“Through the Looking Glass” by Al Sikes

It is hard to know where to start, so let me do so with a warning. My thoughts include a promotion. A promotion to look beyond the obvious.

My part-time work in high school included a gig helping a Disc Jockey at the local radio station—specifically KSIM at 1400 on the AM dial in Sikeston, Missouri. My last two jobs were navigating the analog/digital divide in government and business.

My high school job was to retrieve records during a call-in record show. Now, of course, databases dictate what is played—the human factor is collectivized. Or, you bypass radio altogether and go directly to Spotify, where you have curated (the word of the day that has lost its meaning) your own playlist. And I suspect today if you engage on radio you don’t call, you text. Pardon the interruption.

But, now that is the way the world works—technology creates, destroys, and often stands in between. How many of you rent movies from Blockbuster or get movies in the mail from Netflix? Or watch the movie of the week on network TV?

How many of you rely on broadcasting with attendant radio and TV networks for your distractions? Incidentally, in the old days if you wanted to listen to music on the radio, you had to listen to a news segment. It was required as a part of the broadcast license.

Much of the media business is the distraction business. And today when relationships drift toward being  distractions their replacements become primary. Implications?

So let me dress up as a distraction. News distracts us from our daily routine. It generally happens elsewhere and is rarely all that good. News is a good distraction in a democracy but in recent years it has been largely replaced by political themes. Podcasters discover bias, program to it, and call it news delivering it to various electronic devices we carry around.

Create and destroy. Maybe one day probing newscasts delivered by real journalists will reappear. One can hope. In the meantime, much of the creative community who want to use their talents in unbiased news coverage find demand for their talents diminishing by the day.

If you watch news on TV, it is likely you are overwhelmed with products for, let me say, older people. And try finding a real newspaper that covers your community. The metaverse took over classified advertising and newspapers began to deteriorate and then die.

I could go on and will. I have a Chesapeake Forum gig in early June and am looking forward to going through the “looking glass” to discuss the social and cultural implications of destruction and replacement.

Topics will include the implications of society’s device fixation. And, social media and texting replacing conversation and much else.

And, as noted, the replacement of the media we grew up with. Encyclopedias have been replaced by accumulations that change minute by minute. The disappearance of editing as news is a tweet away.

And not wanting to leave anything out of this tease, think about databases—the stuff of the cloud. How do we protect ourselves and how does our government protect us from being found out or shut down? Or the ubiquity of porn? Or the addiction of games?

And I will throw in “free speech” and its constitutional protection. Exceptions needed for the new world?

I suspect most of you will just stay home. Understandable. Existential questions interfere with sleep and defy remedy. And maybe artificial intelligence will decide what human reasoning cannot. Talk about “through the looking glass.”

Regardless, the world is changing, and horror of horrors: it’s hard to turn off this fact.

If you want to learn more and participate further in this discussion, join me with Chesapeake Forum lifelong learners.  You can learn more and register for the course here.

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books. 

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