The Revolution Will, in Fact, Be Televised (but probably by accident)

Visual media is virtually inescapable.  The Inter-web has taken things three steps beyond the saturated, sensory blitz that was television.  Now, viral videos make people instantly famous with the sort of demographic numbers that would send ecstatic tremors through the psyche of a TV station manager.

Half of the things that become massively popular are completely inane, and many of them are rather vulgar.  It's hard to see how this is possibly making the world a better place.

Most likely, it's not.

The level of discourse demanded by a society with a collective consciousness shaped by Twitter is perhaps tenfold more disturbing than anything Orwell or Huxley envisioned (though Huxley was closer to the mark).  We cannot follow even the simplest rhetorical path, or evaluate the dozens, if not scores of logical absurdities launched at us from every quarter.

Gil Scott Heron sang: "The Revolution will not be Televised," in the 1970's.  While I love the song, while there are certain prophetic edges that are still sharp, there is absolutely no way anything so significant as a revolution will not be televised.  Because television has become more ubiquitous and the progeny of television, including the Inter-Web, are legion.  We have a 24 hour news cycle that was just coming into its own during the LA riots in the wake of the Rodney King incident.  In fact, Heron's wonderful line: "there will not be pictures of you and Willy Mays pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run or trying to slide that color TV into the back of a stolen ambulance," was proven absolutely false, as such behavior, minus Mr. Mays, was in fact displayed for all to see on the evening news.

It's fairly certain that soon, probably sooner than any sane person would like, almost everything we do will be televised, or tweeted, or... God only knows what's coming next, but viewers will probably be doing more than tuning in for details at eleven.