27 April 2009: "Overwhelmed by the Swine Flu "

This post is about tautology. In a discussion about the current panic over teh so-called swine flu, Carles notes how a medical event has transmogrifed into a media event, rendering the information transmitted specious and unreliable: "Kinda weird when something that is ‘viral’ actually ‘goes viral,’" he remarks succinctly. Is information really a disease, he asks by way of implication, or is disease merely a form of information? What's needed, Carles suggests, is an epidemiology of folk epidemiologies: "Please use this post to share tips on how 2 avoid ‘catching’ the swine flu.’ Gonna go do some research." The underlying idea, as word about the disease spreads, is whether or not we can be said to have caught the flu merely by hearing of it and fearing it. There may be no practical difference if the fear disrupts our praxis, as Carles notes: "Don’t even feel like anything I blog about even matters. When u hear about a story so serious, it’s like all of this ‘alt music and culture’ stuff doesn’t even matter."

So in the end, rapid dissemination of medical information makes the content of the virus be its own description; the details of which become symptoms on the social body, obliterating information as more and more attention is sucked into its black hole.