A discussion on contemporary media culture
Lately I've grown more and more concerned with the way our media operates. This isn't because the media suddenly changed, but rather because my perception did.
I've spent a lot of years, basically ever since I became politically aware at about age twelve, staunchly picking a side and sticking to it until for whatever reason I changed my mind. You swing from one extreme to the other and where I was a rabid leftwinger from age fifteen to nineteen, I changed slowly to more right wing thinking from age twenty until about a year or so. Now I'm twentyfour and I'm stuck in the middle, but not in the classical sense. I'll get to how this all relates to our media culture.
It seems to me that our current political landscape is divided between people who feel really strongly about A from side X and people who feel really strongly about A from side Y. That is to say, people hyperfocus on single issues and take a very extreme stance on either.
The people who don't, and define themselves as "center leaning" are, in my experience, people who don't feel really strongly about either topic and would rather we'd start talking about something else. And then they discover they don't feel as strong about those subjects either.
Because between the fringes of right and left thinkers, both of which are pretty well represented on these forums, is a huge mass of generally apathetic people.
Now I don't think that it's fair to call it being a "centrist" if your stance on everything is just shrugging and being a relentless relativist. Nor do I think it's fair to consider the contemporary right and left the sides that one has to choose between, since I don't get the feeling either side is driven by an ideology anymore and are just people who agree to disagree on a whole load of specific topics because it keeps their faces in newspapers and on cameras.
This is where our mediaculture comes in and how closely its related to politics. Obviously I'm not saying anything new here when I assert the link between these two. But what concerns me isn't discussing and defining this link per se, but more people's willingness to float along with the currents and be played like a tool for someone's own gain.
There's a pretty clear division in our media that I have to make clear from the start. First, there's the political media culture that's dominated by left or right wing TV. America is the most obvious example with Fox on one side and MSNBC on the other, and to a lesser extent the same happens in Europe though news stations here don't have nearly the same level of rabid fanaticism displayed by these American channels. Then again, what we lack in fanaticism we make up for in apathy and this is where I distinguish the second part of our media culture namely the entertainment sector which excells in its stupidity.
Between the news networks' insistence on giving us sensationalist, populist news with a blatant partisan color and the entertainment sector's insistence on spoonfeeding us shows like Jersey Shore, The Hills and ridiculous idiots like, well... like pretty much any artist on TV today, we're left with little choice in being a sane and rational human being.
Because at the top of these media organisations stand millionaires and billionaires who laugh themselves all the way to the bank as we loyally buy into their latest editions of stupid. It's in their best interest in keep the partisan people partisan and the apathetic people apathetic. Does a terrific job at emulating a society in which political discourse takes place while keeping the people uninterested enough to figure out that they're actually living in the bloody Truman Show.
And I see it on these forums too. People who I know are intellectually my equals if not better than that who so loyally take their position in the firing line for these channels. People who allow themselves to be defined by these billion dollar corporations that dictate what to say and what to think and who to believe and who to distrust. How can you have so little self respect as to willingly offer yourself as a supporter of someone who only sees you as a way to fill their own pockets?
On Dutch TV we have a channel called Powned (I wish I was joking). I was watching this the other day and their sole journalist who hits the streets to interview people is known for, well.. being a jackass. But apparently this makes great TV. He went to the front door of Gretta Duisenberg, a famous Dutch sympathiser for the Palestinian cause, and after being all nice and kind to her for a minute or two he stabbed her in the back by suddenly calling her an anti-semite. For some reason this is funny. All I thought when watching it was that this sort ofshould be taken off public channels because it literally does nothing but stupidify us even further. There's no journalistic value to any of this but it's what passes for journalism nonetheless.
What purpose is served by blatantly partisan TV? No purpose other than that of the people who own these stations. No society is helped by keeping it polarised and split, and where our politicians are intent on blaming one another for this divide, this only serves to demonstrate their lack of fundamental understanding of how our societies are now working. They stand at the beck and call of the media empires that portray them in whichever way they generate the largest revenue.
Our societies are supposed to be democratic. By the people, for the people. But that notion is a thing of ages past it seems. Democracy and populism are nigh inseparable and there's a nasty streak of corporate business interests that underlines all of it. By willingly taking a side in either camp, be it left wing or right wing, you conform yourself to a society that you have not helped shape. Not directly, anyway, since in our collective herd-mentality we have failed to notice that under the pretense of this surface-level political division lies a massive well of disinterest.
Today we're living in a society that's suffering from the effects of the law of the handicap of a headstart. We made the mistake of assuming that we're the end of civilisation. That once the point is reached that we are at, all is well. And yet it is precisely the ambition and motivation of those great minds that helped us get here that we lack, and so we may one day find that we are no longer at the top of the foodchain on this planet and that we've been overtaken by other cultures. Cultures who, I believe, can never be as good as we have been.
For all our flaws and shortcomings, the West -is- the best we've done at crafting a fruitful civilisation. And for precisely that reason we should not consider ourselves the final destination of all culture, but rather the starting point of many good things yet to come. We cannot, however, be the starting point of anything if we can't talk ourselves out of the stupor we find ourselves in. We owe it to ourselves to reject and deny contemporary media its power and we owe it to ourselves to hold our politicians accountable for not having had the balls, or the inclination, to preserve the essence of democracy any sooner.
If we all agree that the initial framework that our countries were built on, the roots of democracy and capitalism, are things worth preserving, then perhaps we should admit that we're all conservative to a certain degree. And that if that is true, the traditional notions of left and right wing absolutely lose any and all meaning. Because then the progressives are suddenly no longer those people who allow themselves to be classified as politically left wing, but those people who seek to wander our countries further and further from their roots for no progress but that of their own wallets.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by A.J.P. Taylor
).
I'd just make sure they weren't robbed of the opportunities to develop an intellect. It's like when I was learning to read I wasn't interested because it was too easy and those small children books may have worked when i was like 3 but at like ~6? I wanted my parents to read the Hobbit and such. They may have been above my reading level, but that was what i wanted to listen to. I think I needed to be challenged. I'm going to guess my kids will be somewhat like me. I'd rather struggle to learn something hard than practice something simple. 
