Ah Facebook...
You so often serve as a useless window, staring at the brick wall of human inanity, but sometimes - just sometimes - you illuminate the world around us - just a little bit.
As I've been perusing "the news" on Facebook over the last few days, reading first the meatball lead-up to a typically heart-wrenching end to a Chicago Bears season followed by alternately whiny Bears fan tearing theiryoung, injured quarterback apart for appearing on film looking disappointed about not finishing the biggest game of his life and gloating Packer's fans, I've noticed a disturbing trend.
You so often serve as a useless window, staring at the brick wall of human inanity, but sometimes - just sometimes - you illuminate the world around us - just a little bit.
As I've been perusing "the news" on Facebook over the last few days, reading first the meatball lead-up to a typically heart-wrenching end to a Chicago Bears season followed by alternately whiny Bears fan tearing their
The tone and substance of the posts and comments that the end of the football season is being discussed are frighteningly similar to the parallel comments on the outcome and lead up to the 2010 elections. The gloating, the often vicious (or at least thoughtless) commentary, the bombastic tone - and ultimately the pathetically uncritical scope of most of the writing on facebook about sports events, elections... anything really demonstrates one of the real shortcomings of the medium.
Not so, though, the medium of the radio. Much like television, radio has enormous potential for imparting information in useful ways. Marshall McLuhan called radio the...
* * *
July 2018
..."tribal drum". What strikes me as most amazing about not just this observation of McLuhan's, but most of his work, is how prescient his writing is today
* * *
October 2018
... and even today. Or moreso today!
The Tribal Drum seems like exactly the theme I was planning to return to not so long ago. Boers & Bernstein has been the sound of Chicago Sports Talk Radio (and importantly, The Score has always been that same voice) of the aughts and most of the 2010s. This post, despite its academic and leftist turn, was first and foremost a celebration of the best Sports Talk Show that I've ever know.
Noam Chomksy (via Michael Moore) was the first person to point out to me that the discourse found on a typical sports talk radio show was more elevated than the discussions found on any NPR or news radio or (general right wing) talk radio in the United States.
I don't mean to pretend that there is not a meatball contingent in sports talk - just that there is an equal or larger meatball contingent in any news broadcast (I'm looking at all y'all FOX News, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, ABCNBCBS, blech).
Chomsky & Moore point out that the American populace is not, as often seems the case, uninformed unintelligent unsophisticated. If you listen to callers on sports talk radio (not all of them, but the good ones) the extent to which they are informed and intelligent, and their arguments sophisticated. B&B ensured this - they elevated conversations and called out bullshit when it wafted in.
Our political dialogue today seems like our sports fandom. Even more so in 2018 as it was in 2011, but it's been a trend line since the 1990s. The primary difference between the two reveals itself on sports talk radio - the ability to be self critical and diagnose the problems within your own team.
Of course the part that's easy to forget is that we're all on the same team...
* * *
July 2018
..."tribal drum". What strikes me as most amazing about not just this observation of McLuhan's, but most of his work, is how prescient his writing is today
* * *
October 2018
... and even today. Or moreso today!
The Tribal Drum seems like exactly the theme I was planning to return to not so long ago. Boers & Bernstein has been the sound of Chicago Sports Talk Radio (and importantly, The Score has always been that same voice) of the aughts and most of the 2010s. This post, despite its academic and leftist turn, was first and foremost a celebration of the best Sports Talk Show that I've ever know.
Noam Chomksy (via Michael Moore) was the first person to point out to me that the discourse found on a typical sports talk radio show was more elevated than the discussions found on any NPR or news radio or (general right wing) talk radio in the United States.
I don't mean to pretend that there is not a meatball contingent in sports talk - just that there is an equal or larger meatball contingent in any news broadcast (I'm looking at all y'all FOX News, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, ABCNBCBS, blech).
Chomsky & Moore point out that the American populace is not, as often seems the case, uninformed unintelligent unsophisticated. If you listen to callers on sports talk radio (not all of them, but the good ones) the extent to which they are informed and intelligent, and their arguments sophisticated. B&B ensured this - they elevated conversations and called out bullshit when it wafted in.
Our political dialogue today seems like our sports fandom. Even more so in 2018 as it was in 2011, but it's been a trend line since the 1990s. The primary difference between the two reveals itself on sports talk radio - the ability to be self critical and diagnose the problems within your own team.
Of course the part that's easy to forget is that we're all on the same team...
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