Artificial Cheese

Some people just don’t see the big picture. I wouldn’t be concerned if ’some people’ just included your average white consumer with 2.5 kids and a two bedroom house. But thats not the case. I’m talking about the throttle of worldly knowledge; the looking glass between us and the world. I’m talking about the news.

What amplifies this problem are the mindless drones that allow themselves to be fed whatever garbage comes out of the news. People accept whatever their televisions say without questioning its validity, completeness, or even the obvious flaws in its meaning. We, including myself, fall into the assumption that someone sits between us and the idiots, someone smart to say whats news and whats not. The problem is that the propogation of information in the media is a recursive process, where each steps shares the property that I just mentioned. Everyone assumes that what they are told makes sense, even the ones delivering the news.

Let me give an example before I sound like an angry hippie. There was a severe flood in New Jersey in June, 2006. Many people lost carpets. I’ll accept that as news because its painfully obvious when a flood has occured. But the job of the media not only to report on the obvious, but to report on the less obvious impacts of the obvious. The issue at the time was the amount of money that the New Jersey casino industry lost in gambling revenue, $51 million. Also news.

What wasn’t news is how the media portrayed this story as a tragic incident. The papers and television news made it seem like someone took $51 million and threw it into a fire. That money wasn’t lost, it just didn’t go to a skanky casino where it would sit in a vault. That money was spent on milk, eggs, cable bills, roof repairs, and maybe even casinos in other states.

The next week I overheard people talking about the $51 million with the same tone as the news. “What a horrible thing to happen, $51 million that we’ll never see again.” If those conversationeers spent just 5 seconds to stop thinking about Dancing with the Stars or Brangelina and thought about their perfunctory forwarding of trash they heard on TV while channel surfing for…Dancing with the Stars…they might reconsider saying what they said.

I sound crazy, but I’m really speaking with some purpose. You see, it’s as much the speakers fault as it is the listener. Our society has come to tolerate fault. We go to a restaurant and accept cold soup, or go to a movie store and accept arrogance from the staff. Worst of all, we accept what others say without questioning it. Even if we don’t know what they’re talking about it, we don’t want to break the flow of conversation by asking someone to elaborate.

Try this out, say something that doesn’t make sense and wait for someone to challenge. For example, after someone tells a useless story about what happened over the weekend, you can say, “Haha, just like the Reichstag!”. Then wait for someone to say, “What?”. Nine out of ten times, you’ll just get a chuckle in agreement.