punditman says...While Punditman's trusted sidekick and blogging companion, Peacenik, was feigning survivalist within the confines of his cottage and driving across literally hundreds of yards (<<< looky there!) of flooded roads with nothing but beer and love to fuel him, Punditman was growing more depressed by the nanosecond within the confines of his own mind.
As usual, Punditman blames this state of being on the Big Media monolith. Don't get me wrong. I think we should be informed. But we are saturated with mass media these days, and yet we're in more trouble on more levels than ever before. Maybe it is because the majority of today's mass media messaging can be classified as one of the following: negative, biased, insidious or trivial.
Negative media puts the emphasis on bad news, most of which we can do very little or nothing about. An accident here, a murder there, a disaster somewhere, a war over there. As a reminder of our helplessness, this onslaught of angst arrives via TVs tuned to what I call the "bad news channels." Ticker tape tales tell of dire economic conditions, unwinnable wars, fresh international sabre-rattling, random acts of insane violence by mainly males who suddenly explode in fits of rage at age 41, 23, 59, 10...terrible mishaps by stressed out cell-phone distracted, headset-enhanced cyborgs and that great cruel equalizer, the natural calamnity. These 24-hour plasma invaders now dot our public spaces, leaving precious little area of reprieve from the planet's daily carnage. It's one flashed headline of awfulness after another.
I honestly don't know if social psychologists have begun to study the long-term effects of all this mediated mayhem on our already frail psyches, but they should be. Twenty-four hour bad news stations now serve as the fallback channel in (gasp!) pubs (the wait staff never could figure out how to program the 7,000 channel all sports satellite service). So until some geek arrives, it's the bad news channel, no volume necessary. Ditto for the banks. Like everything else they do, banks never care to ask what we want. So there you have it: two places where we don't need to catch any more negative news. Thank you very much, Mr. Banker and Mr. Publican.
Biased media is self-explanatory. It comes in the form of most everything you see or hear on the corporate media networks, from the way the economic crisis is being reported and covered up to the narrow range of allowable foreign policy debate. Switch channel in disgust. Hey, it's another another commercial for more Big Pharma dope with possible side affects worse than the original ailment. This place is nuts.
Then there is insidious media, my very own pet peeve. Insidious media, for purposes here, are those violent video games that desensitize our children. I notice they are now advertised on prime time TV. Adults can now get a little glimpse of what their sons are doing for 10 hours a day up in their bedrooms.
When Punditman was a kid watching Hockey Night in Canada, he may have seen a Tiger in your tank Esso commercial or the old "I'd like to teach the world to sing" coke commercial. Yes it was corporate propaganda as all advertising is, but compare that to today's kids who are subjected to ads for the Grand Theft Auto video game, which apparently has a few critics. Rightfully so. Could violent video games end up causing more damage to society in the long run than a thousand jihadists? No wonder our boys are adrift.
Trivial media includes celebrity gossip and anything else that has no bearing on your life but is nevertheless pushed at you 24-7 as if it really mattered. It really doesn't matter that the Leafs missed the playoffs yet again (does it?). Okay, maybe.
Quality media on the other hand, engages us because it involves actual thinking—the awake, critical, creative, insightful, inspiring and uplifting kind of cognition. But it it is harder to find because you have to first sift through all the clutter being shoved in your face. But it is there. In books; in parts of newspapers; in online or offline documentaries. Peacenik has found one such web gem, by Carolyn Baker, here. It happens to sum up much of the minutiae that has been floating around Punditman's brain these last few days.
The article deals with the "...daily now, almost hourly-rampant eruptions of violence throughout the so-called developed world" and sees it as the inevitable outcome of a collapsing empire. Punditman notes that wackjobs appear even during the so-called good economic times of "empire." Ms. Baker claims that it is the psychology of empire itself that leads to these episodic psychoses of mass violence, "a culture in which one's reason for being lies entirely outside of oneself." You work, you consume, you pay taxes. You feed the growth machine. If things go awry, it's all your fault. Actually, for many people—an inner life that allows for a modicum of reflection or perspective is simply unattainable. What's more, the isolation of modern life means that millions lack a viable social support network. Thus for some, when their organism is distressed, the default position is madness. How many more human cluster bombs must go off before we realize that something in the social fabric, in the way we organize ourselves, in the way information is mediated, is very deeply flawed?
Two years ago, Punditman had this to say about another American massacre:
The good news is that after we emerged from the primordial slime, we evolved into our current apish frames and began to form civilizations around 11,000 years ago, after the last glacial epoch. No easy task! What's more, since 1970 humans have created and stored more information than in the previous 5,000 years. Granted, a lot of it is negative, biased, insidious and trivial. But at least we're a persistent bunch. With any luck, we could get through this current phase of stupidity without slipping totally into the abyss.
Enough niggling. If you are wondering how to make sense of all the mayhem, Ms. Baker's piece is highly recommended. Read it. Then go for a walk outside.
As usual, Punditman blames this state of being on the Big Media monolith. Don't get me wrong. I think we should be informed. But we are saturated with mass media these days, and yet we're in more trouble on more levels than ever before. Maybe it is because the majority of today's mass media messaging can be classified as one of the following: negative, biased, insidious or trivial.
