A profoundly clear piece of argument can be found in an article titled Knowing The Enemy at The American Assembler.
I am fond of suggesting that the interconnectedness of the Internet is a fundamentally new set of conditions, wherein human minds, imaginations, aspirations, fears and so on begin to interact as they never have before.
It behooves us to remember that the TV was a fundamentally new set of conditions that connected minds, and that we’ve only had it for 50 or so years. It’s form of connectivity, however, was manufactured by others, for us, with cameras – based on manipulative interpretations of “giving us what we want”, delivered to us through the air waves and now cable or satellite signals. There is interaction – the producers’ content and our sensations, our imaginations – but our imaginations have nothing to interact back with in the process of watching television other than our own appetites, desires and impulses.
For example, what else other than cable television and video recording is responsible for making porn a mainstream aspect of western culture? And it’s not even the subject matter per se (erotic images have been with us as art for centuries, and in all cultures). It’s human.
What pornography shows us about ourselves, and how we manifest (or not) eros in our culture, is interesting. American pornography is different from French pornography, which is in turn different than German or Dutch, which is different than Japanese. So too with television. It requires some understanding of another country’s language and culture to appreciate that they are addressing the same human issues, but that the expression of content and the patterns of common consciousness it mirrors are different.
Television’s power – the combination of channels, brands and content – has lodged itself in our brain stems. It is an irrevocable aspect of consciousness around the planet today.
Those whose business is power have understood this well, and have deeply entrenched their power in the places where it is most deeply buried and most difficult to dislodge.
This article is about how we can still respond to that power in ways that will be to our benefit, rather than to the benefit of a few media oligarchs.
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