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Traditional
entertainment has always promised to transport
us from our daily
problems by enabling
us to escape the reality
of our lives, if only for a moment. Entertainment
is "escapist": We escape from reality by escaping
into the neat narrative formulas in which
most entertainment is packaged.
The
primary effect of mass media is to turn nearly every
thing into entertainment, the secondary and ultimately more
significant effect is to force
nearly every thing to turn
itself into entertainment
in order to attract mass media attention.
The result is that mass media is not really
reporting what people do; they are reporting what people do to get
mass media attention. As life is increasingly being
lived for mass media, so mass media is
increasingly covering itself and it's impact on life.
"The deliberate application of the techniques of theater to
politics, religion,
education, literature,
commerce,
warfare, crime, every thing, has converted everything into branches
of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and
satisfying an audience." -
Neil Gabler, from
Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered Reality
"Rich individuals
are always trying to weasel out of their
responsibility. They usually
do this in complicated ways, such as creating
intricate offshore tax shelters or by
trying to con-vince a judge that in Malibu,
working American's feet damage the special
David Geffen sand. And now the rich are
just blatantly bailing on their primary obligation: our entertainment. In today's society,
entertainment is education." - Joel Stein
"Why does every
movie have to appeal to the
mindless, the
ill-informed, the
indifferent and the
violent? Our
culture has been dumbed down enough by the
tasteless, witless character of television sitcoms; by the
feel good, don't
worry, touchy feely character of
television news; by the mind
numbing idiocy of the right wing talk shows and a
value system that
celebrates consumerism above everything
else in life." - Gerald E. Kerns
"There's a market for news
that weighs counterclaims and assesses truth
value. It just hasn't kept up with demand. No wonder
Jon Stewart has such a loyal audience: He has a point of
view, and it's rooted in the reality based - not
the ideology based - Earth." - Marty Kaplan, associate dean USC Annenburg
School
"Truth and
news are not the same thing." – Katharine
Graham
For the custodians of culture, art is sublime. It
redirects one's vision from the sensual to the intellectual, from the temporal to
the eternal, from the corporeal
to the spiritual, all of which makes art a matter not
only of aesthetics but of morality.
Operating on the
emotions and the senses
entertainment, for the most part, is beyond the
reach of intellect.
Goethe expressed it in a letter
to Schiller as early as 1797;
"Nonsense placed
before the eyes
Has a magical effect. Because it fetters the
senses
The mind remains a
vassal."
When critics used the
word 'sensational', before the
word 'sensational' became synonymous
with 'lurid',
they meant that the senses and
emotions were stimulated.
They meant that
entertainment induced reactions by exciting the
nervous system in much the same
way drugs did.
Artists create their
work assuming that different spectators will
have different experiences of the
art work, entertainers
create their work by
deploying familiar words, images, symbols, techniques or
stories in an attempt to
manipulate a spectator not only into having
a particular experience but into ensuring that
every member of the audience has the same experience.
Entertainment is now about power - the power to replace the
sublime with 'lurid' or 'sensational'
fantasy.
In the past entertainment had the
assistance of technologies like
electrification, which lit the cities and ran the streetcars that would take
patrons to their shows.
Entertainment had
the assistance of printing advances that allowed for
illustration and later
photographic
reproduction in
books, newspapers and
magazines. The
magazines aimed only to
entertainment which was achieved by
liberal and extravagance use of
photographs which accompanied casually
improvised articles about actresses or queens, or
individuals deemed
socially important.
Entertainment had the advantage of a
change in labor conditions in which wages rose
and hours declined, leaving ordinary citizens
more money and more leisure time. Real nonfarm wages increased 50 percent between 1870
and 1900, while the average manufacturing worker toiled three and a half fewer hours
per week in 1910 than in 1890.
There was also a new attitude among
laborers that accompanied these changes - an
emotional reaction against the
numbing conditions of the
machine age. At the end of the
work day,
workers left their factories wanting to
have a good time, forget
work and forget their personal
reality.
Entertainment has helped satisfy those
desires from the past through the present.
According to Plutarch, Cicero was trained in
public speaking by Roscius the
comedian and
Aesop the tragedian.
