On the virtues of dumbing down (or barrage balloons of the mind)

Yesterday, I wrote this in response to a rant.  As rants go, it was funny and accurate at the same time - but, as rants go, it was also - at times - insulting.

The hub of the matter to hand seems to revolve around the issue of whether writers who are capable of complex analysis should - simultaneously - be capable of simple exposition.  Is it, in fact, a one-sided duty of those who wish to be seen to be participating in a democracy to - effectively - dumb down their registers, syntax, grammar and language in response to the needs of a majority or, alternatively, is it an equally one-sided obligation of those who wish to learn more (in general, I would like to think the majority) to proactively upscale their ignorance not only via content but also in relation to form? 

That is to say, should we simplify the questions we set or expect those who sit the exams to muddle their way through obtuse forests of trees?

I would like to assume that complex ideas can be expressed simply, that ambiguity can be expressed with clarity, that incoherence can be laid out intelligibly - that, in truth, form which draws attention to itself is simply a barrage balloon of the mind.

I would like to think that for sure - but, in the light of the current problems thinker-leaders such as Barack Obama or Gordon Brown are having convincing people they have a useful handle on the complexities that face us, I begin to wonder if we aren't destined to relive - and perhaps even exacerbate - the kind of divide between those in the know who don't care to explain for a wider audience and those who might like to learn but don't care to learn the high falutin' code that those in the know prefer to use.

Perhaps we need a new kind of specialism to add to all the specialisms our world is currently plagued with: that of explainer extraordinaire.

And we could call it journalism.  Or blogging perhaps. 

And in such a way, bring the sub-cultures of the world together again.

Even as I write these words, I am beginning to suspect that the dominant medium of the second decade of the 21st century will never democratise us or allow us to speak to each other constructively; will never fulfil its early promise.  On its tombstone, writ large, the Internet will be remembered as the grand creator of niches, of a planetary grouping that ended up coagulating in tiny gobbets of incompatible thought - like white blood cells, in fact, now turned uselessly to rhetorical pus.

(I remember in my youth how everyone watched Play for Today - how everyone watched it and the following day discussed the stories, the underlying theses, the pros and contras; that is to say, the issues raised that affected - and bound - a society still able to look at itself more widely. 

Now we have murders in suburbia and housewives desperately consuming.  No wonder we're becoming an atomised shadow of our former selves.)