This passage from Kim Stedman's recent rant perfectly sums up something I've been dying to say:
News about important edge case solutions, is not currently being targeted to people who might have it. It is currently broadcast everywhere, all at once, in an
information dissemination
pattern similar to that used by
hormones
(which flood the whole body until the right organ hears them),
radio
(which does that same thing to the air), or TV advertising (which does it to your brain). This is the method society is currently using to distribute this information to the 3 in a thousand people for whom it actually makes a difference. This is a terrible method of communication and wastes everyone’s energy and time.* It is also and massively discrediting.
She's talking about a particular trend in health and nutrition, but the principle applies much more broadly in the marketplace. The principle that spattering a message onto 1000 listeners to find the 3 for whom it's relevant is at the core of mass communication, mostly broadcast.
When we realize that most of the noise being made around us is concerned with the narrow and the extraordinary, we can get down to the real business at hand.
