{"id":12715,"date":"2019-09-03T17:14:33","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T00:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sjcctimes.com\/?p=12715"},"modified":"2019-09-03T17:14:33","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T00:14:33","slug":"news-fell-victim-to-speed-and-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sjcctimes.com\/es\/12715\/reviews\/news-fell-victim-to-speed-and-money\/","title":{"rendered":"News fell victim to speed and money"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James Gleick\u2019s book, \u201cFaster,\u201d tracks technology through time and weaves a tale of the havoc wreaked on humanity in speed\u2019s ever-quickening wake.<\/p>\n

When \u201cstandard time\u201d became a commodity 100 years ago, the ties that bound humanity turned from railroads tracks to tick-tock clocks. Humans became enslaved to their wristwatches, technology and capitalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cFaster\u201d describes time\u2019s speedy progression in terms of dehumanization and dysfunction. Capitalism raked in the profits
\nto the detriment of the natural environment and the biological bodies being forced to keep up.<\/p>\n

Mastering a craft takes time. Journalists are craftsmen: wordsmiths. Their objective is to serve the public by accurately describing and distributing the truths they obtain. The quartz- clock frequency is 215 cycles per second – too quick for critical thinking and polish to be applied to their efforts.<\/p>\n

\u201cAssembly-line efficiency is … stripping craftsmen of autonomy,\u201d writes Gleick. Ergo, wrist-watches function more as shackles than time-keepers or bling.<\/p>\n

In order for history to become a living perspective, both time and space are needed to document and absorb information from data. \u201cResearchers in time- compressed speech, discovering hidden punctuation in the pauses that dot our conversation, found that intelligibility declines as the pauses are removed,\u201d says Gleick. … \u201cWe routinely absorb sequences of shots lasting eight frames, a third of a second, or less,\u201d writes Gleick. \u201cIt\u2019s an impression … resonating just below the threshold of comprehension.\u201d<\/p>\n

Capitalists don\u2019t seem to care about intelligibility. \u201cEvery source of delay could be another business opportunity,\u201d says Gleick. When newsrooms are pushed to the limit and dollar signs are the bottom line, words are symbols without a tangible anchor to reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more journalists hear, the more they feel able \u2013 even obliged \u2013 to keep talking and writing,\u201d says Gleick. 24-hr news networks came onto the scene circa 1980, and their authority was undermined as the pressure to produce more content more often increased.<\/p>\n

\u201cFaster\u201d was released in 1999, and in it, Gleick made a prophetic statement. \u201cAs the flow of information accelerates, we may have trouble keeping track of it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gleick\u2019s prediction has come true. It appears that humanity has given up on attributing meaning to words. According to an article in the \u201cWeekly Standard\u201d in December 2018, The American Heritage Dictionary\u2019s Usage Panel was disbanded, which means that they are no longer tracking the changing tides of human tongues, and I haven\u2019t seen anyone picking up the torch.<\/p>\n

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Adding insult to injury, on May 3, 2019, a revision to the Associated Press style was announced on Twitter that removed \u201c(sic)\u201d as an indication of a grammatical or contextual error, effectively allowing chaos and personal preference to tow the line of linguistics in any direction, instead of drawing them around a Latin word meaning \u201cthus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vocabulary obsolescence comes faster and faster. How soon did we lose track of what \u201cfake news\u201d meant? No one knows, because critical thought can\u2019t happen in the time it takes to tap a screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are reaching the level of distillation of an abridgement of a sampler of a \u2018Reader\u2019s Digest\u2019,\u201d writes Gleick. That was in 1999, before Facebook and Twitter were invented.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s fair to say that things have gotten worse in the past 20 years. Social media actively discourages lingering on a thought long enough to digest it \u2013 just long enough to click \u201clike\u201d and move on \u2013 and social media has become the dominant means of consumption of words.<\/p>\n

Consumption, but not digestion, en masse. \u201cIt might be best to think of the one-minute news report as an art form that takes terseness and concision to the limit, kin to the haiku,\u201d writes Gleick.<\/p>\n

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FAST-FOOD FOR BABEL<\/p>\n

(haiku, by Krissy Tobey)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the news today?<\/p>\n

Nonsensical verbiage.<\/p>\n

Why even bother?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why bother? If you don\u2019t bother, who will? Do words matter?<\/p>\n

Does wisdom take time to manufacture?<\/p>\n

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Both \u201cfake\u201d and \u201cnews\u201d are words that have been warped by light-speed technology and misuse, but the future must necessarily be built on the past. If we are moving too fast to keep track of the present, what does that mean for tomorrow?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Gleick\u2019s book, \u201cFaster,\u201d tracks technology through time and weaves a tale of the havoc wreaked on humanity in speed\u2019s ever-quickening wake. When \u201cstandard time\u201d became a commodity 100 years ago, the ties that bound humanity turned from railroads tracks to tick-tock clocks. Humans became enslaved to their wristwatches, technology and capitalism. \u201cFaster\u201d describes time\u2019s…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":502,"featured_media":12716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374],"tags":[],"staff_name":[724],"class_list":["post-12715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","staff_name-krissy-tobey"],"yoast_head":"\nNews fell victim to speed and money - City College Times<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sjcctimes.com\/es\/12715\/reviews\/news-fell-victim-to-speed-and-money\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"es_ES\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"News fell victim to speed and money - City College Times\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"James Gleick\u2019s book, \u201cFaster,\u201d tracks technology through time and weaves a tale of the havoc wreaked on humanity in speed\u2019s ever-quickening wake. 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