#information age

Years ago I bought a drum at a thrift store. It's big and oblong & has a fantastic voice for drum circles, rituals, dance parties, etc. After hauling it into the park recently I thought, why have I never gotten/made a carrying strap or case? that would make it much easier to use this baby more often.

What IS it? what do I search for?

It took me approximately 3 min on two websites about types of world hand drums to identify it as an Afro-Cuban conga drum. It would've been 15 seconds if I was less stubbornly resistant to Google Lens.

When I was a kid, I would have needed to find a human who was particularly versed in percussion instruments (or at least, recognized this particular one). Or a good encyclopedia. Or a thorough book on musical instruments. Minimum 5 minutes & much longer if I didn't have the correct and specific resource already at hand.

This Is Marshall McLuhann/The Medium Is The Massage (1967)

I see this statement thrown around. And I would like to push back on this with more nuance. Here’s something a professor told me:

You cannot punish people for what they don’t know.

With algorithms and modern strategies of attention capturing, people are being fed information rather than seeking it out themselves or even if they do seek out information, the algorithms will be biased.

In addition, I feel that we have been taught incorrectly about how learning works. People don’t read correct information and just absorb it. There is an entire psychology with learning. We engage every source with our own belief systems, insecurities, and prejudices. Even the smartest person falls to fallacies and their own predispositions. A person in a cult won’t learn and process information the same way as a normal person. A very science-minded person (including the insufferable “logic bros” as I call them) may be more inclined to dismiss anecdotes and stories as valuable information because it doesn’t align with the numbers (the way people present numbers can also be biased but that is a whole other can of worms.)

Research and media criticism is a skill, and it is one that most people don’t thoroughly learn. High school does teach it but only to a certain level. And let’s be honest, how many people were really paying attention to everything in school? I went to a research university so I know how to read and research better than the average person. But it’s been years and I’m rusty because I, an average person, do not work or spend my days practicing research skills or enjoy thinking hard about every single thing I engage with. Daily life is exhausting enough.

If we act like every ignorant person is acting on willful malice and stupidity, we will create in our minds a world full of enemies rather than potential friends and allies, rather than complex humans.