Another day, another set of worthless, lying, evil talking-points from the mass media.
Sure - there is usually something true embedded somewhere in them - but this is like adding a cupful of clear rainwater to a stagnant pond full of rotting corpses.
But it's cleverly done - and the very obviousness of the dishonesty and distortion is a trolling of the attention: it seems to easy to refute that we are tempted to engage. And then again and then again.
Yet it doesn't work, does it? No matter how obviously wrong - 'people' resist And when it does work, it is at the expense of keeping attention locked onto the media agenda... in order to decode and refute it, we must attend even-more-closely to it.
Meanwhile, we ought to be paying close attention to altogether different matters; our attention ought to be quite other directed; our perspective ought to be 'infinitely' larger...
As the kids say: This. I went cold turkey on "news" of all kinds over a year ago, and it's turning out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made. Tune out, turn off, drop out.
ReplyDeleteWm and Bruce: I have been trying. Among the devices arrayed against me are television monitors, tuned to the news, that command every elevator door at my workplace, lest we bureaucrats be driven mad by idle thoughts while we wait to be conveyed to our cubicles. For that, my remedy is simply to take the stairs. The exercise does me good, though to be sure nobody will ever mistake me for a face-working coal miner!
ReplyDeleteIn so far as I succeed in not keeping up with the latest kerfuffle, I encounter the small talk problem. What to do when when acquaintances (or for that matter family members I no longer live with) get the talk flowing by discussing the news? It turns out that I can often manage to keep silent till I spot a chance to start a subject that someone present actually knows or cares about. Otherwise, I can ask for clarification and enlightenment, at the risk of seeming oddly ignorant.
"Art thou only a stranger in America, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?"
There are real social penalties for tuning-out - some types of ignorance are interpreted as being selfish, uncaring, hence as providing active support for the anti-mainstream morality.
ReplyDeleteAnd accurately so. The media morality includes that morality needs to change as the media dictates - so there is an imperative for us to immerse in the mass media in order that we may continually learn what is moral today.
Anybody who opts out is therefore de facto on the other side from what is today's morality.
That reminds me of my infamous 20-minute date.
ReplyDeleteI had unknowingly committed the cardinal sin of not bothering to be currently-news-informed, and so was demonstrably one-who-did-not-care.
No sex for me.
Thank God!