Producing and Consuming Media 3

The majority of the fault lies on me, but I spent A LOT of time today going through news e-mails to reach a link the fiancee sent me for a job ad. I've subscribed to a lot of these news feeds and have taken on the responsibility of sending them onward to people who have signed up to my news feeds.

I should really be focusing on the job search, though, even if I do feel isolated from the world if I don't read the news or, at least, the headlines. Well. . .I don't know the integrity of that statement if I had more interaction with people in the physical world.

Nonetheless, if a citizen needs to read as much as I did today, esepecially if they want to act responsibly politically and even on the everyday level, imagine how much a writer needs to read and do to both (A) act as a responsible citizen and (B) produce material for the responsible citizen to consume.

The other day, at Southern Appeal, I ran into an article that profiled, seemingly legitimately, some climate scientists that disagreed with the science behind Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Supposedly disinterested climatologists with no ties to corporations made up this body of naysayers, except maybe they voice some protest against Gore not using any climatologists, but rather biologists and drummed up statistics.

The other scientists and pundits that argue against Gore make it easy to disagree with them. Oil companies fund them, or they have some connection with oil companies, scientist or not. Or I get to hear from Michael Crichton, and even though he's probably a smart guy. . .his reasoning just simply doesn't jive with me, whether it has to do with the climate or not.

The scientists in the article found via Southern Appeal supposedly had no such connections. I haven't heard anything more about it since reading that article, but I bet I could probably dig up something.

I have the feeling that I could dig up a whole bunch of other stuff in the realm of politicians -- the whole WMD in Iraq issue, the shouting matches between Bill O'Reilly, whether George Bush served in the National Guard or not.

In the first couple minutes of the Charlie Jade pilot, The Big Bang, Charlie does a voiceover, explaining how Vexcor disproved the fact of parallel universes through a marketing campaign. Charlie, himself, had been so convinced by the propaganda, himself, that when he gets transported to one of these other universes, he can't even fathom that he got blasted outside his own universes.

A friend of mine couldn't understand how Charlie didn't know, but I'm starting to think that the propaganda was simply that effective.

In the end, I mainly want to bring up the fact that we have a lot of information out there, and a lot of it seems to depend on certain viewpoints. Somehow. . .the truth has come to depend on a viewpoint, instead of some kind of objective physical truth that we can't deny. Nonetheless, I still believe in this undeniable truth. It, unfortunately, just requires sifting through an overwhelming amount of information that flows through our Internet and boob tube. If a responsible citizen has this much work to do, along with supporting themselves and their family, how does a writer do their job effectively, too?