The Psychology of Mass Solitude

'A useless effort. Completely without merit.' -The Daily Blow'An unsolicited intrusion into the social and political consciousness of a nation. Absurd at best.' -The Babylonian Spectator'Nice try, sucker!' -The corpse of Noam Chomsky There is a long-standing tradition of comparing civilizations to a living organism: they are born, thrive, fight to survive, flourish, grow old and die. In this series of essays, we extend this metaphor to media studies and explore the impact of mass media on the body of Civilization. We define and redefine some concepts: Transformation, which is the underlying experience from out of which both thought and feeling emerge; The Crowd, that inimical and pernicious mass consciousness in the presence of which transformations occur; and The Signal. Signals arise out of the fundamental aloneness and alienation of all animal life. Unlike plants, which can sometimes connect together through their roots and become one massive, unified organism, human beings and animals generally are mobile, but also isolated, distinct. This leads to the need for signalling to each other.  Signalling develops into Stories, i.e., messaging awakens as knowledge. Stories are the concept we use to explore and understand knowledge and truth. We find Truth in several ages of Man’s experience: first as Utility, then as Authority and Law, and finally as Scientific Truth. We examine the pathways of verification and introduce the idea of story attributes to explain how The Crowd passes assessments.  The next concept is Confirmation. Confirmation is like confirmation bias, but dynamic and understood as the origin of and energy behind opinion. We learn that unlike the hopeful ideologies of Progress, Opinion is deeply conservative. There are reasons for this found in biology and evolutionary theory.  We eventually explore some aspects of economics, and the way Signalling is monetized, weaponized, and reified.   Finally, the book closes on a positive note by exploring psychological states and eventually the idea of Alignment, which is our particular contribution to the definition of Truth.