Degenerative cultural effects of a monolithic societal media
I first noticed those effects in the early morning hours of
August 31st, 1997. I was listening to the radio feeds of one
of the Richmond Virginia TV-station’s broadcast of
‘THE ADVENTURES OF HERCULES’. This particular episode
had the two protagonists, Kevin Sorbo-Bruce Campbell, in a
time warp that took them back where they encountered
themselves in their early twenties. The plot was slickly written
for the listening I was doing; since the satire and ironic play of
words about themselves and their younger versions engaged my
post-midnight cognitive faculties to a heightened alertness
because of
the novelty of the plot’s dialogue.
That’s when the NEWS FLASH of Princess Di’s death in that
car accident
interrupted the programming for not only the total nullification of that
program, but onward until her funeral procession several days later. I
had a favorable opinion of Princess Di, believing she did Prince Charlie
a great favor in marrying him, more than he being her blessing. That
favorability ended from the hype of wall-to-wall, MEDIA SATURATION
that exploited her death for the ratings feast of viewers to emote and
overly commiserate Di’s death.
A nurse who was working the same night shift as I, and who’d never said
a word or acknowledged my existence prior to that early morning, came
into the workroom where I was. She was all red-eyed with tears and
asked me ‘If I had heard the news about Diana’s death’. That nurse
was balling over someone she never knew, but was going to use previously
ignored me as her compatriot-in-sorrow!
Geesh! It showed me at the moment and the coming days how much
the media seeks to herd our attitudes, thoughts, and feelings with
their affecting narratives. An observation I share with the conservative
Right’s complaint about the biased, manipulative mainstream media.
Later the SAME GOP/Neoconservative Right, along with the same
enabling media sycophants, did the same thing leading up to the Iraq
War incursion.
Even today, the air-brushing away of the bad policies of the Obama
Administration have been used as a faux-narrative of contrast to the
‘Good-ol-days’ of Obama or the decency of George W. Bush’s actions to
the present outrages of the Trump Crimes-against-Humanity
Administration. People consciously use such cynical rhetoric as part of
the attempt for a monolithic and homogeneous credence for their silo
agenda.
As much as ‘the ills of social media’ are bemoaned, they are the
bastard-progeny of the mass media which sought and still seeks to
herd thought and opinion into agenda corrals of their liking and purposes.
There are silos of group-think that are encouraged on a number of
social media; Facebook being one of the prime abusers of such venues.
In those venues, you can find the same indoctrinated mindset of socially
associated background as the basis of the premises used and that
excludes any attempt to have or take the perspective of a contrarian
thought, which would be seen only as existentially contentious
to the holder of the other thought.
Those venues are also portals of discovery of affirmative thought
for what would otherwise be self-identified by the individual as
their esoteric or idiosyncratic, “unusual” or “weird” thinking of
themselves. Social media can allow for the individuals to find
sympathetic and affirming thoughts not found in their pedestrian
locales.
Individuals can pick and choose what is relevant and applicable to them,
as they do in the produce section of their supermarket
-unlike the homogenized, one-size-fits-all, secondary education system
that was the conditioner of the herd-manipulable mentality for us all.
That mentality continued in higher education courses of tunnel curricula
pedagogy, the STEM and Business majors, who in seeking the
‘golden-rings’ of wealth, advocated the philosophies and theories that
grew as rationales of justification for the workplace adaptations and
administration for the production of the products of those theories
and philosophies in the ‘go-along-to-get-along’ mentality.
For those, who by anomalous circumstances or conscious decisions
of conscience, existed and still exist outside the herd mentality,
they are the potential targets of the consequences of ‘media driven’
herd-mentality, antagonisms. Also, they are the involuntary, rhetorical
frontiersmen and pioneers of free-range, idiosyncratic thought of
this age. In their intrepid picking and choosing of their own aesthetics
and memes/totems of affinity, they’re developing an emotional intensity
which has been neutered out of others for a docile and ineffectual
‘public civility of decorum’.
In their state of acute emotional intensity and mental focus, a new
civil-art and thought-architecture is germinating being constructed
in the public organism. Just as the proverbial ‘weed in the
sidewalk’, the stubborn resilience of these
alternate thought forms can be attributed to much greater than
the normative dismissals of sociopathic dysfunction. It is the
discerning discovery of threads of thinking that weave a more
appealing, elegant, and functional cultural fabric for the present
and the prospective future.
It is these collective aggregates that are the renaissance
alternative to the dysfunctional malfunctions of the present social
order in meeting both the intellectual plus the emotional
synchronization for satisfaction and fulfillment that is benign and
‘does no harm’, individually or holistically, in the short-or-long-term.
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