One look at the Media

Here's one criticism on mass media (TV/Internet/Social Media) from one of Michael Crichton's characters Dr. Ian Malcom:

"This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slow down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media--it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity--our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity."

I find this observation very interesting. One person pointed out this week that the media is mostly to blame for the big uproar about the pastor who wants to burn copies of the Qur'an this weekend at his church. The person argued that if the media would not have given the story legs, the story would've have just gone away. Maybe he is right or maybe he his wrong. But it did prove how quickly we can be swayed in one direction or another by the mass media. Maybe the world is getting smaller thanks to the internet. And that is a great thing, but maybe we are losing some of the intellectual diversity because of it. I suppose everything has a price to pay, but is it really worth the price? What are your thoughts?

***Update: for an additional look into the issue read this NY Times article here.***