Napoleon took instruction from the
actor Talma in the art of small talk and carefully
calculated every
thing from his rages to his poses. In
antebellum America political orators like
Daniel Webster, John Calhoun
and Henry Clay studied theatrical declamation,
prompting theater managers to complain that their own presentations could not
compete with those of the politicians. The
theatrical tradition only intensified through
the remainder of the century, culminating with
Theodore Roosevelt, a
man as comfortable as
Mark Twain or any performer with being
on stage, where he played the part of a larger-than-life version of
himself.
Ashkenazi
Joseph Pulitzer realized he needed
to design a newspaper for a broad audience who was
steeped in cheap dime novels and
family story papers.
Joseph Pulitzer pioneered the use of illustrations, drawn images, cartoons and
comic strips. Joseph Pulitzer employed color
lavishly and wrote news in such a
way that it appealed to the
fundamental emotions. By making the newspaper into a
entertainment medium Joseph
Pulitzer increased circulation of the New York World from 15,000 to
350,000 within four years.
For several days in 1898
William Randolf Hearst, after causing
the Spanish-American War through a
propaganda
campaign in
competition with Joseph Pulitzer, ran
the following headline in the New York Journal:
"HOW DO YOU LIKE
THE JOURNAL'S WAR!"
Ashkenazi Joseph Pulitzer
capitulated, saying "I rather like the idea of
war - not a big one - but one that will
arouse interest and give me a chance
to gauge the reflex on our circulation figures."
Later, as tabloids with images functioning as symbols,
became ever more popular Richard Schickel
noted that "Every thing tabloids report
exist outside reality
entirely and every thing is made to
live on the page for the
reader's instant
gratification."
The New York Graphic editor Emile Gauvreau, with an
insight not unlike
William Randolf Hearst's
realized that newspapers could
create characters from real people and then "star" them in
adventures that could be featured on the front
page news.
Once they were created, any
thing these
individuals did would be
news simply by dint of their recognizability.
Thus was the celebrity created.
Andy
Warhol ushered in a new age for art causing the
custodians of culture to roll over in their graves.
Art as entertainment. Andy
Warhol realized that in the
existing entertainment monoculture people themselves could become
pop cultural artifacts and that celebrities were basically human soup cans.
The most important
art movement became the art of
the creation of the celebrity, the celebrity
business plan.
Celebrities began
creating themselves.
-
Neil Gabler, from
Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered Reality
"I was not surprised to hear that teenagers and
young adults are not really entertained by all the media devices to which they have become attached. The
reason is that entertainment is like dessert - a little goes a long way and
doesn't actually nourish. People derive genuine
satisfaction by actually doing
things such as making their own music,
dancing, creating art,
volunteering, growing flowers,
knitting sweaters, repairing old bicycles, learning a new language. The fact
that youngsters waste so much time
trying to find virtual satisfaction
shows that we need to work harder to make
real satisfaction more accessible to them." -
Ruth Anne Hammond
Celebrity says a great
deal about modern America in that no
other society has ever had as many
celebrities as ours or has revered them as intensely. Not only are
celebrities, the protagonists of
our news, the subjects
of our daily discourse and the repositories of our
values, but they have also
embedded themselves so deeply
in our consciousness that many
individual profess
feeling closer to and more passionate about
them than about their own primary relationships.
An ever-growing segment of the American
economy is now devoted to
designing, building and then dressing the sets in
which Americans
live, work, shop and play; to creating
our costumes; to making our hair shine and our
faces glow; to slenderizing our bodies; to
supplying our props - all so that we can
appropriate the trappings of celebrity.
Everyone is trying to discover the most exciting, provocative,
sensational
way to package whatever it is he or
she is doing so that they might gain shelf
space in the crowded
mass media
supermarket where
entertainment is the fastest-selling
product and more often than not the only
product sold.
Barbara Walters
prefaced her questions by stating her
obligation to ask them and then listened to the
answers in misty eyed agony while
emoting sympathy.
Larry King is friendly and
still provides a forum for celebrity that
borders on public access as
celebrities feel
secure enough to lower their guard.
Donald Trump became the perfect
symbol of avarice,
rapaciousness and ostentatiousness with his grandiose exploits.
Americans
even have celebrities - lifestyle adviser Martha
Stewart - who are essentially drama
coaches, instructing us in how to make
our own lives more closely
approximate the fantasy in our mind's
eye.
