The Most Effective Propaganda Machine The World Has Ever Known
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CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS
THE IDIOCY TSUNAMI
SHARING POP CULTURE LETS PEOPLE FEEL LIKE THEY BELONG
VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES
THE DANGEROUS PHENOMENON OF PROFESSIONAL SPORTS
INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY AS DYSFUNCTIONAL SEX EDUCATION
SUSAN BOYLE
HOW MODERN MEDIA CAUSES AUTISM AND ADHD
CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS: The effect of the media and pop culture is to foster a certain pervasive consciousness filled with approved information which keeps the collective mind busy, largely programmed, while many of real important realities are hidden or submerged in the flood of data so as not to have enough time to think about them. What this does is to program what might be called both a collective consciousness and a collective unconsciousness. While in most cases it is technically allowed or legal to bring important issues out of the unconscious, the continuous overwhelming barrage of pap tends to overwhelm such and drive it back out of the consciousness into the unconscious befor it has any chance of challenging the controlling powers.
Actually radio, TV, video games, etc. have negatively affected everyone's lives relative to their expected potential. The internet is simply next on the list. The reason is all have been used to dumb down, emotionalize and hypnotize rather than to educate.
US daytime TV 'news' is 50% adverts and 50% PC propaganda slanted highly selective 'news'. I regularly watch BBC world news and Euronews rather than US daytime 'news' though that's not much of an improvement, it just gives a slightly different and broader perspective on things.
It is certainly true that the characters on TV and other mass media are extremely important role models for the masses who tend to mindlessly model their life styles on such models. The drop in birth rates in Brazil supposed to be one such effect is an important example, but unfortunately one of the few positive ones.
As McLuhan pointed out, the medium is the message. TV and modern media change preferences profoundly simply due to their visual ADHD format that conveys only skin deep visual imagery. The human mind's attention is naturally drawn to things that continually change quickly, thus the human mind tends to be directed to electronic media preferentially and to take in the only message that can be transmitted by that media, a message of surface beauty with none of the substance of warmth, fragrance, touch, and personal response of a real woman.
It is true that those unfortunate men raised on electronic media are often hypnotized or rather seduced and come to believe that the visual image of woman's looks is what is most important, but the truth comes out in real relationships with real women which are by far more satisfactory than a trophy bride, which is hardly better than a collection of Playboys or dirty videos under the bed.
US daytime TV 'news' is 50% adverts and 50% PC propaganda slanted highly selective 'news'. I regularly watch BBC world news and Euronews rather than US daytime 'news' though that's not much of an improvement, it just gives a slightly different and broader perspective on things.
THE IDIOCY TSUNAMI: Anyone who thinks TV is moronic should take a a look at the USENET groups, of which there are thousands on important subjects, nearly every one of which has been ruined by lack of moderation resulting in tsunamis of spam, flames and idiocy. It is a great failure of the web age that it is simply not possible to find groups on most important intellectual subjects where one can contribute along with professionals in the field.
It is De Tocqueville's tyranny of the majority and the reduction of everything to the lowest common denominator gone wild in the information age. The information age has facilitated the communication of an enormous increase in information flow - unfortunately what that means in practice is simply an enormous spread of triviality and ignorance and often prejudice.
American adults routinely flunk basic science tests, but they can tell you who won the football game, the latest episode of any soap opera in detail, and the latest famous person caught cheating or on drugs, and the names of every brand and model of unnecessary consumer products with near 100% accuracy. After all, that's what counts isn't it?
If anyone has any ideas on how to solve this let me know....
SHARING POP CULTURE LETS PEOPLE FEEL LIKE THEY BELONG: The pervasive meme of conversing about pop culture is simply a method of fulfilling the need to belong to some in group and a way to continually reinforce the fact that you are a member in good standing and thus are to be accepted and trusted rather than ostracized and possibly even seen as an enemy or at least an outsider. It's a modern manifestation of an ancient survival mechanism. In modern societies where tribes are based not on familiar relationships but relationships of association such mechanisms are necessary to maintain in group status since there is no shared group scent or established family relationships among members. So in group membership is much more dependent on shared interests and idols - that is the modern equivalent of shared religious beliefs or political affiliations to tribal leader or god or prophet or hero surrogates.
Sadly we see this widely exploited today by the mass media. Just this week 100 million Americans watched the superbowl, and the next day probably 1/3 of Americans were discussing it and by doing so feeling they 'were part of the herd' due to their shared participation. The same thing happens everyday to a lesser extent by people who share everything from common soap opera episodes, to obsessions with the latest Tabloid style news story. People who don't think for themselves and are insecure in their identities seem to want to belong to social herds in which they can find both identity and pre-packaged thoughts.
