My thinking about the complexity of the world was significantly influenced by a book recommendation I followed up on about a decade ago. It was summer, so one of my friends asked about influential books … and a friend of hers mentioned “The Social Construction of Reality” (by Berger & Luckmann). I decided to read it and was completely “blown away“.
While I often try to state things simply, I am fully aware that the world we live in is neither simple nor straightforward. Let me offer an example I dreamt about a couple days ago.
In my dream, I was attending some kind of event having to do with open source and open organizational structure. One guy there was repeatedly talking about trends and trendy words were bandied about like there was no tomorrow. Different streams of thought were jumbled in quasi-word salads and I noticed that the guy who was attempting to bring order to the mixed-up confusion was up against a rather daunting task — namely the lack of authoritative, valid and reliable texts. All of the mumbo-jumbo was sourced from the shifting sands of the world-wide web. Traditional publishing was nowhere to be seen.
Noam Chomsky’s work in the field of propaganda and manipulation focuses very much on the role of traditional publishing. And publishing industries have themselves been traditionally intertwined with many other industries and also interwoven with most (if not all) of western capitalism.
Let me add in a little bit of historical context here. We now have about five centuries of publishing industry — yet publishing five centuries ago and publishing today are quite different things. For example, when Martin Luther proposed schools and libraries in order to promote literacy, that may have been interpreted as dangerous and controversial. When I talk about literacy, I am no longer concerned with print (paper-based) publishing. I understand why Noam Chomsky points to media like radio and television; increasingly, I point to the languages of algorithms. Yet to bring it back to “mass media“, the basic technology has not changed very much: Five centuries ago, the media were images presented in churches; today the media are images presented on paper, on screens, in trademarked logos … of companies steeped in western capitalism … brought to you by … western civilization.
This is, by the way, the same organization that brought on global warming, corona, the military industrial complex and all that jazz. So when you kick up your heels on the front porch and throw back some refreshments, think a little bit about who is really financing the bombs being dropped on Ukraine.
Socio Business blog 