Hey Stoopid

If, as Douglas Adams argued, the interconnection of all matter means you can extrapolate the entire universe from a single piece of fairy-cake, then it is certainly plausible that you can take the temperature of global culture by sampling its outputs. There is then the Ozymandias approach, drawing impressions from thirty-six screens changing channels randomly every hundred seconds. (“Information in its most concentrated form”? Not really. Concentration implies prior processing, whereas the whole point – as Moore sets out much more persuasively at the start of Chapter XI – is that the waves of images and impressions are raw and chaotic, undiluted but also unmixed, within which regularities can start to be discerned. Anyway…). And then there is the Morley approach, akin to Blake’s urging us to see the world in a grain of sand: returning again and again to the same pool, so to speak, of people mentioning Thucydides on the internet, to see how the patterns change. World events, especially…