For Your Consideration

Over at IM-1776, there's a post on stepping back from more immediate media such as video, sound, and even photos, to provide some distance, to make it more difficult to be swayed by false rhetoric and propaganda.

Not only has digital technology accelerated the dissemination of news events, it has allowed higher fidelity in their transmission, achieving a realism that was lacking in the twentieth century. For these reasons, modern news coverage has an unprecedented rhetorical power to shape the viewer’s world. But this power is now routinely abused. Corporate media entities aren’t satisfied to simply bring the event to their audience; they aim to condition the audience’s reception of those realities. The news media has become the most effective propaganda machine in the history of the world. What power do audiences have in the face of this hypermediated attempt to shape public opinion, and even reality itself? Of course, they can turn off the news entirely, disengaging from the political realm and cutting ties with public life in their communities. But such a move comes with obvious costs, not the least of which is forfeiting one’s own small power to shape opinion and the course of human events.

A better solution, perhaps, is to resist consuming information via modern audiovisual media. Counterintuitive as it may seem, a technological regression is in order.

I'll note that as much as I like Scrivener, I actually do most of my composition and writing in a text editor, often using Markdown. Content first, formatting second.