I think the "Numbing of the American Mind" (NAM) is a brilliant work that touches on some serious issues. Today's world is a world filled with a number of complex problems. Just turn on the ten o'clock news and you'll get the daily wrap on the most negative events of the day. We are always discussing problems, whether it be the war, the economy, global warming, or politics. Perhaps the main problem that faces most of us today as NAM suggests is just the full out waterfall of information and technology our brains are experiencing. I say most of us because i feel the Machugingu tribe in South America has there own separate bag of issues. Whose to blame for this? I believe it is today's media.
In the world today we are being so bombarded with ideas and events that no one person could possibly comprehend it all. Today's media has gotten so incredibly negative and invasive. Watch the first ten minutes of the nightly news or the CNN bottom line and you will no longer wonder why depression is a steadily rising medical condition in America. I thought there was a sad truth in the reference to 9/11 in NAM. There was such a media overflow of pictures, tragic stories, and awful statistics after 9/11, the only thing we could possibly do was burry our emotions and move on with our lives. If we stopped to ponder every tragic situation in today's world we would drown in our own pool of tears.
Another problem with the media that NAM didn't touch on is how disgustingly invasive the media has gotten. I could care less if Britney Spears has cellulite, she's still hot! I don't care where Lindsay Lohan was at 2:30 last night or how so and so in politics had a beer when he was underage in college. I know it's all money driven, but I still think members of the paparazzi are some of the lowest individuals in America today. I just hope we see a general trend towards a more positive and private media in the future.
2 comments:
I completely agree with you. I feel that it is important to try and keep life steady and not so over-whelmed with news interuptions about deadly tragedies. And I also couldn't agree more that celebrities lives are completely unimportant. So what they have a lot of money, why do i care that they go on 10,000 shopping sprees. I just have to stop and think, how could this be changed?! Like how can we not be bombarded with new tragedies and have the media not tell us story after story. I think that that is how life has changed and how we have to live these days. I think that having a slower paced lifestyle is all dependent on the individual.
These are smart, provocative points. I tend to agree with the first point about "tragedy fatigue" and how it affects our ability to process all this bad news, but I'm not so sure about the whole "blame the media" thing. As long as we're all cool with the current capitalist system, and we don't want state-controlled media outlets, then the ultimate decision about what gets printed, published, posted, etc comes from the consumer, who buts the magazine or clicks on the picture, or whatever. Of course, there's a sort of synergy that gets set up, where the media begins to produce a cottage-industry for bizarre celebrity sightings and such, and it turns into a kind of feedback loop, but the media is a kind of paper tiger as far as being the sole culprit for this activity. Although I've got a libertarian streak, I also wouldn't care if the government installed censoring policies for this kind of trash, but I doubt that will happen, and it probably would get abused anyway. I think there's something in our culture that's producing this insatiability for celebrity images, but I'm not sure what it is. Anyway, I'm just not sure the media is the problem (or the whole problem) here.
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