Newsdeath

An artist's impression of the emergent properties of CNN

Ian Bogost posts eloquently today on how 24-hour news creates an inertia that newsgames are not yet apt to explore. This strikes me as deeply true. I got to thinking about some other aspects of culture (so did Ian), and recalled that while I found the first Matrix riveting, with its 1-on-1 fights between Neo and Agent Smith, the second one, with a hundred agent Smiths, was rather dull.

Isn't this Neo vs. 100 Smiths a good newsgame in a sense, or at least a simulation of a day in a busy yet meaningless work environment? And isn't what we're talking about here the death drive, insofar as the compulsion to repeat meaninglessly is how life strives for “the quiescence of the inorganic world” (I can never get enough of Strachey's translation of Freud).

So that the emergent property of thousands of periodic headlines and interviews is a dull stillness, like watching a stone?

And wouldn't it be strange if for one day CNN replaced their frenetic stillness with a shot of a stone?

And for what trauma is newsdeath PTSD compensating?