Art. Not Entertainment.

The fundamental problem is not information.

The need for information is visceral. Survival depends on it.

Food is absolutely essential to sustain life.
Mc Donalds is classified as food.
Mc Donalds is not absolutely essential to sustain life

It is the human need to store, find, look at, re-use and transfer it, that poses a problem.

Information is absolutely essential for finding food
Mindless blog posts are classified as information
Mindless blog posts are not absolutely essential for finding food

Yes, you could search for recipes, restaurants that serve food, stores that sell food etc. on the internet and that is precisely the point.

This is not to say that Mc Donalds or google is bad. it is, like the tail, just a part of the evolutionary process. To state the obvious, not all evolutionary strategies are meant to be beneficial to the host. Mc Donalds might just be a step in the evolutionary progress of cattle; where, by becoming progressively tastier and irresistible to humans, they ensure the survival of their own species. Nature as the frenetic firefly knows, does not care for how long you live; only that you live.

Mc Donalds is for want of a better word, "meta" food. it refers to food and yet it it is something other than food.
It is a concept. Just as blogging is a concept

These concepts, are essentially, agglomerations of existing ideas;
fries=potatoes+oil+salt+fuel+steel+
blog=pc+cheap bandwidth+html+

html and potatoes are again meta entities going down to the rawest material available on earth.

Perhaps it is the evolutionary direction; earth+water+sunlight+air need to come together just right to create a coconut; without that coconut, there would be no monkey and hence no human.

For debatable reasons, the more "meta" an entity is, the more attractive to our senses it seems; Raw potatoes are not as attractive as golden brown fries drenched in salt and fat and raw tcp/ip packets are not as attractive as rounded corner web 2.0 icons on the www.

When it comes to meta entities created by humans, the entities that are successful in propagating themselves are those that, interestingly enough, align with one or more of the following concepts:

- Pride
- Greed
- Lust
- Comfort

Strangely though, these are the same "principles" that are advised against by all religions and "decent people" in some form or another.

Why?

To answer this seemingly simple question, let us step back in time, to those two or three hunters sitting around a fire, making basic sounds and sharing data with each other; most likely on where the food is available.

To start with, presumably, there was a small amount of information that could be handled by a single human brain.

Then came communities. the information from >1 human had to be consolidated and organized for storage and retrieval; which lead to the development and subsequent explosion of story-telling, song-writing, painting and other art forms. What could not be organized went under religion. god was the information management system of the future.

And art, is divine.

Things were manageable for a while, even when, at the later stages, it got to the "suitable boys" and totally dreary documentary films.

With the explosion of libraries there was too much more information than one human could assimilate, make sense of and derive anything of use from, let alone find food.

Then came Leibniz with his “’Let us calculate, Sir’, and thus by taking to pen and ink, we should soon settle the question.”

When libraries got too crowded or specialized and the silicon chip made itself available; i.e when we could, we took all the information created by all humans and started feeding it to an automaton that was really good at crunching numbers greater than the number of grains of sand on earth. What else could the hapless machine do but crunch the information and churn out countless combinations of the bits of information fed to it. And we connected countless such automatons to each other with a human attached to each.

We had managed to exponentially increase the amount of data; without being sure if there was any useful information within.

Things had gone way beyond what even a community of human brains could assimilate. god had been broken into a zillion pieces and we couldn't put him back together.

"modern" art had become like mental arithmetic. Pointless.

We could have quietly shut down the monster and gone back to the more manageable life, but that's not how human civilization works now does it. we go forward.

To make sense of the madness, we again had to organize the information. How else could we do it but around concepts we already know; that of communities and stories.

And storytelling is art

Art is an exercise in abstracting static snapshots of dynamic entities.
Art abstracts concepts and arranges them into stories
Art is not art if it does not tell a story
Art is not the technique that creates it
Entertainment uses the techniques of art to convey banal messages
Art is never entertaining
Art makes you sit up and take notice
Art is ageless

Art, far from being entertainment, is critical for human survival.

Art is heavy and painful, entertainment is light
Art is to entertainment what pain is to pleasure

"Do art; not entertainment" is probably what the religions and decent people have been telling you all along, as you speed along on the road to confusion and the creation of useless data.