Legends and the Zone of awareness

Friday 16^th April 1999

This made me contemplate the zone of awareness concept. We all agree that the modern communications technologies are amazing. We learn about Kosovo, East Timor and other world events very quickly. But the fact that people a few suburbs apart in the same city derive the same awareness from the same technology is worth consideration.

Before modern communication, a massive natural event like last nights hail storm would haved slowly filtered out across the population in a slow, story making way. Legends would be born. "Hail stones the size of basketballs!!"

Now while non-factual elaborations may enter the description, who is to say that "the story" and the sharing of those stories isn't important and relevent?

Tricky thought.

But let us bring into play the concept that "the medium is the message" at this point. The relative importance of a story would dictate it's transmission by word of mouth. If the hail storm was worth recounting amongst people it would spread. All manner of stories would be floating about, but they would be competing with each other to spread around the realm of humans.

In our times, though, the various media present their stories immediately, and destroy the natural development of stories amongst people. At best we hear things like "did you hear/see/read on the radio/tv/paper blah blah blah". That is, we are asked by consumers of media whether we consumed the same media.

And if we hadn't, we can rest assured that our fellow human will not be willing or able to recount the story to us anyway. We missed it. End of story.

end of rant.

(C)opyright Sylvano Lucchetti.