It's 9:20 pm and I venture downstairs to grab a beer. I pass the TV where my family sits enraptured as Ant and Dec feed some z-list celebrity a plateful of maggots or dogshit or something. I'm more appalled that the people I care about are lapping the shit up than the attention seeking fuckhead lapping shit up on the box. Welcome to the 21st century. Teevee aint even trying anymore. Two whole generations have been born and raised, plugged into the network. I can't help thinking the prophecies were true - this media really will destroy minds.
They used to have to justify it, back in the black and white days when RP stiffs would sell the party line on the news at 10. People were smarter back then, it took more work to fool them. That was then and this is now. A barely coherent borderline retard fucks up his lines and dribbles something incomprehensible in respose to a question raised in a press conference about why he, the president of the usa, is making a mountain of dead bodies somewhere in the middle east. That'd never have washed back in the day but now the viewers are satisfied with this answer. It's not even a coherent sentence but he was asked a question and noise came out his mouth - that's more than enough to pacify the people at home.
And here's me, settled down with these cabbages. The girl who fucks me and makes me laugh from time to time. The kid with the wicked sense of humour. I love these two but I can't help thinking I should do something about their unhealthy addiction to banality. "That's sad making people do that." she says to me. "Yeah but the shitheads keep watching." I respond "Give me a shout when celebrity chainsaw juggling comes on". Probably could have been a bit more tactful, I think to myself as she storms off downstairs in a huff, but what the fuck, I'm not gonna get drawn into a conversation about some semi famous fuckheads eating shit in a jungle.
I'm a free spirit - get me out of here!
run while you still have legs.
I know how you feel. TV really is the demon box. Its too easy to just sit there and....do nothing. Aimlessly flick through the channels. Which is why I no longer watch the damn thing. It reduces concentration, you know. I know people who literally cannot think without a few minutes break every 15 minutes. It also makes you see the world differently. People who watch TV percieve far higher amounts of violence than those who do not. Its a useful shackle of the mind, the box.
The real headfuck for me is when a tv cabbage asks me "how the hell can you spend so much time just staring at a computer screen?" I'm wired into the same cathode ray emitter as they are, surely it's not such a leap of faith to understand why someone might want a two way interaction but hell I've given up trying to explain it. I try to remain optimistic. The rise of consoles means that the vegetables might be encouraged to develop rudimentary problem solving techniques or improve their reaction times and spacial awareness. Fuck even voting for who they want to win pop idol requires some level of decision making. Sometime soon assholes like me are going to be streaming counter propaganda into their living room via converged tv/internet. Maybe it aint all black after all.
Yeah, there is a not so subtle difference between passively accepting what is given to you and going out of your way to seek it out, as well as the communication factor.
I do wonder though, about the Digital TV crossover over here. It may open up more opportunities, but from what I have seen so far, it has mostly been colonized by US cable channels and the BBC. Which makes me a sad panda.
got satalite myself
theres good points and bad points about it
i got a few movie channels that only play B Movies and bad drive-in flicks
I like my movies so god damn bad that only a select few can actually sit through them with me :-) (which reminds me I gotta start reviewing movies again)
plus I got about 6 documentary chans - which are all mediocre but between them theres something usually decent on
and the sports chans obviously
but the crappy thing is you HAVE to get the main package and add on to that
and the main package is like 200 chans of CBC, ABC, ect. which I NEVER watch
so your paying for something you will never watch
its also neat to have a bounch of news channels
the BBC News isnt bad actually
CBC used to be the best but have been steadily declining over the years - though the french CBC is actually awsome as far as 24 hour news programs go
CNN is crap execpt for Darth Vader telling you your watching CNN
and FOX is crap and we only get sometimes
(their having trouble getting 24 hour Fox News into Canada cause the Provincial government doesnt consider it news :lol:)
as far as the regular chans go the only one i could stomach is actually the BBC
mainly cause the BBC we get here is actually just the best of the BBC
They only have one channel (and they have to stretch their programs out for commercials) so they have to filter out all the crap before sending it over seas - still wouldn't pay for it if i had the chance
overall though
i really only watch tv when i get home from work and want to mellow out for a bit
and i love documentaries - execially about prehistoric life
I don't watch SHOWS anymore. I just can't. I'll watch movies...that's it. Nothing else, really, is worth the time. I'll watch the odd on-going thing, esp on HBO, but I just consider that an on-going movie. Sopranos DOES kick ass. And BBC International/Lehrer Newshour is about all the news I can stand, either. *shrug*
But even if the mate is watching teevee, I'm on here or there, surfin 'nets.
