I’ve been probing the media via what's called media dowsing. It’s a plausible idea where you imagine you are holding two dowsing rods, but these are mental dowsing rods.
To dowse headlines and general media guff, first relax in a quiet room. Remove all distractions and with those mental dowsing rods ready, quietly scan headlines, articles and advertisements with as little interest as possible. Not too difficult I imagine.
While mentally dowsing the media, make a quiet note of any word or phrase which, in a sense twitches those dowsing rods. For example, here are three sentences I came up with during a recent media dowsing session. Do they offer clues about what lies beneath?
1. Rishi Starmer may Rayner his poll lead say Donkey Sanctuary foresight experts during luxury sustainable housing crisis luncheon.
Okay - my first attempt almost makes sense, so there could be hidden depths in there.
2. Exotic mobile astrology jobs up for grabs in a sustainable world of AI teaching beta politicians about the dramatic solar eclipse of human experience.
No.2 is a little better because it seems to mean more than the first attempt, but in chasing that ephemeral meaning it loses something too.
3. Millions of households behind existential battle for record pizza deliveries after maps turn purple when filming begins with optimistic doom.
Could possibly be something in there, but I’m not totally convinced by the whole idea. Yet our media do have a level of shallowness which could still be worth dowsing in search of something deeper.
While mentally dowsing the media, make a quiet note of any word or phrase which, in a sense twitches those dowsing rods. For example, here are three sentences I came up with during a recent media dowsing session. Do they offer clues about what lies beneath?
1. Rishi Starmer may Rayner his poll lead say Donkey Sanctuary foresight experts during luxury sustainable housing crisis luncheon.
Okay - my first attempt almost makes sense, so there could be hidden depths in there.
2. Exotic mobile astrology jobs up for grabs in a sustainable world of AI teaching beta politicians about the dramatic solar eclipse of human experience.
No.2 is a little better because it seems to mean more than the first attempt, but in chasing that ephemeral meaning it loses something too.
3. Millions of households behind existential battle for record pizza deliveries after maps turn purple when filming begins with optimistic doom.
Could possibly be something in there, but I’m not totally convinced by the whole idea. Yet our media do have a level of shallowness which could still be worth dowsing in search of something deeper.
7 comments:
All three of your results are clues from The Grauniad Crossword...
But I rather expect the shallowness of the media is a feature, not a bug.
Newspapers and broadcasters now want to entertain with gossip (that word again) rather than inform. Subjects which once merited a page of analysis skid by with an eye catching Headline, a dissociated sub-heading, and plenty of celebrity pictures. Gossip about celebrities and their 'relationships' has now colonised the 'serious' pages. Politics and economics are often reported as one person's views against another. But gossip is far more entertaining because it is about people and their relationships rather than Cod Wars and Trade Balances (which filled the newspapers in my early adulthood).
Need more 'evidence'? Broadsheets have shrunk to Berliner size and are heading towards Tabloid size. "All the news that's fit to print" - hollow laugh.
Scrobs - and in all three cases the answer is "climate change".
DJ - yes, early copies of serious newspapers such as the 'Times' are clearly intended for serious reading and could not be perused at a glance. There is still a certain amount of that, but generally headlines say it all. More 'gossip comics' than newspapers now, which says as much about the readers as the media.
I'll stick to my late fathers "Revealer Detector" - basically a professional set of divining rods. They have proved useful on a couple of occasions when tracing buried services. But I won't be going up to Scotland with them, because they're sexist: they seem to work much better for men than women.
Dave - they could be useful for tracing GP services, or even GPs.
From Taki's magazine:
“Gay Jewish man claims lesbian couple ditched him as a sperm donor because of war in Gaza”
dearieme - if only the Labour party had to tackle something like that instead of Rayner's dull tax affairs.
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