While slightly off topic, I feel obligated to post this. The obvious recklessness, egotism and gluttony going on inside the largest banks in America is too hard for me to ignore. I saw this video that reminded me of what I think America was once like. But I’m just a college kid, so what do I know?
In this world, people who do good in the community are rewarded and people who hoard money and power for their own selfish ends are punished. In this world you’re not alone if you’re going through hard times, and only the bad guys look out for only their own. In this world people are known by the works that they do by their local community that knows them well. Wouldn’ t you like to live there? I know I would. And thanks to people like those at moveyourmoney.info it’s easier to move the world one step closer to something like that.
If you haven’t heard by now, for about two months now Comcast has been talking about buying up NBC from GE. Actually, it’s not just talk. They actually are going to go through with it. I have good reasons to suspect that the more consolidated the media market is, the more reasons we have to fear for our way of life.
The first reason is simple. If media distributors don’t understand that the media is something far greater than a money making machine, they will damage all of our psyches. Broadcasters who put content up that’s shocking and appalling for ratings miss media’s real power, and that’s the power to shape and reinforce cultural values. You can either use this technology to keep drug use and materialism in middle schools, or use it to educate to a higher calling. The second reason is equally simple. When you understand how the media industry shapes what we think, it becomes pretty clear that the power to do so shouldn’t be kept in the hands of a few people. One executive’s decision to run a particularly disturbing ad effects us all, even if we say we’re too smart to be affected by ads.
But this is no ordinary purchase. In addition to everything that’s been said, Comcast is an internet company, and NBC is a cable company. This is the first buyout to cross the two realms, I think. Not only does it create a really, really, big company that puts too much power into the hands of too few people; What this does do is make Comcast keenly interested in keeping NBC’s content only to Comcast subscribers in more ways you can imagine. Say goodbye to 30 rock!
Is it realistic? Unfortunately, yes. I would be somewhat at peace with the merger if NBC was going to bought by Verizon. Comcast has a legacy of attempting to control your actions online. If there was a company going to violate net neutrality, I’d put my money on Comcast. And I wouldn’t trust Comcast’s ability to self-regulate themselves. I wouldn’t even trust Comcast executives to watch my kids. Would you?
What can be done? Not much right now. The public hearing is happening on Feburary 4th, but all that just means is that Congressmen and Senators can ask whatever they want to the Comcast and NBC representatives, but they’re not going to bring it to a vote yet. I’ve listed the phone # before, give ‘em a call if you’d like to ask them a certain question. It’ll be filmed on Cspan, or at the least open to the public so someone’ll be taking notes and post it on the interwebs. You can always call up your congressmen and tell them you’re not a fan. That’s what I do…every day…for fun…I swear I have a life somewhere underneath all the magic the gathering cards scattered around my room…
And one final note: as much as I hate to say that the guy in the xkcd comic was wrong on my first post, there actually is a chance that an employer could read this, and without an employer I won’t have enough money to be able to post. So please don’t use my name here.
Shout outs to Cooper B. for sending this to me. Lookadis.
“For over one hundred years, we’ve been scrunching and folding toilet paper. Finally there’s a better way!”
Really. I personally use bark and thistle bushes when I do my business and it’s pretty darn inconvenient. Please, tell me more.
“Comfort Wipe! The sanitary paper extension arm and holder!”
I like how you speak. It is pleasing to my ears, as I speak in your style frequently. When I go to the cafeteria for lunch I ask for fried poultry embryos mixed with in vegetation. Couldn’t you just call it a butt-wiper?
“Think about it. Toilet paper is really archaic and disgusting. The Comfort Wipe is a modern solution”
You know what else is really archaic and disgusting? Eating. I mean, sheesh, manual breaking down of food particles with your teeth? Those outdated hunks of calcium? Screw that! I want my meals liquefied. Sorry. I mean liquified. Yum.
I’m sorry. I just can’t buy it. The whole “using your hands to wipe your butt is insanitary” makes no sense if you just wash your hands. It isn’t a problem now, nor has it ever been a problem. No. A thousand times, no. This ad demonstrates a very simple point about the world we live in: our material needs are taken care of so well that salesmen are getting desperate. Now to make a quick buck we’re actually stooping so low as to imply that you need a butt wiper. And not only will we sell things you don’t need, but we’ll sell them by any means necessary. Call you up on your phone when you come home from work? Yes. Embed them into your TV shows and movies? Yes. Illegally put fliers up around town against zoning restrictions? Yes. Convince you that you’ll answer life questions and get an identity with the product? Yep. Even advertise to toddlers, who can’t even tell the difference between TV and advertising? Yep. There’s neither a method too low nor a product too unnecessary for advertisers to manipulate the way you think.