The celebrity archetype addressed social fear extant in
modern America: the anxiety of losing one's
identity or never finding it at
all; the terror of having too little amid
plenty; the dread of anonymity; the awful suspicion that some
people are blessed and some are not and that most of us
are among the latter.
Joseph Campbell
spoke of the archetypical
hero's mythical
journey which was a
voyage into the
psyche to wrestle and
defeat fear. When the archetypical hero returns to society
he bears his enlightenment as a
gift to everyone else.
This, the basis of all
mythological stories, is overcoming adversity.
Oprah Winfrey is in a continual crisis
which she continues to triumph
over.
Martha Stewart emerged
triumphant from
prison.
Celebrities have become devotional
objects and they inspire devotional
language just as
Joseph Campbell's
archetypical hero deserves our
devotion and respect.
When Richard Schickel in his book on celebrities, Intimate Strangers, talks of fans'
having "internalized their chosen celebrities,
unconsciously making them a part of their
consciousness," he is really describing a
form of
communion.
When
people say, as many did after the
death of Princess Diana, that they
feel they have a "personal
relationship" with a celebrity, they are invoking the same
term that evangelists use to describe their
relationship with God.
Although deification lurks beneath the crust of
consciousness there are times when the religious
imagery becomes explicit.
There is the
deification as affection apotheosized into
worship, with fans making
pilgrimages to grave sites as if these were shrines, buying artifacts as if
they were relics and seeking exegesis of
the lives as if they were sacred texts.
How much value can celebrity
create?
When Alex J. Mandl, the former
president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, was given
a $20 million signing bonus to head an obscure wireless phone company in 1996,
the firm justified the fee on the basis that a big name attracts investors exactly the same
way a big name movie star attracts an
audience. As it turned out, the company was right.
Within forty-eight hours of Alex
J. Mandl's appointment, each share rose $6. 75, covering his bonus six times
over - and suggesting that the economic
value of the celebrity of a
corporation's
CEO might even exceed the value of its material
assets.
In the book The
Winner-Take-All Society, economists
Philip. J. Cook and Robert H. Frank even translated this process into an
economic theory that
accounted for the growing disparity in the 1990's between the highest and the
lowest paid individuals within a
single profession. Philip. J. Cook and Robert H. Frank believed that the increasing globalization of
markets had created a giant set of bidders for
services, in effect turning
every employee into a free agent. While
multinational corporations could
pay more, employees at the tops of their professions could also demand more.
The best way for an employee
to succeed in such a
market is to establish some unique
value, and the most easily appreciated
value is celebrity.
The result is that Homo sapiens is
rapidly becoming Homo scaenicus -
man the entertainer.
-
Neil Gabler, from
Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered Reality
"In a culture in which
celebrity is the highest value and there is
little distinction between fame and infamy, you'd better enjoy your limelight
moment, even if it's a tawdry tabloid one. You
want a book deal? Step right up. No question, celebrity trumps everything." -
Anne Taylor Fleming
"I hope this will
serve as a wake-up call. If Paramount can realize that
Tom Cruise has nothing
intelligent to say, maybe the rest of
the population can realize that we should not pay as much attention as we do to
movie stars like Tom Cruise. There
are more important things in the world." -
Mazi Bahadori
During the last half of
the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the period
during which the idea of the movies became a reality, some
thing momentous happened in
America, and it happened not only to
American culture but to
the American consciousness.
Images began to flood
the market. Publications that had
been limited to text were now, thanks to new print
technologies, cluttered with
illustrations, so much so that some
critics even began complaining about "over- illustration."
Historian
Daniel J. Boorstin would find its
source in what he called the "Graphic Revolution," by which he meant the remarkable
rise in the quantity of visual material that had become available to the
public.
Nor was it was not
just a matter of graphic reproduction.
Everywhere in America there was a new
emphasis on seeing. An example was and is the
dressing of department store windows, carefully arranged to provide maximum
visual stimulation.
What made the 'Graphic Revolution'
revolutionary was less the quantity of images than
their effect on the America mind.
Daniel Boorstin's own concern was that the
'Graphic Revolution' encouraged what he called
image-thinking - thinking in terms of an "artificial imitation or representation of the external
form of any
object, especially of an
individual." This came at the
expense of what he called ideal-thinking - thinking in
terms of some idea or
value toward which one could strive.
