9 thoughts on “Zocalo: Spoiler-free Discussion of “The Illusion of Truth””

  1. Because I’m a massive news media PLONK I’ll be rewatching ‘And Now for A Word’ with this, and may I direct your attention to the B5 trailer on the DVD – usually cringe awful, this one’s genuinely quite good with a fun in-theme style.

  2. All together now:

    And we can build this dream together
    Standing strong together
    Nothing’s gonna stop us now
    And if this world runs out of lovers
    We’ll still have each other
    Nothing’s gonna stop us
    Nothing’s gonna stop us now,

    (Not original, but someone had to do it.)

    I want to like The Illusion of Truth. I really do. Its heart is so very clearly in the right place. I’m a fan of And Now For A Word…, and it’s definitely worth revisiting that territory under the full-fledged Clark regime.

    And the basic idea of how to do it is fine. Our heroes take a chance and allow filming because a fast-talking reporter persuades them that he’ll give their story a bit of an outing behind the propaganda that he has to film. It’s stupid of our heroes to fall for it, but people do stupid things sometimes.

    But no-one is so stupid as to think that you’ve said nothing that can be taken out of context to sound sinisterwhen one of you has said “No force in the universe can stop it!”

  3. I obviously wasn’t paying attention before, but just saw in the screenshot – Trumbo and Mostel, both surnames of people who suffered under the Hollywood Blacklist. Were there any others?

  4. Which famous person would you marry? Ah…Mira Furlan. So I’d forgotten how sharp the ‘Everybody hates Delenn’, which in terms of ISN’s assasination strategy, is clearly key assasination from the outset. Well done to B5AG on bringing it to the fore here, and well spotted on the (names of) McCarthyite victims (and you Lee), and the coinciding launch of Faux News.
    It was good to hear JMS description contextualising ISN, but also the name, “Interstellar News”, that’s typical shark branding. Those crazy over-reaching astrojournalists. As to the early-on non-confrontation with Garibaldi, I hadn’t noted Sheridan was provoking the problem, (it takes two to tango), but Boxleitner’s glare is wonderful.

  5. “At one point someone asks for a high-speed data connection and this is treated as a pretty serious request.”

    This is a brilliant read. An example that leapt out at me was the holodeck as social media. Ofc, B5 didn’t have that. McLuhan’s definition of media is broad as (paraphr) ‘anything which is an extention of us’, so clothing and decor, religion, hairstyle, dust, dreams, Zack’s pepperoni pizza and many examples of hobbies the author of that blog gives. These certainly make more sense now than when McLuhan first wrote in the 1970s.

    The second half of Antipope’s post, inter-connectivity as otherness, well B5 is certainly guilty but so much less and so a broad part of it’s appeal: Sheridan tells the Centauri to piss off, Garibaldi gets dressed, Franklin…he’s not the most organised. Ivanova has hangovers, and oh yes, does Londo and boy do those technomages like their flame wars! All this aside, Antipope’s point stands very well. The removal of virtual inter-connectivity to such an extent presents problems reading B5. It’s a look to the past, not to the future and so it’s worrying how much has been replicated. Give a read to that article, it’s long but very astutely writ.

    1. I guess, they don’t use social media also because they have come past it. It’s stressful to always feel this need to connect to the others and perhabs in that century they have learned: Yes there are social media, I can waste my time with it. But it’s much more of a luxurity to just relax and disconnect, especially in a space ship, where there are sensors everywhere that controls if I’m still alive and everything I write is going through the computer system and could be checked and with only 1000 people anonymity is not a thing (because you cannot be anon, when the number of possible people who have written the bad tweet about Picards bad tea taste is only 1000), so being online gives you on DS9 much more social pressure than for most of us the internet nowadays.

  6. Ha, well put Sacha. The (electronic) island mentality would certainly have folk feel everyone knew each others business and also give rise to a sort of echo chamber or bubble. The victors of the shadow war aren’t quite expecting to be exposed to the ISN hate parade.

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