Brain Assassin

Whoa, two days with­out an update. I can almost hear you out there scream­ing “What is wrong with you?”, “You promised!”, or “Don’t get a life, I absolutely need to read what­ever you write!”. I do take my respon­si­bil­ity seri­ously. It it all about enter­tain­ment, isn’t it? Since there’s noth­ing of great inter­est going on, and I know it all – trust me, I take the chance to address some­thing that’s been on my mind for the last 24 min­utes. No. This is nei­ther a hint at a cer­tain TV show nor am I refer­ring, in an encoded way I might add, to a par­tic­u­lar movie inspired by Dou­glas Adams.

No, what I have in mind is about a cer­tain term that has been in use for quite some time now: info­tain­ment. Obvi­ously, this word is the result of an art­ful cou­pling of informa­tion entertain­ment and refers to a mix­ture of news and enter­tain­ment fea­ture. In short, it is a way to make hard news more diges­tive to the aver­age Joe. Plus, to my mind, it describes a cer­tain lifestyle where it is impor­tant to know every lat­est bit of infor­ma­tion avail­able on a topic almost always con­cern­ing so-​​called celebri­ties or cool new stuff in gen­eral. It cer­tainly makes you look cool if you got the lat­est “intel” on some­thing that oth­ers don’t know of.

I do not like this term and I do not like the way info­tain­ment has sneaked up on us. This is no pure jour­nal­ism but rather some­thing the masses like. There, it’s out. This post is a rant … and, frankly, I just don’t get it. What’s wrong with hard news? If there is so much going on in the world, and there always is, why do we have to take a look at Jen­nifer Lopez’s off­spring on the cover of the lat­est Peo­ple issue? Those in com­mand even paid a few mil­lion bucks for the exclu­sive pic­tures. Now, that is what I’d like to call tremen­dously per­verted. I’m feel­ing so sick.

There is vir­tu­ally now way to escape this mad­ness, and a mad­ness it truly is. Hon­estly, that just shows how rot­ten our soci­ety is. An obser­va­tion by Will Durant comes to mind: “A great civ­i­liza­tion is not con­quered from with­out until it has first destroyed itself from within.”. There exists a paper (PDF, ~261 KB) that orig­i­nated back in 2000 and describes how info­tain­ment is a threat to democ­racy because of dimin­ished inter­est in pub­lic affairs. I’m no dooms­day prophet but I enjoy say­ing this: The end is nigh!