Information Black Out

News is a tricky thing. It can be the good, the bad, and the ugly kind. Some types of news, in my opinion, are a necessary intrusion of our solitude although it can certainly drive some people into a deep level of paranoia. Through an “information black-out” we were asked to experience for a period of 48 hours, I found myself to be much more dependent on the out side world than I had anticipated. There was a moment a couple of hours in that I felt this hint of anxiety, the kind of need to know who is everyone, where and what they’re doing. Coincidentally I found more time to be out side doing something with myself that was kind of conducive to my health. It took me back to my childhood where you left the house at the crack of dawn and didn't come home until the sunset. Went to the park with the dogs and stumbled onto the Coconut Grove Art Festival. It felt weird that I kept reaching to my side checking for messages on my BlackBerry that wasn’t there, oops, forgot I left it at home.

What caught my interest most was the amount of time left over for me to think for myself. It was in a way relaxing not to have to filter the good news from the bad news, deficit this deficit that, why Americans are so over weight, what will Obama’s hair look like after his term as president, what celeb is hooking-up with what other celeb. Is the world running out of things to talk about? I have daily news needs however that I absolutely need. First is the weather, it guides me in the right direction as term affective cover-up gear. Second is traffic, when, where and how can I avoid it. The third would have to be, the morning family check-in. How’s everyone doing and what they're going to do about it. Had I known how cold it was going to get on Sunday, I would have taken a sweater to the park. So to me, news is like what the grumpy old man said about his wife, “can’t live with her can’t kill her”.

Aristotle's and Plato's influence on how we communicate today.

For good or bad we communicate with the intention of convincing or to persuade our audience that the words we speak are indeed the truth. True to the Aristotelian rhetoric, justification of the knowledge base of the speakers is greatly desired. Compare these two examples; if Yoichiro Nambu, a 2008 Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, or Pee Wee Herman, beloved TV show host of “Pee Wee’s Play House” during the 1980’s, managed to get on national television and said “the world will come to an end in 11 days”, who are you most likely to believe?

The first thing that would jump out at you might be, because it would for me, is ethos. Ethos is our appeal to the credibility of the speaker. Here we are faced on one hand, with a TV personality that is synonymous with wacky, cartoony, and borderline delusional characteristics, running around in his red shoes, pale skin and cowlick screaming to the top of lungs “it’ll all be over in 11 days ha ha”. Hum, questionable? On the other hand we are presented with a physicist in a white lab coat with glasses speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”. Don’t know about you but when I see a lab coat, I think genius. Sure you could go online and Google him to find out more about him, but he’s wearing a lab coat.

The next two parts of the art of discourse play a much more personal and tighter role in rhetoric. Logos is an individual’s attraction to the message based on logic or reason, and pathos is the attraction based on emotion related to the message itself. I my opinion, the first of the two that I would engage in would be pathos. The reason being is because Pee Wee Herman telling us that we’re going to die would probably make me laugh after thinking about what kind and how many drugs he’s on. Given that, I wouldn’t make it past the pathos phase because I would disregard the message completely. Now a physicist in a white lab coat with glasses on, speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”, might make me soil myself just a little, not that much…..yet.

In Pee Wee Hermans' case, since the emotion generated wasn’t taken seriously, I wouldn’t go on to the logos portion of the rhetoric. But, big butt, in the case of the physicist in a white lab coat with glasses on speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”, would push me into logos because of its plausibility. In comparison, Plato, to whom Aristotle was a student of, believed largely in dialect as leverage to the art of persuasion. The idea is that if we use different words from the norm (big words, words with different pronunciation or in another language) our story can be just that much more persuasive and compelling. One last example is, I’m just student doing an assignment, do you believe anything I've written on this blog?

Why do we write things down?

If we take a look at history and the evolution of humans as a culture and civilization, guaranteeing our survival through procreation would be at the top of my list. Look mom no hands. Hundreds of thousands of years of wondering who we are and why we're here might have been the very questions our ancestors where thinking about, till one day someone decided to apply color pigments to the inside of a cave wall.

By definition, the modern practice of history begins with written records. Dating back to Ancient Mesopotamian, about 4000 years ago, the form of writing used was with round-stylus and sharp-stylus. Over hundreds of years, Chinese and Egyptian civilizations developed its own language, giving way to the more traditional form of an alphabet that we use today. Again, I guess what we were seeking by recording events and legends were to capture life in the moment, so that those to come can know what our interaction with the world and what was taking place. Knowing is half the battle. We write things down so that we don’t forget, so that we may look to the past for answer. Sometimes, not always, I take notes so that I can study for an exam or to send the ones I love a message on their birthday.

Writings things down gives not only man kind as a whole but we as individuals the opportunity to leave a mark in history. Take this blog for example. Yes, it is a part of an educational program but, I will be leaving my footprint somewhere on this Earth in this life time or another. As digital and minuscule as that foot print may be it is now part of my legacy although I highly doubt anyone would ever care to look. So why do we write things down, I believe it’s so that we won’t forget who we are, how we got here and what we did while we were there.