In questioning motivations behind media production, the problematic issue of 'meaning' comes into focus. Meaning itself is an awkward term, much like 'truth' or 'nice', and defining how it functions is debatable: one person's inspiration can easily be another's curse, depending on context and perspective. If the function of meaning is as undefinable as it appears, what is the point of placing importance on it?
Magazines lining the checkout isles of grocery and department stores offer free-playing sociability and interactions which are mostly devoid of any real content, yet they are popular enough to warrant their continual presence in these places. Why yes, I am ready to fully render myself into a pilon and accept Anna Nicole's wasted life as a pretext for concern, and I grieve daily for Britney's amateur haircut. By discussing these and events like them as daily sources for communication, am I, as a person, learning anything? Arguably yes, water-cooler conversations are part of regular life and help people feel surrounded by like-minded colleagues and aquaintances and feel more comfortable not talking about anything too serious. However, in regarding the application of meaning, this content is relatively free of substance.
Fox News' 'No Spin Zone' hosted by Bill O'Reilly offers a concise and deeply disturbing account of journalistic failure. Promoted as an intangible, infallible zone of fact and information dissemination, it provides a unique experience which steps grandly over the 'dogmatic' principles of critical thinking and logical reasoning. The CRTC has recently agreed to a contract with Fox News, which will now become available to the Canadian public. Given the response to O'Reilly in the States (80% of his viewership believe either that WMDs existed in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, or that liberals hate democracy) and his pathological nature, the institution of another financially-backed yet intellectually-vacant television channel will probably not help in educating the viewer or fueling a sense of democratic responsibility. Unless of course, it is used as an example of hostile incursion, bordering precipitously on the edge between humour and trumped-up ideological politics.
"Can ‘distracted’ perception generate collective meaning capable of entering individual experience, and thus become the conscious basis for recognition on the condition’s of one’s existence?" ask Shiller and Urry. If we are distracted away from important concerns and towards superficial ones, is it possible to develop a sense of collective meaning, thereby allowing a sense of self-adjudication? Currently, I say 'no', but that's because I've temporarily invested myself in a deeply cynical rout, feeling hostile towards my social world. However, I can always find solace in knowing that all will be fine, provided I remember that if we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything (Allen Ginsberg).
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1 comment:
*sighs*
I understand this stream of thought all too well. The tabloids at the grocery store are our modern day Bread and Circuses aren't they?
Cheap food (regardless of quality), glutting of the ID and mindless entertainment are the building blocks of the sated and questionless society.
I think its because so many of us are all sick at heart. Living in denial of what is right and wrong, because to see right from wrong, we have to see what we should be doing, and arn't. Because to try and do all we should would be a lifetime commitment to a battle no one wants us to win.
People convince themselves that fame matters more than substance, that money is a good enough justification for less-than-right deeds.
I think people get sick of the poet who points out the flaws of the world, but that in no way waters down the truth of it.
We're on a Supersise Social Diet and wondering why our hearts hurt so much...
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