All about the noise

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...

This is a quote from the manifesto of a candidate in a student election campaign I was involved with in the 1980s. The candidate I supported was a well-meaning and sincere individual who set out his policies in a reasonable way. The candidate with the blah-blah message was only interested in parties, drinking, and rock music. He had nothing to say, sincere or otherwise, hence the blah. The blah was a reference to his opponent's manifesto.

Needless to say, the blah won the day.

I can understand why. Many, if not most, voters in elections are not interested in reading wordy manifestos, however well-intentioned. I tried reading all of the manifestos of my constituency (then Croydon South) candidates in the UK parliamentary election of 1979. I gave up after the first few turgid paragraphs of political pontification. I have never attempted to do so again.

These days elections focus more than ever on the sound-bite, the three word slogan (Get Brexit done... Stop the Boats... Make America Great...) and making a noise to attract attention. But its not just about politics. From where I look, politics is just another jostle for attention, competing with commercial messages, eyeball grab and click bait, generally.

Doesn't matter what the message is, as long as it generates clicks and builds traffic to someplace or other in the network, or cloud, or whatever you want to call it. The online, on-phone, social media or other such virtual world or 'metaverse'.

Noise attracts noise. The most successful noise generator is perhaps Donald Trump. Not the man, not the former President, but the virtual persona. I just opened up a browser window and one of the many feeds served up by MSN before I got a chance to do anything else was this:

'Kari Lake got served' a lawsuit the moment jury was reading Trump's guilty verdicts

The message was presented on behalf of, 'Raw Story' which means nothing to me. It might have been a reference to the recent verdicts of a New York criminal court. Or it might not. I make no comment about the verdicts in question which I consider none of my business. I am aware, of course, of the controversial nature of the verdicts and this is the point. Any mention of Donald Trump will excite considerable sentimental response. It will excite love or hate, fear and foreboding, outrage and support. More to the point, it will generate noise.

What do I mean by noise? I mean it will generate meaningless digital activity. If I wanted to generate traffic to someplace, I would mention Trump with a controversial statement. It doesn't matter whether it is pro or anti, either will generate the desired noise. I imagine there are some people who spend their lives thinking up, or just copying, controversial statements about well-known and controversial people. Again, it's not about the views, it is all about the noise.

It doesn't have to be about Donald Trump of course, and it doesn't need to be about politics.

Gordon Ramsay leaves fans 'horrified' after 'declaring war on Italy' with new dish

This, again, from the MSN startup screen. MSN is from the Microsoft Empire, the greatest virus in the cloud. The link is to "Metro" which is a London-based free newspaper. Gordon Ramsay is another online meme that generates noise. A TV celebrity chef who swears a lot. "Leaves fans horrified" is the bit that MSN likes. Declaring war, is also helpful to the MSN need to make noise. What has he done? He has probably not declared war, just invented a new recipe, which as a renown chef is hardly surprising. But how much online traffic (or noise) would be generated by "Well known chef makes new recipe" ?

The fact that I clicked on the link meant that I will presumably now get more of this stuff served up by MSN.

Microsoft: The greatest virus in the cloud

We all see these kind of messages every day. Not just on MSN but on anything we use on our devices, on our socials and even on our work laptops. My former employer stopped filtering this kind of garbage out long ago. It was just too much trouble. I tried installing Chrome on my last new home laptop but Microsoft blocked it. I could only do this if I disabled MS security features. My next laptop is going to be a Macbook, which will no doubt have its own nightmare noise generators.

Does the noise matter?

Does it matter, navigating all this noise? I guess not. I guess it's no worse than having to put up with TV ad-breaks (unless you subscribe to paid-for services like BBC in the UK). Or is it? The problem I have with noise is that it has started to dominate life outside of the network/cloud. The 'real' world. Politicians don't seem to want to bother with policies anymore, or even sound-bites. You might get a three-word slogan if you are lucky but most of what you get is just blah, blah, blah!

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Please feel free to comment if you have a view but bear in mind I do not discuss politics, religion or conspiracy theories in this space. Why? Because it just generates more noise. I try to ignore the noise and focus on what's important. In this space it's all about the writing and creativity.

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Thank you for reading.

Ray