The danger of this is that it primes the entire society to accept propagandistic messages of any sort if they are presented as shared cultural experiences, and these are now routinely piped into people's brains through the mass media.
Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found (2/4/09) that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.
VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES: It is nonsense to believe violence in video games and popular media do not affect consumers, especially children. All the most popular games are exceptionally violent. Even if it is true that most can understand the difference between game and reality such violence desensitizes the player to violence and makes the commission of violent acts second nature and more expected and acceptable in society.
There are an enormous number of useful things that could be effectively taught with interactive game-like programs. In fact almost everything could be most effectively taught this way by semi-AI programs designed to teach particular subjects. And there is an enormous intellectual as well as financial opportunity here. Unfortunately with a few exceptions such as flight simulation, there has been little done in this respect compared to the enormous proliferation of violent video games. This is especially important due to the abysmally low level of competence of US public school teachers.
There was a recent study suggesting that kid's morals carry over from the real world to their preference for violent video games. This study seems to largely ignore the real issue. To what extent does the packaged immorality of violence carry over from the virtual world to the real world, not the other way around is the important issue.
THE DANGEROUS PHENOMENON OF PROFESSIONAL SPORTS: There is little doubt that professional team sports appeal directly to the same negative aspects of the human psyche that also are involved in nationalism, ethnicism and war. Whether the worldwide popularity of professional sports effectively sublimates these inclinations, making wars less likely, or reinforces these urges in human culture is I think an open question. Likely it does both, sublimating them into non-lethal fair play based contests, but at the same time reinforcing the need and acceptability for intergroup conflicts. The question is are human societies doomed to continual co-existing with such dangerous urges, or can they come up with a better alternative?
The most obvious and concerning example is the intensity and magnitude of fan mob responses to professional soccer we see all across Europe and other parts of the the world where huge mobs of often drunken youths pour onto the streets in intense and irrational emotional displays of nationalism and patriotism that often erupt into violence. The intense and totally mindless identification of personal identity with that of the performance of a sports team should be extremely disturbing to any concerned and objective observer.
This is precisely the same nationalistic mob mentality that so often has been so easily directed into war and genocide in the past. It also shares many similarities with the mindless fan adulation of popular music performers though that is typically more muted.
And sadly much of this is perpetuated and reinforced by the public school system where what gains students prestige is far more sports prowess and cheerleading than academic excellence. In my view all team sports should be cut from public school curricula. Not only is it a tremendous diversion of money away from academics, but it improperly skews the prestige scales away from academic excellence.
INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY AS DYSFUNCTIONAL SEX EDUCATION: The new wide availability of internet pornography to children and teens has both positive and negative effects. Ideally there would be no censorship and sexual material would be freely available to all as they desired and young people would learn beautiful and healthy sexual habits from it. However it turns out that the pornography produced by the pornography industry is in many ways abnormal for a number of reasons. One it depicts sexual acts between professionals (essentially prostitutes of both sexes who are paid to perform sexually) by and large rather than people who are in love and making love. Thus the sex depicted is often just repetitively going through the motions between semi-bored partners who have done it so often it has become mechanical and lost its emotional loving component. Then there is the overemphasis on close up un-esthetic shots that are more appropriate for gynecological textbooks. There is also the great overemphasis on kinky sex seen among persons who have sex so often they lose the intensity of it and must constantly seek more and more perverted variants in an attempt to recover that intensity. And there is a great skew to depictions of lesbian activity as 'normal' as men are turned on by such images.
Now the problem with this is that such depictions are now universally available on the internet to people of every age and young people are widely modeling their own sexual behaviors after the very skewed sexual meme propagated by the sex industry. Thus among young teenagers we see a huge rise in the emulation of pornographic behaviors as their new 'norm'. Young people of both sexes treat partners as disposable 'hook up' sex objects with little emotional attachment, young girls feel they are expected to engage in lesbian sex with their friends, young girls feel they are required to give oral sex ending in 'facials' to their boyfriends, and often to their boyfriends' friends as well because that's what they see happening in pornography. And on and on. Basically it is a very unhealthy behavior as the model they see is not real people in love having sex, but professionals who will perform any sex act for the money.
Sadly this will lead to even less emotional attachment and more and more women using sex as a valuable asset to be traded for money or goods or power.
I should point out that in primitive and traditional societies due to intimate living situations children were always discreetly exposed to adult sexuality between actual husbands and wives and modeled their behaviors after that so that the 'normalcy' of that society would thus be perpetuated.
