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In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.
[...] Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy.
[...] Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That's the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans' "vast descent into triviality," and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans' great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun.
In 1984, Americans took a look around at the world they had created for themselves and breathed a collective sigh of relief. The year George Orwell had appointed as the locus of his dark and only lightly fictionalized predictions—war, governmental manipulation, surveillance not just of actions, but of thoughts themselves—had brought with it, in reality, only the gentlest of dystopias. Sure, there was corporatism. Sure, there was communism. And yet, for most of the Americans living through that heady decade, 1984 had not, for all practical purposes, become Nineteen Eighty-Four. They surveyed themselves, and they congratulated themselves: They had escaped.
Or perhaps they hadn't. Postman opened Amusing Ourselves to Death with a nod to the year that had preceded it. He talked about the freedoms enjoyed by the Americans of 1984—cultural, commercial, political. And then he broke the bad news: They'd been measuring themselves according to the wrong dystopia. It wasn't Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "In Huxley's vision," Postman noted, "no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history." Instead: "People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
The vehicle of their oppression, in this case? Yep, the television. Which had, Postman argued, thoroughly insinuated itself on all elements of American life—and not just in the boob-tubed, couch-potatoed, the-average-American-watches-five-hours-of-television-a-day kind of way that is so familiar in anti-TV invectives, but in a way that was decidedly more intimate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/are-we-having-too-much-fun/523143/
Are we having tooooo much fun ?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @10:39PM (8 children)
news filtered through late-night comedy and [...] Saturday Night Live
At least those places actually cover the stories.
USA's corporate Lamestream Media won't ever criticize a megacorporation; the "news" outlet's parent company might lose that entity's ad revenue.
If they criticize the regime, they might^W will lose access; Trump has already pulled news agencies' White House credentials.
...and add to list of useful sources e.g. Jimmy Dore on Pacifica Radio. also webcast [google.com]
The fault here isn't the consumers.
It's the crappy offerings of a system whose primary interest is profit, not truth or information.
Lamestream Media became infotainment in the Reagan years.
we--turn to memes
Though the word used to describe that is new-ish, the concept is as old as human interaction.
Apparently, this "journalist" was having trouble making her quota of submitted words this week and had to pad her infotainment thing with nonsense.
...and how much interstitial crap can The Atlantic put between the article's title and the first paragraph of the content?
Sure, there was communism.
Nope. That has never existed on this planet.
If it had, national borders would have dissolved.
There would be a wordwide brotherhood of workers.
National governments do their utmost to thwart that stuff.
(See the Loyalty Day Celebrations Begin in U.S. journal entry by butthurt.)
Just like some hardware projects and some publishing projects and some biology projects call themselves "Open Source" (while offering no source code), some Totalitarian regimes have called themselves "Communist".
It's a complete aberration.
television
I turned it off for good in June 2009.
I was no longer interested enough in what was being offered to spend any money on new (ATSC) equipment.
With the Writers Guild set to go on strike, I'm even less enthusiastic about hearing what new "reality" schlock Hollyweird will be producing for the 2017-2018 season.
thoroughly insinuated itself on all elements of American life
With the internet, I have access to a billion "channels".
I can consume (and interact) on my own schedule.
I can block the ads.
TeeVee is obsolete.
In particular, megacorporations that try to convince me that I smell funny and need their new whiz-bang product to correct that are obsolete.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @11:10PM (1 child)
But, dude - you really do smell funny. There's a reason no female has ever been seen walking through your door. If you didn't keep her chained in the basement, there wouldn't be any women in your life at all.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @11:39PM
Plain old soap and water takes care of that.
...and people were making their own soap from fireplace ashes and fat going back many centuries.
It doesn't require the intercession of a megacorporation and its whiz-bang product.
...and where I buy soap, I can get 3 no-name bars for the same price as the megacorporation's 2-bar or 1-bar offerings.
I largely stopped paying attention to brand names (and ads) as soon as I left my parent's home.
Paying attention to Madison Avenue's efforts to convince you that commodity items are somehow notably different from each other is for suckers.
...and did you know that the first products that got advertising campaigns were cigarettes?
Again: suckers.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 30 2017, @11:31PM
On internet instead of being force fed whatever some produced deemed good for you. It's possible to seek out what one actually want.
Link.. Loyalty Day Celebrations Begin in U.S. [soylentnews.org] by butthurt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @12:02AM (2 children)
USA's corporate Lamestream Media won't ever criticize a megacorporation; the "news" outlet's parent company might lose that entity's ad revenue.
You are delusional.
Did you not see the wall-to-wall coverage of every air mistreated airline passenger over the least month?
Or the wall-to-wall coverage of Pepsi's epic fuck-up trying to co-opt BLM protestors to sell soda?
Every day there is criticism of megacorps on the news. Maybe its simplistic and too often its just low-hanging fruit. But nonetheless it happens all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @01:15AM
He probably missed it because he turned it off.
Our media is controlled. Not by any central authority. But by a need to make money and fit a world view. Both of those alone are enough to bend our media into total junk.
There are some epic fuckups our corps do that never see the light of day. Because the CEO can call his buddy from school and have the story spiked before it even sees the light of day.
