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polls are bizarre-o things.
i think they're popular because they're cheap and appear meaningful. but more, they give an illusion of immediate connection between the audience and medium, which is key for any successful authoritarian media system. polls quantify opinion so make it into a kind of data which is paper-thin but nonetheless scientific-seeming.
nonsense plus footnotes.
the magic of number, of counting things.
i think polls are innocuous in themselves, but used as they are by television infotainment outlets, for example, they have the effect of basically telling audiences what they think...it's like they're passivity generators that effectively say "no need to think about x given that The Abstract People have already spoken to our telephone operators...." this because infotainment outlets typically don't bother with things like method or actual data, which presumably would bore you and i and interrupt our rapt television-viewing attention which must needs be maintained until the next sequence of vital advertising.
as for the self-confirming circle-jerk of fox news infotainment and the manufacturing of an illusion of consent for right-wing politics, i suppose we're about to see how effective it really is.
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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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