Mass media genocidists cry crocodile tears
CNN and Fortune have gotten together to complain about the impoverishment of “our” society with the explosion of choice offered by the Internet, in an article titled “The extinction of mass culture”. A few excerpts:
The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences - and the explosion of choice has left us poorer
Do we lose something as a society if we have less in common? How do we define ourselves as Americans if we are not sharing the same culture impacts?
Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.
Politics in America has become polarized for many reasons, but a big one is the fact that people can now filter the news and opinion they get to avoid exposure to ideas with which they disagree.
Mass culture provides intangible benefits, too. Big stars, hit TV shows and even commercials help knit a society together. Think of the feeling that comes a few times a year - the morning after the Super Bowl or the Oscars - when tens of millions of Americans share a common experience.
I think this article unintentionally pretty much explains the problem. These guys are so self-absorbed due to unaccountable control over the culture that they can’t see that the real impoverishment occurred with the advent of mass media via fictive kinship. Mass media fictive kinship created a false ethnicity within which it was possible to commit what the Geneva Convention defined as “genocide”, without anyone taking notice. After all, if an entire race of people is utterly destroyed, and we still have “our mass culture”, then the loss is no more important than the loss of, say, a brand of dish-washing detergent.
Posted by On Holliday on Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:14 | #
This is an excellent post that summarizes the problem with various forms of “constitutional patriotism”:
“After all, if an entire race of people is utterly destroyed, and we still have “our mass culture”, then the loss is no more important than the loss of, say, a brand of dish-washing detergent.”
Indeed. I had to laugh about the idea in the original article about the “polarization” of politics in America. This “polarization” is fictive as well - consider the “polarizing” differences between Bush and Kerry on race, immigration, diversity, the future of America, and America’s obsession with Israel.
However, the idea that somewhere someone is accessing information independent of the mass media is “disturbing”; we just cannot have any dissidents “not with the program” now, can we?
Their fears, of course, point the way to our salvation: ever-increasing balkanization and an increased sense that our “mass culture” does not represent the interests of white Americans.