I remember what Seth Godin was teaching some years ago about the new information-driven age; that attention itself, mental focus, was a resource, and an extremely scarce one compared to all the media it could be directed at. I compare this to George Guzzardo's article on media and finance: http://georgeguzzardo.typepad.com/my-blog/2015/04/the-history-of-freedom-and-the-financial-matrix.html “In reality, propaganda cannot exist without mass media. ... Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life.” -Jacques Ellul, 'Propaganda' One engineer friend of mine put it this way; 'You have to be smarter than your equipment.' For some of us, that is a tall order indeed, and it begs the question of who is the user and who is the tool.

"It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, technology style." Wow. Nailed it. We can't be 'us' when we're being manipulated by media technology, and smartphones are the most ubiquitous form of it. 'Who was that smartphone-masked man?' '...the world may never know...'