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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: 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.
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