Oh, Supreme Court…I have have no clue what you guys are playing at. What you give to the public with one hand, you take away with the other. Three days after their ruling to screw over American voters, the Supreme Court decided not to challenge a lower court’s ruling that California can have sections of the highway billboard free. California has had this policy in place for a very long time, where sections of the highway labeled “landscaped highway” are mostly free from billboards. As a result, I bet you can enjoy the fantastic California landscape a lot more. Hey, who knows, maybe there are less accidents because people are paying more attention to their surroundings. The story is that Nano Maldonado lived by one of these areas and wanted to put a billboard on his roof but was told he couldn’t. Over the past 10+ years he’s been challenging the policy, moving up the California court system pushing his luck only to be struck down by the Supreme Court recently. I don’t know what to think about the Supreme Court. And this isn’t a victory for people who want to see less ads, it’s a defeat of an advance of ads. Nothing’s going to change. But for right now, I’d say that’s pretty good.
There’s a fantastic article over at Clean Cut Media about how TV makes you stupid, specifically children. Childrens’ minds are more malleable compared to adult minds, and what they see on TV dramatically shapes them. Children in between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 6 hours 21 minutes interacting with TV’s and other media. More time than they spend with their parents. For the average American family with a busy life and not enough time to see the kids, television starts to fill the role of caretaker and teacher of morals and values. A couple highlights from the article.
“If children watch ‘edutainment’—shows that teach through song and dance—they begin to associate learning with an entertainment format and expect that format when they go to school,” he says. “But teachers aren’t going to sing and dance for them. So then children complain that school is boring. Compared to the fast-paced, exciting shows they’re used to on television, it is boring. Nothing will meet that standard. Television constantly ups the ante.
“Kids who watch the most television don’t do as well in school,” says Poussaint. “Television is not the best way to learn; it’s too passive and noninteractive.” A 2003 study found that toddlers and older children with screen media in their bedrooms learned to read later and read less than those with no screen media in their rooms
…many parents don’t know that the American Academy of Pediatrics has established guidelines that recommend no televisions, video games, or Internet access in children’s bedrooms; no screen media for children under two; and no more than two hours of educational television a day for children older than two.
“In the first 18 to 24 months of life, the brain is developing rapidly, primarily in response to environmental stimuli,” Strasburger says. “Stimuli that optimize the development of brain architecture include personal interactions, motor skills practice, and problem-solving activities. And the best way to teach these skills is not through screen media.”
Basically, by putting children in front of a TV not only are we harming their ability to live life outside of TV, but we’re actually hurting their brain development. And keep in mind the damage done to their minds is partially the result of individuals at television networks and video game companies looking to maximize a return on their investments by using the most explosive and horrific imagery. (I don’t don’t know what I think about the idea that video games make you more violent. I do think that unnecessary violence in media is just unnecessary).
You probably have heard it from other people. Maybe. If they’ve got a single brain cell working or not. If not, let me spell it out for you: American elections have officially been round up, taken out back, shot and then sold to the highest bidder. The Supreme Court ruled today that corporations and unions can give as much money as they want to candidates, with no limitations. None. And yes, the Supreme Court did this. The Supreme Court? Are you sure? The most powerful and respected judges in America? With decades of experience under their belts and degrees from prestigious universities? Those legendary arbiters of truth and reason? Yes, they did this. They did this to us. The most powerful court in America has failed its citizens.
You don’t need to be a Political Science degree to know this is bad. You don’t need a seal of approval to have an opinion about where you think your country is going. You don’t need a goddamn permit to be outraged at this. You don’t need to be afraid of being called a conspiracy theorist if you’re worried about your country. The battle lines have been drawn. Our government has been so thoroughly infiltrated by Wall Street business executives that even appointed Supreme Court judges have been bought, and the politicans have been routinely dismantling everything this country stands for. (more…)
For a while now, the FCC’s kept lines of communication open to the public’s opinion of Net neutrality. But on January 14th, they’re gonna close the lines and come to a decision soon.
