over-communication
...Over-communication -- that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture and its members to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality.
-- Claude Lévi-Strauss ('Myth and Meaning', 1978)
jorrit , 30-06-’05 22:53