Twice recently i’ve heard material / programmes on bbc r4 that are utter garbage, misleading and vacuous. You can spot them from a mile away, bought-in i guess and often about tech, data, AI and delivered in a breathy ‘we are travelling so far ahead’ BS mode that its all utterly unbelievable and always with a Stateside voice-over. delivered as if all is unavoidable, we will / are being overwhelmed by data, analytics etc. Please back up your fantasy projections; I mostly believe what i hear but journalism of rigour needs proof. I am being expected to believe candyfloss ….
You are talking to a man that does not buy in to modern crap, my idea of fun is to chop the sticks, wash by hand, use a pen, doodle, learn things each day, memorise verse and text, look at books which allows me access to brighter and clever people than myself, to enjoy and learn from mans art and handicraft of decades and centuries gone past.
We can expect worse, The Times newspaper Tuesday March 26th (p.20) voiced concern at the dumbing down of bbc r3 and 4 … Michael Buerk worries over the predominace of public school educations, but personally I am less concerned on this point, as surely its never been much different? All i want is quality. I do not want to hear a dumbed down repetitive output that is blinkered to better things. I put my faith in the privately educated! However the new Director of Radio James Purnell is very youth orientated and is actively reducing bbc r3 & 4 but is ring fencing younger targeted material on radio 1 and 6 music as sacrosanct (ehm … anybody listen to these at all) ? Tish pooey … the young couldn’t care less abt radio as a medium and radio 1 is nothing of its former self, it cannot be, times have changed no longer is it universally what we could hear playing in households up and down the land (as a kid we mostly tuned in to the Dutch pirates, not understanding was a bonus). Programmes such as bbc r4 Womans Hour have been badly served, re-scheduled at a most unsuitable loony time on weekday mornings when mothers and housewives etc have to get busy !
A bit like Brexit, the increasing love affair with data and AI is quite puerile, sickening and needless. But like zombies etc we rush to embrace this crap!
I quite happily have no washing machine and each day wear clean shirt, boxers and t-shirt (its called a washing line) … likewise no mobile phone. I do not need such things and i save energy and minimise my electrical consumption and data footprint. BUT BUT BUT in our desperation to embrace technology theres an unfathomable appetite to harvest data, endless data .. what fckng time I open my curtains or what i have in my fridge should matter to no-one. This is data gone beserk and human values need to prevail, not the values of some faceless twit in a corporation i care nothing for.
For instance ‘bit coin mining’ we read consumes the electricity of a small country! If ever a bubble was promoted it is bitcoin. Perhaps it will be tulips next ….
So lets connect again as how we are hellbent of racing to the abyss, below in the Grauniad we read of the electrical power required to run banks of servers and data collection of which so much is pointless and trivial in the extreme … https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025
climate-change-briefing 