The glut of images directes us to the here and now, to some
thing immediately useful; the
ideal directs us to some
thing above and beyond, to some
thing the utility of which may not be
readily apparent.
In Daniel
Boorstin's view, then, the 'Graphic Revolution' was a
moral revolution as well because it replaced
aspiration with gratification.
Print demanded ratiocination. "To engage
the written word means to
follow a line of thought which requires
considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning," Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves
to Death.
It followed that a
predominantly print-based society, as
America's was until the late 19th century, while
not necessarily one coruscating with intellectual brilliance, nevertheless
was one in which logic, order and context prevailed.
An image-based society, on the other
hand, dispensed with all these because
images did not demand them. How much
logical discipline
did one need to recognize a image?
-
Neil Gabler, from
Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered
Reality
"Research has shown that movies have a
powerful influence
on the behavior of children and teenagers. That's why
corporations spend
money for product placement in films to
market their
sneakers,
sunglasses and
soft drinks." - Jay A. Winsten,
associate dean Harvard School of Public Health
"It has come, this new weapon of men, and the
face of the whole
Earth changes. In after
centuries its beginning will indeed beremembered." - Vachel LindsayThe new
weapon was the movies.
All one has to do is watch people filing
silently out of a movie theater, their
eyes vacant, their faces slack, to see how one must
reemerge after being submerged this way in a fantasy.
Art was said to
provide ekstasis, which in Greek means "letting us
stand outside ourselves," presumably
to lend us perspective. Everyone
knows from personal experience that entertainment usually provides just the
opposite: inter tenere , pulling
us into ourselves thus
denying us perspective.
The Harvard
psychology professor
Hugo
Munsterberg, writing of this almost mesmerizing effect, cited reports that
"sensory hallucinations and
illusions have crept in; neurasthenic
individuals are especially
inclined to experience touch or temperature or
smell or sound
impressions from what they
see on the screen. The associations become vivid as realities, because the mind is
completely engrossed in the moving pictures."
Movies have interpenetrated reality in a way no
other art
or entertainment has, in part because as a
photographic medium they were fashioned
from the materials of reality. Early audiences reportedly would shrink as a
train on-screen pulled into a station, fearing
that it would burst through and run them over. They had to be constantly
reminded that what they were seeing was only an
illusion.
"Should
you ever seek the source of the moving pictures of
the vaudeville theater," Moving Picture World
felt compelled to warn its
readers in 1907, "you will
learn that the
comic, the tragic, the
fantastic, the
mystic scenes so swiftly enacted in
photographic pantomime are not
real but feigned."
What makes the movies appear even more
real, and what makes them even more
powerful in their effect, is how the audience
mentally processed them. As
Hugo
Munsterberg noted, the movies played in our heads and
seemed to replicate our own consciousness.
Conspiring with the dark, they cast a
spell that lulled one from his own reality into
theirs until the two merged.
This was precisely what concerned some of
its more astute critics.
They
realized that the
movies seemed to cross the line that
separated reality
from imagination.
To Jane Addams, the
social reformer and director of Chicago's Hull House
community center, the movie theater was a "veritable
house of dreams," which was "infinitely more
real than the noisy streets and crowded factories."
Over time, after tens of millions had watched
thousands of motion pictures, the movies gradually began occupying the
common American imagination
like an expeditionary force, not only filling
Americans' heads
with models to appropriate but imbuing them with an even more profound
sense than anyone in the nineteenth century could
possibly have had of how important appearances were in producing just the
right effect.
-
Neil Gabler, from
Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered Reality
"Since audiences have no way of distinguishing
between what is real and what is fabricated, they
are asked to swallow the whole
sugar-coated confection in one gulp. In the real
world a bald faced lie is easy to identify, but half
truths are more insidious."- Preston Lerner
"Television is not necessarily a mirror of anything
but what those few people think. The whole entertainment component of
television is dominated by men and women who have a unified, idiosyncratic view
of life." - Ben Stein*
"Television has allowed us to create a common
culture, and without it we would not have been able to accomplish our goal." -
Morris Janowitz*, psychologist,
Chicago University, December 1, 1984
"Research has shown that "mindless" television or
video games may idle and impoverish the development of the pre-frontal cortex,
or that portion of the brain that is responsible for planning, organizing and
sequencing behavior for self-control, moral judgment and attention." - Jane M.
