General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]rrneck
(17,671 posts)Last edited Sat Nov 23, 2013, 01:06 PM - Edit history (1)
Why don't you summarize them and explain them. Can you do that?
The use of media is a collaborative effort between the artist and the viewer, or in this day and age between the producer and the consumer. They are, as with any other interaction between human beings, a relationship. All media alters our brains because interaction with everything in our environment alters our brains. Television alters our brains just as cave paintings altered our brains fifteen thousand years ago.
The "problem" with certain types of media consumption is not the media but the consumption. Or rather, over consumption. People have been exploring new and interesting ways to insert tab A into slot B since the advent of sex, and they will continue to do so. There is nothing that will halt, or even slow, human innovation in the field of fucking.
Have you read 1984? The dystopian society that Orwell describes is only possible through forced complete immersion in state propaganda. Hence the torture. The problem with seabeyond's OP is that she is proposing to "cure" people's perversions through forced immersion in the media that she feels is so destructive. Not only is it an oxymoron, it is a punitive solution that flies in the face not only of healthy cultural development but liberal ideology as well. The real question is how she came to those conclusions.
The relationship between Fox News and the people who consume it is purely commercial. They are telling people what they want to hear. It's a sort of highly focused banal wish fulfillment just like any other bad art no different from a Thomas Kincaid painting or a trashy romance novel. For such a commercial enterprise over consumption, or addiction, is profitable and total immersion is just another term for market domination.
Of course around here Fox News is always a ready example of all that is evil in the world but there are liberal ideology producers with the same business model - produce heroin content for market domination of peoples confirmation bias. Through it's role in the tremendous social advances in this country, feminism is an important part of liberal politics and liberal ideology. Such success has not gone unnoticed by those who would make a lucrative living telling people what they want to hear and over consumption of liberal ideology is just as pernicious as it's opposite number.
So many of the culture war issues that seem important are little more than the source of a lucrative revenue stream for people who make a living turning ideology into an addictive drug. There is no functional difference between the cheap wish fulfillment peddled by televised talking heads, hyperbolic polemicists, romance novelists or pornographers. It's all pornography one way or another.