One of my favorite movies is Paddy Chayevsky's Network. Like more than a few 1970's mass marketed films, it is a prophetic story about the way that power was beginning to be wielded in the brave new world of mass communications.
Some of Them Were Angry
NOTE:The title and much of the quoted text are from Jackson Browne's brilliant Before the Deluge
Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge
As we head into the abyss...
For far too long far too many of us have mostly ended up just going along with some of the worst acts against humanity, ever. Either in outright denial of reality or via superhuman feats of rationalization...or by being misled in one way or another, or by simple exhaustion, pummeled as we are by the constant torrent of media-borne propaganda.
Television viewing habits change as technology evolves. Long gone is the uncontested dominance of the three major networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC). The cable news networks are increasingly being replaced by podcasts and YouTube shows. Nowadays, many of us tend to believe our peers more than news fed from up top ala Soviet-style propaganda, although I liked watching Eric Sevaried, John Chancellor, and Howard K. Smith. They were real wordsmiths and had a lot of respect for language and how it is used to communicate ideas. One of the things I liked a great deal as a grad school student living in England was the fact that most people talked in complete sentences!
The ACLU of Ohio has created a series of videos sharing the lives of transgender Ohioans.
The title here refers to people complaining about the state of many forms of media and entertainment today from Television to Video Games and Music to, yes, even Professional Wrestling. These cries of Political Correctness and 'SJW Censorship' have ruined everything according to some. There's just one problem with that: What many of these folks decry as Political Correctness Run Amok is simply a media response to changing and growing demographics.
At the gym in my apartment complex the other day this guy was watching O'Reilly Factor the day of the attacks in Nice, France...hoo boy. Of course, he had Trumpy Boy on the phone talking about how 'we need to stomp these guys into the ground' blah blah blah, but the entire show was just him and his idiot guests ranting about how Obama should have done 'more' to stop this shit.
and I am watching as the program goes from "plucky resistance movement" to "extinction burst" and yet there is the symphony of Root and Shaw (spoiler alert)
There will be another program for those with apocalyptic worries about the global surveillance meta-state and the advances of artificial intelligence.
Unlike the role of individual folks like Manning and Snowden, it will take a community, properly armed.
Midnight Mulling continues its look at building reality in 2016.
OPEN LETTER TO ABC, NBC CBS AND FAUX NOISE --
Once upon time there were big television sets. Really big. Not the size of the screen, usually, but the chassis itself. The innards were tubes and capacitors and resistors and transformers. And the quality of the picture could be measured by the number of tubes and capacitors and resistors and transformers stuffed into the chassis. Not always. But usually.