Healy, Ph.D. American Academy of Pediatrics May 1998
"Advertising gained
considerable momentum after World
War II, especially with the advent of television. The average
American adult sees about 21,000 commercial
messages a year; the largest 100 corporations in America pay for about 75 percent of commercial
television time and about half the public television time. With
advertising for a 30 second segment in prime time
costing over $200,000 on network television, only the largest
corporations can afford it." -
Donald O. Mayer No medium generates images like television.
Television takes every
thing on the screen and converts it into
entertainment, which is
television's
natural
form of discourse.
"No
matter what is depicted or from what point of
view, the overarching presumption is that
television is there for our
amusement and pleasure."- " Neil Postman
But because
television has become the
primary means through which people appropriate the
culture, it has promulgated an
epistemology in which all
information, whatever the
source, is forced to become entertainment, the age of typography gave
way to the age of
television and
transformed our
way of thinking in the process.
Marshall McLuhan
theorized, "Any technology gradually creates a totally new human
environment," and that certainly
seemes to be true for the changes wrought by the
technologies of image creation, especially
television.
The
advent of television allows
an endless source of raw news to be processed into entertainment. Entertainment removed from reality by the naturally
occurring bias of all those responsible for the ‘news' presentation. .
"I thought
news briefings were meant to inform not
entertain." -Matt GiorgiThe
public's hunger for
entertainment allows for either
fiction or 'news' based on reality.
News has become
television
entertainment and because news provides a
common window on
public reality, the window through which most of
us apprehend those parts of
life with which we do not have direct contact,
entertainment had stealthily become the standard
of value for reality itself.
"The
reality is that it is increasingly less realistic to
expect commercial
broadcast outlets to
effectively serve two masters: the
public interest and the
corporate bottom line." -
Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkley's Graduate School of
Journalism.
Attributing the sudden increase in show business
news to
television's
preoccupation with
entertainment, Neil Postman called it a "ricochet
effect," meaning that the entertainment values of
television bounced off the
other mass
media and then got deflected back into television. "Whereas
television taught the
magazines that news is nothing but entertainment," Neil Postman wrote, "the
magazines have taught
television that nothing but
entertainment is news."
"I don't think we are
fully aware, no matter how many times it is said, of how
television (and print)
news creates a bubble in
which stories are not actually reported as they
are, but to fit a proscribed idea of what
news should be." -
Nora
GallagherWhat has made entertainment a cosmology is the constellation of
expectations that
television
creates, expectations that
weigh heavily on the American
consciousness and actually
change our
mental architecture.
For many
Americans the dream
reality of
television is as vivid as
their own lives and inextricable from it.
In politics, as in all things,
television demands action and
it demands personality.
John F.
Kennedy, with his matinee
idol good looks,
was the harbinger of a new category of politics that was predicated on celebrity appeal.
"What we are dealing with here," Richard
Schickel wrote of John F. Kennedy's
effect on American politics, "is a recognition on the part of the
candidate and his managers that traditional
debts and alliances
between the party and among various outside interest groups are, in the age of
television, of less
significance in winning elections,
and in governance itself, than the
creation of an image that
gives the illusion of masculine dynamism
without
sacrifice of ongoing
affection. Which is exactly what a
successful male
movie star recognizes his
job to be."
If the main vehicle of the political campaign is
television, the main thrust
of television itself is to
disassociate content from image, words from
feelings, cogitation from reflex, so that the audience reacts
rather than thinks -inter tenere rather than
ekstasis.
"Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort
to understand what we are talking about,"
Richard Nixon speech writer
Raymond Price emphasized in a campaign
white paper. "Reason requires a high degree of
discipline of concentration;
impression is easier.
Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it
demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in,
without making an
intellectual demand. . . . The
emotions are more easily roused, closer to the
surface, more malleable."
Of course
mass media is fully
aware that now
political campaigns are being staged for their
benefit and that they were conduits through which emotional manipulations would reach the
public. But mass
media prides itself on its superiority over those
manipulations, and that may
explain why it began
placing stagecraft itself at the center of reportage.
