One of the more difficult lessons for me to learn as a writer is that even when I do my best to communicate my thoughts, my readers often experience them differently than I intended. It's not just that I might be too nuanced or have chosen the wrong phrase; like any craft, there is an interaction involved, and I cannot control the “beholder’s share.”
“It’s not just irony that readers struggle with, but allegory, parody, hyperbole, vocabulary; an increasing number seem not to understand the difference between a metaphor, a microcosm, and an analogy, and that’s if they even bothered to read the article before commenting, which many do not, because they don’t think they should have to.
I read the part in the screenshot.
I skimmed it.
I don’t need to read it to know what’s in it lol lol lmao.
None of this is shocking if you understand the animating principle behind it: a sincerely held belief that it is the writer’s job to make himself understood by readers, even when those readers don’t so much read a text as skate over the face of it like a waterbug. The notion that true understanding might require getting their feet wet is one they neither believe in nor appreciate.”
Here is an eloquent discussion of the dilemma, from The Freeman, Artist vs. Audience
Recently, Vox reported:
“In 2017, researchers at MIT, the University of Tokyo, and Recruit Institute of Technology crowdsourced a database of 100,000 “happy moments” from 10,000 contributors. Nine years later, the data journalist Alvin Chang plotted those moments onto an interactive "happy map" of the topics that people find most joyful.”
Stealing the concept of a musical coda from Paul Krugman’s Substack I offer up this YouTube video. And I would be remiss if I didn’t also provide Alvin Chang’s interactive map.
Today’s media landscape increasingly features infotainment, the term for the fusion of information and entertainment. Examples include The View and Joe Rogan. Recently, the FCC’s Brendan Carr has stepped into the situation, targeting late-night talk shows and now news reports on the “excursion” in the Middle East. It is time for us to pause and reflect on the First Amendment and its exceptions.
“In 1959, however, when a political candidate used the equal opportunity law to make defamatory remarks about an opposing candidate and in light of growing television news coverage of political campaigns, Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to include four statutory exemptions to the equal opportunity provision. Under the amendment, broadcasters are not subject to equal access obligations when a legally qualified candidate is included in a bona fide newscast, news interview, documentary, or on-the-spot coverage of a news event. This amendment sought to relieve broadcasters of the impossibility of providing free air time to every minor candidate.”
From the Free Speech Center of Middle Tennessee State University, an explainer, Equal Time Rule
I’ve been spending some of my time with a West Coast startup, and the experience highlights the generational gap even more. While I learned some computer basics as a young adult, my journey as a programmer ended when networks began—these people are digital natives. But as it turns out, we're all either newbies or veterans with some form of technology.
“One of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.”
From Nicholas Carr’s Substack, Flame and Filament
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