Negative media puts the emphasis on bad news, most of which we can do very little or nothing about. An accident here, a murder there, a disaster somewhere, a war over there. As a reminder of our helplessness, this onslaught of angst arrives via TVs tuned to what I call the "bad news channels." Ticker tape tales tell of dire economic conditions, unwinnable wars, fresh international sabre-rattling, random acts of insane violence by mainly males who suddenly explode in fits of rage at age 41, 23, 59, 10...terrible mishaps by stressed out cell-phone distracted, headset-enhanced cyborgs and that great cruel equalizer, the natural calamnity. These 24-hour plasma invaders now dot our public spaces, leaving precious little area of reprieve from the planet's daily carnage. It's one flashed headline of awfulness after another.
I honestly don't know if social psychologists have begun to study the long-term effects of all this mediated mayhem on our already frail psyches, but they should be. Twenty-four hour bad news stations now serve as the fallback channel in (gasp!) pubs (the wait staff never could figure out how to program the 7,000 channel all sports satellite service). So until some geek arrives, it's the bad news channel, no volume necessary. Ditto for the banks. Like everything else they do, banks never care to ask what we want. So there you have it: two places where we don't need to catch any more negative news. Thank you very much, Mr. Banker and Mr. Publican.
Biased media is self-explanatory. It comes in the form of most everything you see or hear on the corporate media networks, from the way the economic crisis is being reported and covered up to the narrow range of allowable foreign policy debate. Switch channel in disgust. Hey, it's another another commercial for more Big Pharma dope with possible side affects worse than the original ailment. This place is nuts.
Then there is insidious media, my very own pet peeve. Insidious media, for purposes here, are those violent video games that desensitize our children. I notice they are now advertised on prime time TV. Adults can now get a little glimpse of what their sons are doing for 10 hours a day up in their bedrooms.
When Punditman was a kid watching Hockey Night in Canada, he may have seen a Tiger in your tank Esso commercial or the old "I'd like to teach the world to sing" coke commercial. Yes it was corporate propaganda as all advertising is, but compare that to today's kids who are subjected to ads for the Grand Theft Auto video game, which apparently has a few critics. Rightfully so. Could violent video games end up causing more damage to society in the long run than a thousand jihadists? No wonder our boys are adrift.
Trivial media includes celebrity gossip and anything else that has no bearing on your life but is nevertheless pushed at you 24-7 as if it really mattered. It really doesn't matter that the Leafs missed the playoffs yet again (does it?). Okay, maybe.
Quality media on the other hand, engages us because it involves actual thinking—the awake, critical, creative, insightful, inspiring and uplifting kind of cognition. But it it is harder to find because you have to first sift through all the clutter being shoved in your face. But it is there. In books; in parts of newspapers; in online or offline documentaries. Peacenik has found one such web gem, by Carolyn Baker, here. It happens to sum up much of the minutiae that has been floating around Punditman's brain these last few days.
The article deals with the "...daily now, almost hourly-rampant eruptions of violence throughout the so-called developed world" and sees it as the inevitable outcome of a collapsing empire. Punditman notes that wackjobs appear even during the so-called good economic times of "empire." Ms. Baker claims that it is the psychology of empire itself that leads to these episodic psychoses of mass violence, "a culture in which one's reason for being lies entirely outside of oneself." You work, you consume, you pay taxes. You feed the growth machine. If things go awry, it's all your fault. Actually, for many people—an inner life that allows for a modicum of reflection or perspective is simply unattainable. What's more, the isolation of modern life means that millions lack a viable social support network. Thus for some, when their organism is distressed, the default position is madness. How many more human cluster bombs must go off before we realize that something in the social fabric, in the way we organize ourselves, in the way information is mediated, is very deeply flawed?
Two years ago, Punditman had this to say about another American massacre:
Is there any correlation between the horrific events at Virginia Tech and the daily carnage unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world? There may be no direct link, but it has been shown that domestic violence does increase when nations go to war, as outlined by the landmark study, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, published in 1984 by Yale University Press. The hypothesis posits that when countries do violence to other human beings, this incites their citizens to perpetrate more violence than they would normally commit. So the phenomenon extends well beyond the returning war vet who becomes a ticking time bomb (although this is a huge problem as well).In Collapse psychosis: navigating the madness, Ms. Baker uses civilization synonymously with empire. I quibble, slightly: what I call civilization is synonymous with society. And society always seems to muddle on through, decade to decade--almost like there is a kind of collective brain at work (Margaret Thatcher be damned!).
The good news is that after we emerged from the primordial slime, we evolved into our current apish frames and began to form civilizations around 11,000 years ago, after the last glacial epoch. No easy task! What's more, since 1970 humans have created and stored more information than in the previous 5,000 years. Granted, a lot of it is negative, biased, insidious and trivial. But at least we're a persistent bunch. With any luck, we could get through this current phase of stupidity without slipping totally into the abyss.
Enough niggling. If you are wondering how to make sense of all the mayhem, Ms. Baker's piece is highly recommended. Read it. Then go for a walk outside.
