WHAT a noisy world we live in. By noise, I’m not referring to what the Oxford Dictionary describes as “a sound, especially when it is loud, unpleasant or frightening”.

I’m honing in on the concept of “noise” as defined in communication and information theories as “any interference added to the signal between encoder and decoder that make accurate decoding more difficult; a major source of error” (O’Sullivan et al, 1994).

Now, the average Malaysian would probably only come across the word “decoder” if he is a faithful subscriber of Astro or if he had paid attention during his communication theory classes in university.

I assume the word “encoding” might be familiar to those in computer science or information technology but I could be wrong since the only thing I can programme is my ancient VCR player.

Encoding essentially refers to the process of embedding some form of meaning into a form (like a text or image) that can be decoded (understood) by another.

So, noise in this context prevents the message from being accurately understood or decoded. 

I’m not giving a free lesson here but I do feel the need to elaborate a bit on this to get to my point about the noise that I find annoying in this epoch that we all live in now, notably that language has lost its currency in the face of spin and propaganda not of the political sort but by corporations.   

There’s a pervasive lack of clarity about pretty much anything now in our culture, especially if you only tune in to the mainstream media and their neatly packaged entertainment.

I am greatly annoyed at how our everyday language has been bastardised by irrelevant words and prefixes and phrases that add absolutely no value to a sentence. 

These “additives” in our language only inflate mundane word phrases into seemingly important officialese.

Corporations hide behind the veneer of language. Language is depersonalised to squeeze out any semblance of character or humanity for the sake of “professional” communication – something that is now taught in universities, especially in mass communication programmes.

The most popular arts programme in local universities is mass communication (or “mass comm” for short}.

It’s worrying that most majors offered by universities are in public relations and advertising – two professions that are rooted in spin and propaganda.

In the previous private institution where I taught more than a decade ago, the mass communication major offered the trinity that is needed to balance the equation: advertising, public relations and journalism.

No prizes for guessing which was the least popular major of the lot and which has since been effectively erased, causing an imbalance in the media and communication industry because what journalism offers is the moral and ethical centre of the media and communication field.

The phenomenon of fake news is merely a symptom of a lack of media literacy in a vast majority of the public.

The irony is that trust in the media is at its lowest, surveys show, while the rate of consumption is at its highest, judging by how glued everyone is to their devices and screens.

As a result, our popular culture is now all noise, all spin to favour the best campaign or endless blinking lights and pixels that intrude on our private spaces promising instant, shallow gratification.

In other words, it’s a noisy competition to attract our attention or to distract us.

Little wonder why young in this day and age are soaked in ennui – it’s an endless information overload, noise at its highest order that is both visual, aural, and intrusive unlike in any era before.

And of course, the platform for this is media technology – sold to us as “connecting” us to each other with the promise of making the world “a better place”. A better place for corporations to sell their ware, that is. Nothing more, nothing less.

The onslaught of branding and advertising has destroyed language, syntax, diction, you name it. This is the real dystopia.

Pure desire has taken over and this has permeated into our everyday politics; politicians, too, sell their wares with no long-term plan for customer satisfaction.

This may explain why right-wing nationalism is on the rise everywhere: loud crassness is easier to sell than the hushed tones of reason in an environment marinated in noise. – September 23, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.