Scoping ideas

Satellite radio, like national TV, is a platform for non-local content. Thus hidden behind its market attractiveness (and potentially high production values) is a capability for purveying spectacle only on a national scale.

Is this a benign fact, or does it bring with it fundamental changes in what folks spend their time thinking about, and the ways they might interact through communications?

Imagine cells in your body trying to respond in an informed way to the world around. They communicate with one another using a finite set of recognizable molecules.

Hence they represent objects in the world around in those terms: "If that's an adrenaline siren, we had better run to shelter quickly!" "Hello, serotonin, long time no see." "Did testosterone just walk in the door?"

So already it's clear that living things, when they communicate, necessarily reduce things in the world around to molecular (or idea) codes that only silhouette what they're intended to represent.

Now let's complicate things by creating new channels for distribution of those molecules. When you cut your finger, instead of keeping the blood-clotting enzyme released in the area of the wound, imagine that it's instantly made available by "molecule youtube" everywhere in your body. If that enzyme is not somehow tagged as "meant for the cut and not the brain", this could cause some trouble.

In other words, just as our bodies need molecules made for local distribution (e.g. within a cell or within an organ) and other molecules for distribution throughout the body, so do our minds need locally-tuned ideas as well as ideas marked-up for global distribution. If we don't label them accordingly and ask folks to respect the difference, in these days of rapid electronic communication we should not be surprised if locally-targeted broadcasts are having bad effects globally, and vice versa.

Can you think of any recent examples of this in the news?