The Daily Minutiae

To start out, when I heard Israel was attacking Gaza again, I was disappointed.  When I heard how aggressively they were attacking and about the politics behind the newest campaign, I wasn't exactly supporting the Jews like I felt I should.  It almost feels like a loveless marriage between us and the Israelis.

Then I realized how well-reported Israel is.  We almost know more about what the Israeli military's doing more than our own, daily casualty reports of combatants and civilians alike.  And all with limited press access into Gaza.

This took me back to Gandhi's method of protesting, which preached "Media exposure, media exposure, media exposure," the very method millions of Americans can trace their civil rights to.

As I previously mentioned military casualties in the current "situation" going on in Gaza are staggeringly in favor of the already much larger Israeli army.  And the Israelis have evolved.  With U.S. smartbombs, the Israelis are bombing Hamas targets and leaving relatively few innocent civilians dead, all things considered.

What I think is, is that Israel is redefining how to fight a war.  By and large, the age of world wars and front-line battling may be on its way out.  With nuclear weapons and bigger and bigger conventional bombs --not to mention ever-bubbling global interdependency-- it would seem unpractical, a waste of resources, to wage an all-out war between two world powers.

So war changes to a policing operation where one side is bad and broke the law and the other side punishes them.  Media has become its own front, and the attacking government makes up a kind of (making up a new term here) neo-propaganda, which is nothing more than good PR.  Every successful PR worker will tell you the best way to look good is do good thing (smartbombs) and be transparent, like having a YouTube channel or a blog.

Ideally, Israel would make a really smart bomb that wiped out only Hamas militants all in one blast, but for now they have to make due with their sloppy, but well-planned media strategy.

So many people are doom and gloom about journalism these days, but I'm optimistic.  There will always be a place for journalists as long as there's strife and human rights involved.

A lot of people would wonder why I like this article so much.  To us echo-boomers, it doesn't say anything we haven't heard of before.  In fact, for most of us, it's talking about things we drench our lives in everyday.  I guess a textbook topic name for it would be: "a glance at how social networking websites are bringing the world together."

That's all face-value.  What drew me to the article was the fact that it was written somebody who actually remembers life before the 'net.  We take the news feed on Facebook like it's always been there.  Granted there were some things they mentioned I had to give a look like Twitter and some things like "ambient awareness" that really left a little more knowledgeable.  

The writer of this story throws around words like "phenomenon," "paradox," and even "E.S.P." for Facebook and sites like it but really it was going to happen sooner or later.  This one's for you, Professor Stewart.  The Fourth Truth "They" Don't Want You to Know about the Media: Nothing's new.  First it was telephone.  I'm sure nobody was seeing cell phones and look where we are now: GPS, text messaging, video messaging, new kewl ringtones.  The technology was there and Zuckerberg used it.

I thought it was weird, that bit about how many people we can keep tabs on at one time.  Scientists say 150, a little bigger than my graduating class.  Maybe that dopey small town I came from wasn't so bad after all.

That's how they get us.  We can't possibly imagine what the next great thing will be, only hope that we can afford it.  There you go, the future of marketing and advertising: let people put in tell you what they're interested and suffer them your pitch.

Sometimes I wonder what somebody years and years ago would think if we went in a time machine and brought them back.  The Founding Fathers would be smiling, I think, and the ancient Romans would say we were gods.