STREAMING – OR VERBAL STALKING IN THE AGE OF MILLENIUM MODERNISM


The above title might suggest that all this is new in the history of communication, art, business and or politics. But, we know sadly, that it is not, and as it perniciously persists into our current day, it seemed a not so inappropriate title, to me.

I’ve been attempting to understand its style and usage for many a moon now. I am (like, I believe so many of you) available to and victimized by Streaming, and have been for many years as a child; a student in training; a working professional, and now more recently in a larger public forum.

I have become more recently impressed with it’s increasing frequent commonality, on all fronts – on television; on the radio; in hallowed halls of governance, and between all sorts of people, their agencies, as a seeming preferred method of non-communicative communication.

Mercifully, I have not personally experienced it in the day to day vernacular of the rancher or farmer, or those vocations of the hand. But it is truly pathological in the vocations of the trite mind and parroting mouth, drawn ever more confuscatingly to the forefront by volitional defensive over thinking and paranoia.

The most obvious example being that of the media’s newest witless permutation of this mental flogging and sheer drivel, as promoted by their continuous cable news coverage’s ever increasing magnified thirst for what passes as their effluent river of “news”.

It not only seems sadly more common, but paralytically endemic to our way of life, as divisive polarization, rather than unifying symbiosis seems to be the encroaching idealized desirable mass communicative hallmark of our day.

A day in which background noise and clatter overcomes dialogue, dialectic, and common sense solutions. It now seems the rule, rather than the exception. The very thing to do? It is the verbal analogy to doing nothing – saying nothing – helping nothing. Our modern day equivalent of politically correct Nietzsche-esk infantile nihilsms (Aren’t they all?).

I even think I remember, that as far back as 1968, when I was living in San Antonio Texas, the halting personal realization, that local and national news was just then beginning to use percussive classical music to highlight and emphasize the ugliness of any particular car accident, and that ever more similar negative information, and close up “in your face” bloody visuals were increasingly being presented and defined as … “The News”.

Streaming may have been around before, but I find myself today, escaping back to more austere linguistically simpler days, as memorialized in the silent and then classical noir movies of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s for more encouraging examples of direct and realistic interpersonal relationships, problem solving, and just good ole dialogue between open minded considerate people.

Now, before I get criticized roundly for this comment, let me just say, ok, not all, but many, and regardless, I find such movies enlightening and enheartening, rather than stupefying, as so many of today’s movies seem to me personally.

And, yes … you are correct this posting is not intended as a critique of movies now or then, but just as personal reflections offered as back ground on today’s increasing use of Streaming, as an excuse and inferior destructive substitute for the more laudable and constructively hopeful communication between and among folks.

What is Streaming:

Repetitive restatements, banal, childish, unsupportive, non sequitur re-questioning, and positioning, regardless of any facts for, or to the contrary. Substantiative arguments are always conveniently and carefully avoided. Bromidic self indulgent sermons guided by clinically and clearly culturally conditioned passive aggressive behavior.

When:

Any time, by anyone seeking to ignore one or another’s vision, words, or actions directly. The design apparently to state and restate the insinuated obvious, while avoiding any rationale or logical argument to the contrary. The point being the intentional belittlement through the lessening of authority, dignity, or reputation of one’s peers, competitors, or colleagues.

Why:

Not sure why, exactly, perhaps it embarrassingly boils down to it simply and sadly being the only tool available in the questionably cognitive toolbox of the noncreative thinker, and their need for what has now become the ever ageless and hapless indiscriminant flogging of the proverbial and now perpetually well dead horse?

Streaming is seemingly often used for any purpose instead of stating a simple Yes, or No, or defining a position, which might otherwise by indefensible, or at best subject to rationale criticism or challenge by the self professed loyal and unyielding opposition.

Those who do Streaming, emphatically denying it (sometimes unconsciously), while simultaneously accusing the other of yielding to its illogic illusory and cowardice like strategies.

Results:

Unanswerable unfounded aspersions, assertions, and accusations, which defiantly challenge the very nature, humanity, and personal motivations of the respondent, while intentionally diverting from any authentic answer to the actual question(s) posed, or offering any mutually constructive solutions.

This destructive and serpentine tactic resulting in mutual distrust, and fear, while further exacerbating the problem confronting both, or all parties, as well as jeopardizing all parties by the increased time necessary to move through this highly charged emotional mind field toward a mutually desirable constructive outcome.

Lord Tennyson, in his “… The Charge of the Light Brigade”, perhaps said it best:

"Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do & die"


AND I COULDN’T RESIST: From our once very own, briefly local, Nobel Laureate:

… Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. …
Bertrand Russell
Skeptical Essays - 1938


All Put More Simply:

Streaming is what we do -- on our falsely self constructed indefensible and shallow cognitive islands, habitated by only one other person, when we offer no solutions to the survival challenges confronting us, and instead of solving the problems constructively together, one finds irrational differences -- attacks and kills the otherwise willing collaborator, leaving the one to die slowly, and inconsolably alone.