Tech-Fuckin-Ology

Written By: Dan Sklut

The media has come a long way, baby…

From the printing press in the 1700s to the Associated Press in the present day, information has traveled far and wide in America, finding its way into eager and receptive minds everywhere. But no Founding Father could have ever imagined the ease with which we could one day communicate (save for Ben Franklin; that man was a visionary). This Age of Information in which we live provides society with more ways than ever to transmit and receive messages, entertainment, and other valuable data. People have newspapers, movies, televisions, books, magazines, internet, multimedia cell phones and music players, video games, faxes, and telegraphs readily at their disposal… so many ways to take in the media, in fact, that simply realizing how incredibly advanced we are is a mind-blowing revelation unto itself.

Some would praise these technological breakthroughs as a godsend; that argument could even be made based solely on the time-saving applications of said breakthroughs. When once it would take months or even years to get a simple letter across the country, it’s now as easy as pressing the “SEND” button on a computer and waiting a couple of seconds. We have the internet, the collective knowledge of the world, at our fingertips, able to gather volumes of research with a single graceful keystroke. Cellular telephones make it possible to talk to anyone, anywhere, at anytime, even 10,000 miles across the globe. These digital developments are so commonplace now that the generation that grew up with it is somehow jaded and blasé about it (one wonders how they would tolerate life without it).

On the surface, it may seem like all of this widespread proliferation of communication is the best thing to ever happen to the human race. After all, who doesn’t like instant gratification? However, mass-media technology is a double-edged sword. With its benefits come drawbacks that practically compromise the convenience of such carefree creature comforts. People are isolating themselves, drowning out the rest of the world by constantly listening to music on their portable players, sending text messages, talking on the phone, surfing the web, checking their email, and updating their “MySpaces” (so much so that if an extra-terrestrial totally ignorant of a human’s physiology were to land in the United States, it would probably assume earphones/earpieces, telephones, and the like to be natural human appendages). The easier it becomes to get closer and communicate, the farther we distance ourselves from everyone else.

These technophiles may enjoy watching their televisions or surfing their internets, but they do so at the cost of their precious time. Paradoxically, it seems that as our methods of delivery for our media get quicker, we spend more time preoccupied with them. Large fractions of our lives are wasted in such outwardly banal activities as staring at a flickering box for hours at a time, like flies stuck on a toffee. Man was not made to just sit around, staring. Use that leisure time to achieve something purposeful, people! Television alone has changed America’s primary diversion from meaningful pursuits, such as baseball and spelunking, to staring at glowing screens depicting someone else playing baseball and spelunking. Our nation has gone from active to passive.

It almost seems as if people are losing touch with reality the more they absorb this fantasy land depicted in the media. Modern television shows, movies, books, and basically any program or printed word portray a skewed version of our culture and world. They show a shattered reflection of our true selves as a society, hastily cobbled back together and glossed up with plenty of empty-headed materialism and shallow, self-serving “values” to go around, then dumbed-down and homogenized as the public sees fit to consume.

Even more distressing than the amount of time squandered on our little gadgets is the time spent between use, buying things. I’m speaking, of course, about the worst byproduct of the media ever: consumerism. Consumerism is the scourge of the planet, taking everything right and beautiful in the world and putting a big yellow price tag with some ugly corporate logo right in the middle of it. It cheapens art, reducing it to a commodity to be bought, sold, and judged based on its selling power and popular appeal. It diminishes individuality, encouraging everyone to look the same way, think the same way, shop the same way (frequently), and be good little obedient consumers.

But where does this horrible slave mentality come from? The media and its various advertisements and subliminal messages. Indulge me in a bit of paranoid conspiracy for a while: It follows that any media companies that have enough wealth and influence to reach millions of citizens on the television (or other ways) have ulterior motives at play, namely to gain more wealth and influence. They do that mostly by selling advertisements, the vile hellspawn of the mass media. Advertisements are omnipresent in our daily lives, from the shiny brand-name logo you see on the toothpaste tube every day to the commercials on the radio for that same toothpaste. Every logo, every label, every billboard, flyer, and commercial is painstakingly designed and detailed by top advertising professionals for one purpose and one purpose only: to get that company’s message in your head. The words may be different, but the theme is always the same. It’s “Give us your money. Buy more.”

What happens when you watch something? You become influenced by it. You take in those sights and sounds, and internalize them, regardless of whether you liked them or not. As long as a certain message is seen/heard and processed by the brain, there is no getting it out. Even when a show’s signals aren’t to buy something, people are still encouraged to obey the commands on a subconscious level. If a television program features an all-white cast, full of thin, “pretty” young people, and shows them acting happy and living well, that show’s going to convey the idea that a certain look and way of life is more acceptable than others, and respected more. Unrealistic body images, social “norms”, and lifestyles all stem from the media’s depiction of the false reality it’s trying to sell. Just look at how glamorized and glorified certain celebrities have become for their “clubbing” habits. Anyone with common sense could tell that’s no way to live, but the media says differently, celebrating unhealthy habits and excess under the guise of “success.”

So people eat up these lies like hogs at a chili cook-off , believing them to be true, and go on imitating what they see, regurgitating thoughts and opinions heard on TV the night before, since it’s easier than thinking for one’s self. I have known some people that actually base their entire personalities on what they’ve seen on television and think is funny and acceptable. This is especially true in children, who are extremely impressionable at such a young age. They perpetuate terrible qualities (terrible quality: an oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one) like greed and envy that only an advertiser would find desirable, then raise their children the same way. And thus the Cycle of Media Despair continues once more.