A LITTLE “LUDDITING” IS IN ORDER
Nothing can be done about youth being “wasted on the young”, but squandering the power of moral outrage on the ridiculous is waste to the nth degree. Beset as we are by screeching to ban books for “woke” agendas, universities more focused on ensuring students don’t feel “uncomfortable” than in sparking critical thinking and a Press willing to quote lies in the name of “balance”, it’s time to rehabilitate the Luddites, if only in spirit.
The 19th century workers who made their point by wrecking machinery that was taking their jobs have been portrayed as selfish enemies of progress.
In fact, the acolytes of the mythical figure Ned Ludd weren’t against new machinery as a matter of principle. Their targets were more accurately focused than protestors who today are excused, even glorified, as “activists”.
The Luddites “… were technologists; they loved technology themselves in many, many cases. But they had an issue, a specific machinery being used in specific ways, namely by elites who wanted to force them into factories and degrade their standard of living.”
They also objected to factory owners cutting back on quality for the sake of profit.
Today, the rich are kow-towed to by both the media and consumers, who they treat as the “great unwashed” by offering “new” products, especially electronic devices, that are merely slightly tweaked versions of the ones they supposedly surpass.
Think i‑Phones and laptops.
Utterances and pronouncements by the likes of Elon Musk, no matter how self-serving, disingenuous or palpably ludicrous, are reported as if issued from oracles.
The demands of tech giants like Facebook and Google are nodded at by political leaders and commentators until they begin to sound like common sense.
Tweets, or whatever the ungrammatical verbal incontinence of “X” is now known, become facts merely by being there.
News outlets increasingly treat their target audience like customers in a cut-rate retail outlet. The line between informing and persuading, always thin at best, is in grave danger of being erased.
Online editions of newspapers, Google et al, routinely offer ways to tailor what is presented. They call it “news you want”.
That’s fine if it means providing up-to-date and in-depth coverage of a specific story or area of interest. Making it the only news presented is another way of offering to willingly reinforce pre-existing beliefs in exchange for subscription money.
The moral arguments of that aside, deciding what’s news is the job of journalists, not their “customers”.
CP Scott, the great editor of the then Manchester Guardian, said of a newspaper:“Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
USEFUL IDIOTS?
Instead, newspapers whose credo surely includes that sentiment, increasingly allow it to be clouded by the bottom line. Advertisements stuck in the middle of copy have headlines using the same (although a bit smaller) font as sub-headlines and read like they are part of a news report.
EG: “Meet Upway — the No.1 Certified E‑Bike Expert”
The fact that it is an advert is conceded in a much smaller, and dimmer type face.
A MESSAGE FROM UPWAY
How’s that for “fairness” and “journalistic principles”? Surely readers should be given the option of eschewing such insults to our intelligence in the same way “cookies” can be rejected in the name of privacy. The irony – and tragedy — is that we are willing to embrace epitomising the proverb “a fool and his money are soon parted” without question.
Were there curious, never mind outraged letters to the editor, or (spare me) “Guest Essays”, when a piece about how aquifers are being sucked dry and fires are rampant, had this advertisement slipped into the middle of it like a paragraph of copy?
“Large Pondless Waterfall Kits
Water feature and Pond Design Ideas for Every Budget
View Our Water Featured Dream Book”(Italics mine)
News organisations thrive or die by advertising revenues. In the pre-digital age however, sub-editors (known as “down-table subs”) had no idea what the advertisements they were fitting copy and headlines around said. Advertisers could request (and pay for) space on a specific page of the paper, but the editorial content only reflected or contradicted the advertising copy by chance. There was no way of changing it once the type was set and that glorious, spine-tingling moment the presses began to roll.
In the digital age, it can be done with a few clicks of a mouse.
HYPERBOLE RULES
Maybe too many of us have simply been ground down by hyperbole. Everything is apocalyptic, probably in part because what isn’t awful is “awesome”.
Had the adjective been as ubiquitous in the days of the Industrial Revolution as it is now, no doubt the owners of the “Satanic mills” would have over-used it to justify their innovations.
The Luddites might well have tolerated the rhetoric, but by all accounts it wouldn’t have deterred them from making their point.
We’d do worse than to follow their example – up to a point, of course.
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