"The
language of political reporting is filled with accounts of staging
and backdrops, camera angles and scripts, sound bites and spin
control, photo
opportunities and mass media gurus." -
Kiku Adatto
Ronald Reagan
intuited that every thing boils down to
perception and therefore
everything except perception is irrelevant.
Ronald Reagan addressed issues
by applying solutions he had seen in movies.
Ronald Reagan saw politics not as a means of addressing
problems but as a
way of distracting the
public from them.
Ronald Reagan
designed his presidency to make
Americans feel
better.
Americans readily acquiesced to the
illusion because
Ronald Reagan was a
good actor.
When hijackers took the Achille Lauro
Ronald Reagan stated "they can run but
they can't hide" straight out of a Hollywood Western.
George W. Bush's "Bring em on!"
was straight out of Ronald Reagan's
play book.
Ronald Reagan ushered in the age when
entertainment
triumphed over
ideology. As for substantive
issues, though they couldn't be purged
entirely, they largely became what film director Alfred Hitchcock, in a
discussion of his plotting, once called macguffins - that is, they are the
excuse for setting the whole
process in motion though they
have virtually no intrinsic value.
Celebrity has now become an example of
chaos theory.
Celebrities and celebrity wannabes have practically become
indistinguishable as talent is no longer a
prerequisite for the office of celebrity.
-
Neil Gabler, from
Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Our
brain is both source and repository of our elusive identity and of all aspects
of cognition and emotion.
The brain is the
master control of our health and well being,
competencies and coping skills.
The brain
directs all aspects of bodily functions through established biological
pathways.
The first two years of a child's life
is when the most rapid development of the brain occurs.
The first five
years of a child's life is the critical period for
developing language and cognition.
The more a brain is stimulated the more
it is capable of doing.
An infant is born with approximately 100
billion brain cells designed to store and transmit
information.
Children's brains are at its most receptive stage in
infancy and early childhood, when experiences,
positive or negative, will affect how groups of neurons are either strengthened
or disregarded.
Television offers children
benefits such as education and entertainment but
television can have negative
impacts on children by limiting their participation in physical activity and
dramatic play.
Television watching deprives
children of experiences that help to develop the
neural pathways which are
necessary for healthy brain development.
Heavy
television watching during
the early years when the brain is malleable and sensitive prolongs the
dominance of the right brain function and inhibits the left brain which is
responsible for verbal-logical functions.
Television has become the
dominant force raising our children.
Brain growth
in many young children is inhibited by watching an average of two to four hours
of television per
day.
The more
television children watch,
the greater the negative influence on their
lives.
Children's behavior due to
television watching is
further accentuated when one considers that children have difficulty
separating reality
from fantasy.
Children have a strong
tendency to identify with a particular character.
Children who admire
aggressiveness in their heroes and heroines
will see little reason for devoting time and effort to learning other ways of
problem solving.
By the age of three
children imitate
television characters as
readily as they imitate real
people.
When children decide to
imitate a
behavior,
morality is not a part of this decision
process.
Children are great
imitators who often
believe what they view on
television as being
true because many of the characters portray
qualities that make them acceptable role models.
Children often can not
distinguish between pro-social and anti-social
behaviors portrayed on
television.
As
children imitate
behavior they view on
television, frequent exposure
to television
violence can make children think that
violence is normal.
As many children's
programs reflect violence in a
humorous manner children may even
see violence as humor.
Children's aggressive skills are
acquired earlier than mental or social skills as a
survival mechanism.
Children who
view large quantities of television
violence tend to see the world as a frightening
place and grow leery of neighbors and strangers.
Children that are
taught that violence is an acceptable
solution to problems will tend to
work out their problems in the same way.
The number of violence acts in
children's programs are six times greater than in adult shows.
The
amount of television
violence witnessed by average
American children during formative elementary
school years is about 8,000 murders and
around 100,000 other acts of television
violence.
Children lack the cognitive
attributes to put these violence
images into meaningful contexts as they can not
articulate a rationale for the violence they
witness.
Consequently, they often
imitate
violence
behaviors witnessed on
television.
As
children view television
violence the chemical transmitter,
noradrenaline, increases in children's brains.