Quote from: SillyCybin on December 01, 2006, 09:41:21 PM
I'm a free spirit - get me out of here!
Well, in theory we could, but it wouldn't help.
Everywhere is where you're at right now (or rather, at the time of your writing). The whole world is either a place where people eat maggots for entertainment, or it's a place where people eat maggots because that's the only fucking food for miles.
One or the other. Bullshit or privation. You decide.
good rant. I can empathize with it. I feel the same way in my house. Except, right now, my wife is still getting over some shit that happened to her/us and so I'm not going to question her escapism, though lately at least she's been escaping into books rather than TV. And even then, at least it isn't Reality TV shite. I have to admit, I enjoy a show here and there that is "thought provoking".
But let's face it. TV is the Easy Button for people wanting to escape themselves.
tv is a medium
some people use it well
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 16, 2007, 06:48:06 PM
good rant.  I can empathize with it.  I feel the same way in my house.  Except, right now, my wife is still getting over some shit that happened to her/us and so I'm not going to question her escapism, though lately at least she's been escaping into books rather than TV.  And even then, at least it isn't Reality TV shite.  I have to admit, I enjoy a show here and there that is "thought provoking".
But let's face it.  TV can be the Easy Button for people wanting to escape themselves. 
fixxored for accuracy
Quote from: LHX on February 16, 2007, 06:51:39 PM
tv is a medium
some people use it well
Possibly very true, but far too many users and producers are working together to waste untold people's time, minds, and bodies with the garbage they play these days.
Quote from: Felix Mackay on February 16, 2007, 07:38:16 PM
Quote from: LHX on February 16, 2007, 06:51:39 PM
tv is a medium
some people use it well
Possibly very true, but far too many users and producers are working together to waste untold people's time, minds, and bodies with the garbage they play these days.
i agree
same goes for the airwaves, print media, and internet content
Quote from: LHX on February 16, 2007, 06:51:39 PM
tv is a medium
some people use it well
"The Medium is the message, AND Ill KILL anyone who Disagrees... FUCKEr"
/
/
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(http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a139/ThornIs/mcluhan.gif)
Medium is a signal, but not the whole message.
some would disagree...
Does medium imply content?
media shapes content
what is internet telling you right now?
to be fair to the late McLuhan
what he was saying was a generic form of mass media was in fact more important then any message it is trying to convey
in his world the content is the viewer himself
best let Wiki explain
QuoteIn The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous slogan, "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) calls attention to this intrinsic impact of communications media. (It should be noted that he titled his later, 1967, book The Medium is the Massage.) The slogan, "the medium is the message," is best understood in light of Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.[18]
the sad thing is his ideas on were popular culture and mass media was going to take us is more relevant today as it was in the 60's
dare you to turn on CNN, or, if your feeling really brave, FOX News
QuoteThe main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."
QuoteInstead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.[23]
QuoteMcLuhan's theory was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the lighbulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[28] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society –- in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example -– the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.
QuoteMcLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Wake represent different stages in the history of man:[32] Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals. Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression. Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life. Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power. Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors. Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism. Thunder 7: Tribal man again. Both all choractors end of separate, private man. Return of choric. Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound. Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death. Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. Last thunder = turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
Quote from: LHX on February 17, 2007, 07:42:13 PM
media shapes content
what is internet telling you right now?
The point of media is to decode intended meaning. The medium is a clue, but not the message itself. Media is form, content is function. It really takes an artist for both to work in the same direction.
Quote from: Felix Mackay on February 17, 2007, 11:49:44 PM
Quote from: LHX on February 17, 2007, 07:42:13 PM
media shapes content
what is internet telling you right now?
The point of media is to decode intended meaning. The medium is a clue, but not the message itself. Media is form, content is function. It really takes an artist for both to work in the same direction.
i had to read that about 4 times, but its actually a really good post
pretend i am gonna attack you from the 'what is the point of discussing that abstract nonsense' angle -
how do you make that observation pertinent and practical?
(because it is a good summary of a sharp observation)
The upshot of that last post is that you can't encode your messages carelessly (the obvious part), and that the medium you choose is always a part of what you say and you must always keep in mind not to whisper through a megaphone.
Quote from: SillyCybin on December 01, 2006, 09:41:21 PM
I'm a free spirit - get me out of here!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!