Is “Spring Break” a rational or an irrational event? In any case, it almost seems to be a calculated irrational media event — and the quote in the title seems like a clever invitation to “click here”. [1]
One thing that I believe Milton Friedman may have overlooked in his “Free to Choose” analysis, is that choosing is never completely free … because such freedom requires a sort of “cognitive tax” to think (i.e., to invoke rationality). For example, if I were to want to drink only the best mineral water, then I would need to apply some sort of algorithm in order to determine which water is actually “best” … and indeed: in different circumstances, this might even require various different measurement criteria.
Most modern search engines purport to resolve such complex issues by simply maximizing profit. As long as a sucker is willing to click on a result for which the search engine collects revenue (whether directly or indirectly), that result will probably “pass the test”.
In contrast, rational media involve the inputs of much larger communities of participants. All potentially interested parties engage with other participants by speaking the same language and employing rational behavior (which requires effort). They willingly do so mostly because the results are far more reliable than the results obtained from the far less intellectually taxing irrational media.
To pretend that the freedom to choose does not come at a cost would be very naive — perhaps even ignorant. It is far easier to simply consume a “mainstream” religion than to choose a belief of your own. [2]
In any case, if there is one thing I am fairly certain of then that is that the vast majority of people lack the literacy skills required to employ rational media as a method for acquiring reliable information. They did not learn them — whether in school, in college, at a university or any other educational institution. [3]
Therefore, I have chosen to begin work on devising some “training wheels” for people who seem rather clueless or simply unskilled or whatever (indeed, including most of my friends and family, who seem to feign stupidity or for some reason are simply not as literate as the thousands of people who follow my blogs and the many thousands more who simply come across them by applying rational media methodology).
This what I have come up with so far. I have created a site ( classified.news.blog [ https://classified.news.blog ] ) where people can promote different kinds of news, each according to their own preferred categories of information. For me the main categories of information are simply whether the information is of local or global relevance. Most of the information I consider to be important is global in nature — you can see the page I have set up for such “global news” @ https://classified.news.blog/classifieds/nmw-classification/nmw-global (this is just the beginning, I have many more sites to include … and at some point I may also create more categories).
If someone has any feedback (whether positive or negative — I consider it all to be constructive 😉 ), then please feel free to comment below!
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Socio Business blog 