but rather something closer to the establishment of alternate realities.

It isn’t science fiction. It is the ability now to be surrounded exclusively with narrowly focused exclusively shared instantaneous information flows in visual, audio and conceptual terms. Hence, the peculiarities of a campaign for the most powerful office in the world conducted from basements and without spontaneous interviews.

We know, we know. We are just attempting to understand why the messaging is so strange. So weird, to borrow one of the terms flying around now. It makes sense if we just remember to consider it as a sort of collision between complete and committed worlds that are colliding.

More on that as we lurch forward. Together. Proud, resolute and apart!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com