What do the recent Imus and Cho episodes have in common ?
Seen as information, they are both essentially about the same thing, though perhaps for different reasons.
They are about attention.
When I teach web site design in classes, as I used to teach Critical Thinking about media, I start with this quote:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate economist
That is how the two cases are similar; a difference is motivation.
Imus wants attention because he is paid by companies to gain attention so that listeners will hear the advertisements for their products. Those who gain attention on commercial media make money.
After all, that's what ratings do: measure attention (indirectly to be sure) and prices are adjusted accordingly. I worked for a company once in New York which took the Nielsen and Arbitron ratings every night, and adjusted and scheduled television and radio advertising for the next day for every zip code and demographic in every major market in America; an eye opening insight it was.
Imus is good at gaining attention; I don't have to explain to you who he is or put a link on his name, even if you, like me, have never actually heard his radio show.
A white person making disparaging racial remarks about blacks publicly in America will gain attention much more than blacks doing likewise, for instance, in rap music: an irony numerous commentators have noted in this affair, though without seeing its roots. The issue is which gains more attention (from a particular audience, of course; follow the money to find out who that is).
Imus worked for a company, CBS, that is in the attention business: they make money by being paid by other companies to direct and channel attention onto their products and services.
That is what they really do: CBS is not in the news business, nor the entertainment business, nor the television business: they are in the attention business.
As for Cho, he was after something more than money. Something that lasts after death.
When I said to some students that Cho's motivation must have been attention, they retorted, "But he killed himself. He's dead. He can't get attention now."
I simply said: kleos aphthiton.
The undying fame of the Homeric hero. Fame, fama: to be talked about. Achilles is dead, but his undying fame lives on; we still talk about him. And his poet, too. In fact someone even more famous is named after him. Dido, too.
They didn't believe me, until ...
Attention! Until of course, the package with the videos and letters arrived at NBC and were of course immediately broadcast to the world: for, like CBS, NBC is a company that exists to make money by gaining and focusing attention for the companies that pay it to do so.
And NBC did exactly what Cho knew they would, because of course that is what they exist to do.
He is dead, but his message is not.
Not until eclipsed by the next thing that garners more attention.
Is this what one must do to achieve attention in a world of information overabundance ? 33 people dead one day at Virgina Tech, 127 the next in Iraq. Where is our attention purposefully directed by those who control the media of attention?
Sadly, I can only quote from one of my favorites of two thousand years ago, an epic of eventual victory, but how bittersweet, a paean to that fateful goddess Fama: rumour, gossip, news item, top headline, this just in, 15 minutes, notorious, infamous, famous, fame.
Fame, far the swiftest of all mischiefs bred;
Speed gives her force; she strengthens as she flies.
Small first through fear, she lifts a loftier head,
Her forehead in the clouds, on earth her tread.
Last sister of Enceladus, whom Earth
Brought forth, in anger with the gods, 'tis said,
Swift-winged, swift-footed, of enormous girth,
Huge, horrible, deformed, a giantess from birth.
As many feathers as her form surround,
Strange sight! peep forth so many watchful eyes,
So many mouths and tattling tongues resound,
So many ears among the plumes uprise.
By night with shrieks 'twixt heaven and earth she flies,
Nor suffers sleep her eyelids to subdue;
By day, the terror of great towns, she spies
From towers and housetops, perched aloft in view,
Fond of the false and foul, yet herald of the true.
