Wednesday 26 September 2018

Mass media fasting just gets easier all the time; indeed, easier than the alternative

When I wrote my mini-book about the mass media, I advocated a substantial withdrawal from the mass media.

I used to find this advice difficult to follow, but it gets easier all the time - since I find nearly everything online, on TV, in newspapers and magazines, in modern books... to be intolerable.

It is really no hardship to do-without the dull or disgusting propaganda for evil that makes up almost every form of communication nearly all of the time.

Indeed; I find it increasingly difficult to get myself to engage with any form of mass media; because it is just so actively-unpleasant. I start quite a lot of books/ movies/ TV series; but cumulatively I cannot bear the in-my-face preaching of political correctness.

It's like I'm being subjected to a behavioural modification program designed suppress and to extinguish my old addiction; with each media engagement being punished.

Which is (unintentionally) A Good Thing.


4 comments:

Monty James said...

We don't have a culture, we had it replaced by an entertainment industry decades ago. I find that it was a mistake to spend so much time being entertained. I mostly no longer seek it out.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Same here! It's strange to think that not that long ago, "checking the news" was a temptation that had to be resisted. Nowadays it's about as hard as resisting the temptation to drink dishwater.

lgude said...

I read your media book some time ago and had wanted to write a book along the same lines starting with McLuhan and "The medium is the message" over 10 years ago, but I found the 'treasure buried in a field' and have been selling all that I have to buy that field ever since. I am really glad you wrote it and exposed the media and the constant delusion and evil they perpetrate. I lectured in media in the 70s and 80s in Australia at University level and taught that TV news was a form of drama descended from the Greek theatre via cinema and then specifically trained students to edit video to create false narratives by cutting answers to - say - questions about people's opinion of Mercedes Benz cars against a question asking their opinion of MacDonald's hamburgers. My goal was to inoculate the students against being able to watch a news broadcast and fail to notice the cinematic techniques used to manipulate their minds and their emotions. I too am spontaneously consuming less news and entertainment.The first hint of political correctness and I'm gone. Once you see certain things it becomes impossible to unsee them. I also helps that the official narratives has gotten more desperate and impossible to swallow.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Igude - I suppose that there is nowadays no need to decode media, in the kind of way you taught, because we already know what we will find. But also the volume of communication is far greater than the rate of decoding. Plus, there are nowhere near enough relevant reliable sources.

(People who run the Alternative Media don't yet seem to have realised this - since they are trying to provide alternative but true narratives on exactly the same agenda and at the same pace as the mass media - Which is clearly 1. impossible and 2. means an Ever Greater volume of mainstream media engagement and consumption in the Alt media than the average.

So, the solution of fasting from mass media is pretty much forced upon us; unless we volunarily wish to collaborate in our own destruction in return for feeding our addiction - which is, of course, the decision that most people have made.