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the associations bundled around viral metaphors are obviously dense and this enables a rapid migration from register to register. these migrations seem to happen almost unconsciously, a function of repetitions or mappings in the imagination of the people who write scripts. the press, given to telegraphic forms of communication as a function of the media they work in, seems to be inclined to traffic in these associations because they enable the telegraphic forms to acquire density, using rhetoric that makes otherwise flat descriptions jump out at you, affect you. this is important for maintaining engagement, which in turn is fundamental to the selling of advertising. in the commercial shangri-la that is the united states, infotainment is an advertising delivery system, so anything that captures attention--and particularly anything that generates a kind of floating anxiety that is itself mediated by the accounts of events in the world---are good for business. it is better of course if these events follow the usual narrative arc of problem-->strategy-->implementation-->conquest because the last 3 phases enable the this mediation function to acquire a therapeutic dimension.
so you find in a situation of generalized anxiety about the implosion of neoliberalism and the socio-economic relations it enframed a particularly fertile space for media self-promotion, and by extension promotion of the advertising for which it stands across the riot of curious metaphors associated with swine flu.
this says nothing about the relations which may obtain between this infotainment and situations in the world. it's just about how the rhetoric seems to operate.
i gotta go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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