The media has an interesting problem now though. The 'people' have some control now. An epic fuckup like united went viral. Suddenly it was no back page story. It was front and center. To ignore it would be to make them look more fake than they already are.
The media has been twisting things for so long they no longer know how to be balanced. I will show you how they do it with a simple story. A dog bites someone.
v1 Man leaves untrained dog to viciously attacks young boy.
v2 Teenager antagonizes elderly mans dog, dog lashes out.
Both are the same story but leave out details for you to make up things and sway you to a POV. Once you see the spots where things are missing or inflammatory you can not turn it off. You even may think 'my news does not do this'. I 100% guarantee it does. You may even think 'I can spot that sort of thing and filter it out'. No you cant. It is designed to manipulate you. _gewgs way is the right way. Turn that shit off. They offer nothing other than outrage custom designed to make you addicted to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @03:55AM
Well, I'm not currently under the care of a mental health professional, so I don't know for sure that I'm not.
I wasn't, however, so much thinking of the stuff that Lamestream Media -will- cover as much as the stuff that they won't touch.
As the AC who replied first notes, I'd have to actually consume their junk to rate them these days.
On occasion, while I'm listening to my Smooth Jazz station, I"m doing something that prevents me from changing the station|switching off the radio when their (mostly-Rightist) Associated Press feed comes on.
Often, I already know what has happened over the last 24 hours and I am thoroughly unimpressed with AP's coverage.
Several times a week, I grab a webcast of something that includes The Thom Hartmann Program.
He's a Democrat and he really stays on top of what Lamestream Media is doing.
When they make glaring errors, he mentions that on his show.
After The March for Science on Saturday, he noted that the next day commercial TeeVee completely ignored it.
What we called Counter-Culture back in the 1960s (protests/marches/be-ins) almost always gets ignored by Lamestream Media--unless they want to twist it to try to somehow make it look ridiculous.
I also run into stuff by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR.org) who is constantly having to point out omissions, errors, and outright distortions in Lamestream Media stories.
They even have a half-hour radio show each week called Counterspin full of reports on the junk.
This is the kind of stuff that had me tune out modern commercial media.
After I realized that they're missing half of the stories (and getting the other half wrong) it's just not worth my attention.
Unless a news outlet that I trust vets their stuff and links to them, I typically won't bother with LSM.
I used to read sci.electronics.design regularly.
Every now and then, John Larkin would mention Howard Johnson's book about digital design and note that half of it was OK and half was bullshit; if you know which is which, you don't need the book.
That's how I feel about Lamestream Media.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @02:01AM (1 child)
Nope. That has never existed on this planet.
If it had, national borders would have dissolved.
There would be a wordwide brotherhood of workers.
National governments do their utmost to thwart that stuff.
It can not exist just because you say so. But it has been tried many times. From Nazisim (you know the socialist party) and Communism (you know the big red party) to Venezuela for a current example. Communism fails because of the same reason a dorm room with 10 people in it and no one will do the fucking dishes. People are inherently lazy and distrustful. Only a few exceptional ones will get off their ass and do something for the sake of doing it. Most people just want to sit on ass and do nothing. Think of all the jobs you ever had. Can you 100% say 'yep I did all of those because I liked them'. Oh you may have liked them at first but you no longer do them? Why? Because something better came along you upgraded to more money or happiness not because of some ideal you were doing better for those around you. In communism that does not exist for long. Eventually someone has to scrape the clogged fat toilet paper shitball out of a sewer. No one will do that because they want to. They will do it because they are ordered to by the central authority. You assume everyone is inherently nice and altruistic. I know many who will never fit that mold. They are total douchbags and will never change unless someone held a gun to their head and told them to change. Even then they would not change.
Pure capitalism also will fail but i can leave that as an exercise to the reader. It fails for similar reasons (if you want a hint).
You can pretend that communism has never been tried. It has been tried hundreds of times. It fails for the same reasons every time. Lack of resources and lack of people who are altruistic. Eventually you run out of resources and people willing to get more of them and do it for free.
I know you want it to be true but it is not. I know I do. But it is a big fat lie. Look no further than the way people and yourself act. You can see why it fails. Not for a lack of trying. But for the same reasons every single time. But you do not have to take my word for it to see the horror communism inflicts upon every country it visits. Make no mistake communism is the end game of socialism. Which is just a different way to achieve the same goal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/37bffg/in_1989_wanting_to_see_how_the_americans_lived/ [reddit.com]
https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-randalls-grocery-store-ended-cold.html [blogspot.com]
BTW you can sign in you know, and I know you can do better :) Even your act of not signing in would not be allowed. As it would be seen as subversive to the culture.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @03:08AM
You're an idiot who's swallowed a whole bunch of Cold War bullshit.
I'll bet you believe the Australian Reactionaries who call themselves The Liberal Party magically become Liberal because they call themselves that.
The whole point of my paragraph was that any entity can call itself by whatever name it wants to.
That -name- doesn't mean anything.
Actions speak louder than words.
...and words have definitions.
For instance, "Communism" is a state of affairs that follows widespread Socialism (Democracy in the Workplace).
Without the 1st step, you can't have the follow-on condition.
As an example of calling things by an inappropriate name, you could call yourself well-informed.
Clearly, however, that isn't so.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]