Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Last night at 3:00 AM I was awakened by music.  Since I live in the woods west of Boston, this was strange.  Crawling from bed and following the siren call through the house, I discovered that somehow my TIVO was playing audio through five channels of surround sound.  The singer was kind of mock country–highly produced, close to falsetto–and beautiful enough to be surreal listened to from near sleep.

I turned off the machinery and stumbled back to my bed. As I lay in bed I had the strongest sense that media had finally passed me by–that I could never approach the sound of that voice, the clarity, the beauty, the sheer production quality.  And this deeper and richer life, this mediated life, had so saturated my world that I was finally defeated as a voice–relegated to the role of a simple supplicant and consumer.  Never again would I think that I might be able to participate in my time, because to be a player in my era is to participate in the media, to play on that stage.

And I had the sense that most Americans feel that way–relegated to the audience–marveling at those larger than life images up there on that towering Super Bowl half-time extravaganza platform, exploding with flash and fire.

Maybe media is the cancer on the planet–not energy-squandering, population-exploding human society–but rather the noosphere that I usually champion so enthusiastically.  Like a more fluid, seamless and insidious version of the “machines” in the Matrix, media is finally solidifying its penetration of our individual and collective consciousness.  Media’s heavier-than air influence is flowing across the planet, creating a blanket of comforting falsehood as it suffocates our true dreams.

As Bob Dylan said, “everybody’s having them dreams.”

And then I woke up this morning to the more mundate business news. The lead story is that Comcast is going to try to acquire Disney.  Why am I not surprised?