some kind of mushroom

     I listened to a video on You Tube where a young-sounding guy explained how "news" and information work, in the Internet Age.


     He said there are four features that cause an item to --

A)  get people's attention, and
B)  to be shared with other people.

An item can have all four of the features, or one or two or three of them, I think.



The four features are:

The item is sensational
It is simplistic
It is novel -- new, different
It is enraging


     These factors automatically get our attention.

     The video guy said, Don't blame the media for constantly shoveling stuff at us that is

     sensational

     simplistic

     novel, and

     enraging,


because -- these are the items that people
     click on,
     watch, and
     share.



Why is "click on, watch, and share" the goal?
That's how "they" make money.

Simplicity.
Sensationalism.


Sensational; simplistic; novel; enraging.
Click on; watch; share.

     The guy on the video said another thing that I wrote down:

"What gets repeated, gets remembered."


     Not only remembered, but eventually believed, by many people.

     This ties in with what Bill Eddy wrote about the Holocaust in his book, Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths -- and How We Can Stop.  He wrote that many people in Germany came to believe everything bad was Jewish people's fault because Hitler repeated it many times.

____________________________________

On You Tube, type in 

White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

and listen.

     This song weaves an hypnotic spell:

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall


And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call...
He called Alice
When she was just small



When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know


When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards...


     Sometimes these days, the words, tone, and mood of this song -- seem to make perfect sense... a lot of people say it... I don't know, but that's what they say... ...Where are we?...


_______________________

{"White Rabbit," written by Grace Slick.  Single by Jefferson Airplane, from the album Surrealistic Pillow}

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