The brain's alarm
network is located at the base of the brain and sends noradrenaline to other
brain centers that control such functions as
emotions.
As a reaction to the viewing of
television
violence, the brain adapts by rewiring trillions
of cellular connections establishing the chemical pathways of aggressive
emotion.
Neurological processing of
television
violence is not any different from processing
real violence.
Known as the 'orienting
response', the human brain is wired to fix the eyes on sudden changes in
the environment.
Rapid changing
television
images in children's cartoon shows change
approximately every 4 to 6 seconds reducing thinking functions and keeping a child's instincts and
emotions in a constant state of alertness for flight
or fight.
The neural
pathways that control how we respond to
stress seem to be particularly
powerful in shaping how we learn and behave, and our
overall health.
When our neural pathways are shaped by
violent aggressive emotions the sustained stress during the time when the brain is going
through its major sculpting process can adversely our health later in
life.
When a child's brain is under prolonged
stress, the child's brain sends a signal to
the body to produce greater amounts of a stress hormone called cortisol. The constant
release of cortisol means the child is constantly on high alert.
A report by the Ontario Medical Association indicated
that watching television is a
major contributor to sleeplessness, depression, and
hyperactivity in young
children.
The television has
invaded every aspect of our
culture.
The lack of proper stimulation, due
to television watching, is
damaging the brains of children.
Children have limited cognitive
abilities to process and cope with
television
violence which leads to aggressive
behavior, emotional
desensitization and due to the excess amount of violence in
television shows for
children, many viewers develop a distorted brain along with a distorted sense
of reality. - Wayne Eastman, Ed.D
"Children
are the Earth's most ardent
traditionalists. They like
things stable and
categorized.
Television, like it or not,
teaches them a lot of these rules." - Jane Espenson*,
television writer for 'Ellen'
starring Ellen DeGeneres playing an 'average'
lesbian, from an Opinion article in LA Times March 20,
2005.
"We are vunerable to video
lies.
Against purposeful
lies, truth
has never been so helpless."
-
David
Gelernter*
"Advertisers cultivate needs by
hitching their wares
to the infinite yearnings of the human soul." - Donald O. Mayer
"Ads invoke communal connections even though they
do so in order to fulfill non-personal, even anti-personal, commercial
objectives." - Marianne Sawicki*
$139,168,000,000 was spent on
advertising in
America in 2004.
$143,293,000,000 was spent on
advertising in
America in 2005.
The association of
consumption
with entertainment does not end with the shopping
experience as there is a flow of
celebrity from the world of entertainment to
the world of
consumption.
As early as World War I actors
and athletes were enlisted to give endorsements of
products in
advertisements, and aviator Charles
Lindbergh, even before he successfully completed his solo flight across the
Atlantic Ocean in 1927, had already cut deals
with Mobil Oil, Vacuum Oil, AC spark plugs and Wright
Aeronautical.
These endorsements suggested that a
celebrity's aura would rub off on a
consumer who used the
favored
products conveying to the
individual the status of
celebrity.
"Consumerism is now the
religion dujour." - Bob McLaughlin
"This
entire capitalist society, dependent upon the interplay of
consumer and
marketing industry, has produced the most profoundly
manipulative
advertising
empire the Earth
has ever known - and the main "game" is to
create self-imagery dependent on external validation.
Marketing experts, skilled at catering
to every vanity and whim of the
ego, inundate the media
with advertisements that ignite a worshipful attitude
for external display, such as fashionable
name-brand attire to enhance the
image of success, coolness,
or hip sophistication." - Lew Paz
As
the advertisers need to convince you that you will only attain that hip
sophistication by using their products they push the envelope of moral
acceptability in an attempt to be "edgy." Many times advertisers take advantage
of human nature to convince the target audience that their products will
somehow enhance the victim/target's sexuality.
Calvin Klein advertising
campaign featuring images by Ashkenazi photographer Stephen
Meisel is an example. Adolescent models were photographed in various stages of
undress, poised to offer both sexual pleasures and the fantasy of sexual
availability.
Women Against Pornography condemned Calvin Klein's
earlier suggestive commercials with an adolescent Brooke Shields. Unfortunately
any complaints about the latest campaign were completely stifled by the
mass media propaganda machine. American morals have
not declined to the point that the latest advertising campaign was not
offensive to the vast majority of Americans. It is simply that those American
voices have been effectively muzzled.
