REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

Stimulating, edifying, involving media is more and more being replaced by nearly constant predatory pronouncement aimed at shepherding us through increasingly expensive toll booths onto emotionally charged treadmills of one inane type after another. The noise has grown deafening, the clamor scarring. The more sensitive and caring we are, the more weary we become. Until, in self-defense, we finally tune out. Silence becomes golden. Space and peace, deeply welcoming.

The problem is that one size does not fit all. Students of research in Human Development know that as people mature from infant to adult they progress through a series of stages characterized by differing physical and intellectual capabilities held together and mediated by differing sorts of active and reactive biochemical processes. But individuals do not all progress to the same end points and they do not progress through all stages according to the same tick on the clock. Some spend longer in certain stages, others never leave certain stages. On cross-section, we are a mixed bag. But mass media tries and essentially fails to serve all of us en mass. The question we might well ask is: what method of societal communication would serve us better?

The hope has been that with the advent of more and more media channels and ubiquitous access to the Internet individual differences in needs and interests would better be served. But so far, it hasn't happened. Instead, the fracturing of mass markets has diluted funding for any particular splinter. And poor funding has resulted in less stimulating, less edifying, less engaging content across more and more channels. For anyone with any span of attention, efforts to find engaging content have become increasingly fruitless. Once again, the best solution would seem to be just tune out.

What kind of society will result when the most critically inquiring and learned amongst us break off communication from the rest of us and the least learned least critically inquiring amongst us find louder and louder reinforcement for maintaining and celebrating their own prejudicial ignorances? Has our much labored neo-Tower of Babel begun to crumble?

Perhaps in quiet open spaces, more in touch with the unadulterated processes of nature, a practical usable answer will make itself known.