It’s the principle that the people who you buy your internet service from (Comcast, Cablevision, AT&T, etc. ) can’t stop you from doing what you do on the internet. It’s the idea that internet service providers can’t stop you from looking at whatever you like on the internet. In this way, all websites on the internet are “neutral” in that as long as you can type it in the search bar you can see any site you want on the internet. It sounds pretty good, no? Who wouldn’t be against that? (more…)
For the past two and a half years I’ve been digging around American culture and my life, chasing this notion that there was something fundamentally wrong with both of them. Explaining this notion has been one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, because this feeling leaves me at a moment’s notice and has a knack of doing so right when I try to explain it to people. Which was why I was so happy to learn that the media, made up of specific companies and industries that I can point to, have a role in shaping what we do with our lives. It’s this fact that I’m truly proud of this blog for: Unlike Fight Club and Adbusters that advocate ridiculous solutions (explosives) to undefined problems (The things you own wind up owning you? What does that mean in practical terms?), I’m trying to highlight specific laws, businesses and practices that have changed the way we think for the worse. (Just in case I might apply for a job with Adbusters sometime in the future, I think Adbusters does good work but I think they could benefit from being more specific).
Unfortunately because I was so eager to explain everything, when I made the blog I figured that all of our social problems are because of the media, and that isn’t true. The media is only one piece of the puzzle. In addition, I started blogging about things that are other resulting problems of bad media, like the decaying state of journalism and Glenn Beck. As a result, keeping updated in all of these things meant I updated less. Those things are important but they’re not what this blog is about. This blog is about how life in America on a day to day basis is not good for people’s psychological happiness and where these bad habits, rituals and ideas come from, but because they’re important too maybe I’ll cross reference an article every once in a while that talks about that.
So sorry if I’ve been rambling incoherently and have misled you. If it makes it any better, I’ve also been misleading myself. I’ll be revamping the website soon to reflect this new change in thinking that will hopefully make more sense to you all. And in addition, if you can’t see the bigger picture I’m trying to paint drop me a comment that says “WTF is this?” and I’ll sort it all out. I can’t say I’m going to know all the ways that our brains are manipulated and how we’ve come to live in this world, but I can say that it’s a start and we’ll be closer to the truth.
This is Ken Robinson. Sir Ken Robinson. He studies creativity. This is his take on schools, which I agree with. It’s a bit long but it’s worth it. When you think about why people act the way they do, it’s not only media that’s influencing us. It’s any big cultural force that has access to shaping us all, and schools also fit that. Who doesn’t go to school? Here’s a couple excerpts from the speech.
“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”
“Creativity is as important now in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
“Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we’re running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this: he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately; that we don’t grow intro creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”
“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think that they’re not because the thing that they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.”
“Our education system has mined our minds in the way in the way we strip mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us.”
There’s a great ol’ American tradition of ours, most actively performed by people who most identify as “patriots”, of putting the winner on a pedestal and blaming the loser for not being more like the winner. This type of opinion frequently comes up in discussions about the American Dream. You know the opinion…The rich got that way because they had the drive and the diligence that you don’t, bum. Maybe if you worked harder, you’d be one of them. You also see this idea promoted by health and beauty magazines about weight loss. Just replace “rich” with “skinny”, and “bum” with “fatty”. You also see this when in sports training. The best athletes train hardest. You snooze, you lose. And maybe you’ve heard the childhood variation of the philosophy. You can do anything you set your mind to. When you grow up, well…it gets meaner and starts to blame you for not getting what you want.
When stuff like this gets said over and over, people start to believe it. They also start to hate themselves for not being like how everyone wants them to be. It makes you feel bad and then gives you a way out. Like you’re some twisted wretch of a person unfit to live, but even you can work your way out of this hole you dug yourself in. It gives you a problem and then sells you a solution. (more…)
America isn't a healthy place. The lives that are socially acceptable for us to be living just aren't good for our bodies, our souls, or our planet. We eat food that we don't know what it's made out of, and then think we can fix it by eating more of it when it's got health claims. We send gift cards to each other, like we're incapable of telling someone how we feel about them. We hope death will go away if we just put on enough make-up. We even sell sexually revealing clothing to little girls. And at the end of the day, the simple thing is that a life built on these rules won't be satisfying or meaningful. This society provides never-ending insecurities, toys, and distractions, but not enough lessons on how to live your life proudly, and if you ever develop into a critical thinking, confident, and creative person you run against the current of thousands of advertisers and salesmen who want you to be an insecure and dependent consumer.