Ashkenazi Nicholas de Gunzburg, the
"fur and fabric editor" of Vogue magazine was Calvin Klein's mentor.
Calvin Klein's key partner in his initial years was fellow
Ashkenazi entrepreneur Barry
Schwartz.
The Guess company, founded by the
Ashkenazi Marciano brothers who
share control of the firm with the Ashkenazi Nakash family, followed
the same advertising strategy to sell jeans as Calvin Klein.
Media
Watch called for a boycott of Guess, charging that its ads demean women,
integrating sex with violence.
"Like most habitual shoppers, I was
looking for something that I wanted more than
I needed, something I could not
necessarily describe but would recognize when I saw it.
I was looking for something I had
bought new long ago but had lost and was expecting to find once again. Call me
a constantly lapsing recovering consumer. I
am not proud of this, though I am not ashamed of it either.
The worst thing it means is that I am an entirely average
American, easily driven by
complex and unpleasant
realities to the escapist distractions of
stuff. I am a member of what
social critics and theorists like to call the "bewildered herd," though
I like to think that
I am less bewildered and more
self-aware than most of my fellow cattle,
even when I find myself buying
another pair of high heels that
I can't really walk in and don't need." - Erin
Aubry Kaplan
Entertainment and
consumption are
often two sides of the same ideological coin.
Entertainment is about release,
freedom, transport, escape. Aside from the purchase
of necessities - brands of which
are themselves often differentiated from one
another by their "personality" - so
too is consumption.
Entertainment is about the power of
sensation. So too is
consumption, in
this case the sensations generated externally by how
one looked and internally by how one felt.
Entertainment relies heavily on instant
gratification. So too does
consumption.
Entertainment is an
expression of
consumption
allowing anyone to buy his way into
his fantasy. Both entertainment and
consumption
often provide the same intoxication: the
sheer, mindless pleasure of
emancipation from reason,
from responsibility, from tradition,
from class and from all the
other bonds that restrain
self.
-
Neil Gabler, adapted
from Life : the Movie or How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Theorists of
consumption
also understand that
acquisition itself is dependent upon a fabricated, conditioned Pavlovian need
engineered by advertisers.
"It has been found that the less an
advertisement looks like an
advertisement, and the more it
looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and
read. " -
David
Ogilvy
"I am in the 'desirable'
18 to 49 demographic, and fervently wish that marketers would just leave me alone.
I look forward to the day
I turn 50, when the torrent of messages enticing me to buy
useless junk I do not need may abate slightly. Oh, but
I forgot: We are all members of an 'ownership
society,' are we not? How silly of me."-
Alexandra Ferry
"Moving
beyond range of TV hucksters, pesky telemarketers and the daily onslaught of
direct junk mail is one of the great perks of maturity. It seems
Americans are so thoroughly defined by
commerce that a decline in
add dollars aimed our way challenges
our identity according to the contemporary Cartesian
principle: I
consume therefore I am."-
Daniel
S. Hinerfeld
"Being relevant to current American advertising objectives is to be
irrelevant to the broader aim of the breathing, thinking and living."
-Carolyn Gale McGovern-Bowen
"Goodbye annoying, nasty
ads, so long dirt-flinging rhetoric
and farewell to the constant assault of pounding negative nonsense into our
heads minute by minute, hour after hour and month after month. Now we can go
back to the really important ads: being brainwashed about being
sick and needing every single
pill that has been manufactured in the
universe for
illnesses we never even knew we had. Can't
wait. Even that will be a relief after this very long and latest
political mud fest." - Francis Terrell,
11/08/2006
Seven blunders of
materialistic consumerism
1. Wealth without
work
3. Knowledge without
character
5. Science
without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without
principle Mahatma Gandhi
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This web site is not a commercial web site
and is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a new religious
ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification
of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern
propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an
international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt
version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any
group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due
to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion
aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason
which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no
church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to
develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of
reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the
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This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary
the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the
international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The
international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking
system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military complex of America and is
responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior
and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on cooperation.
Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.
American social mores
and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt
international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the
ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing
emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through
prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the
destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not
adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through
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has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite
that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.
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