The NEWS con - Corporate mass-media and the anxiety induced consumption

I am now almost 3 month deep into my voyage and have never turned on a TV set once and never missed it. Many of you will be appalled by how much disconnected from “reality” I must be by now and maybe also by how as an active person I can live with such an abdication from one of our unchallenged prerogatives: the one to stay “informed”.

I have news for you my friends. Corporate mass-media are playing an enormous scam on most of us, our perceptions and our minds. They fooled us into an undiscerning bunch of idiots when it comes to the “News” concept. If when it comes to other TV programs we are allowed some level of diversity in choice, some preferring sports over soap operas and some the documentary over the fiction series or feature film, the “NEWS”(!) don’t allow any deviation from the hypnotic obedience the “X” o’clock title animation and grave-alert accompanying jingle generates. Dr. Pavlov would be thrilled and flattered by the scale of this mass experiment. They fallaciously have us believe that we actually “need” to know what they want to tell us in order to better function in the world we live in, small and large scale alike.

Having worked in brand and corporate communication industry for many years I studied and became aware of some of the psychological effects of information and the varied reactions different communication processes trigger. And slowly over time the picture got clear by closer investigation of the subsequent truth known in the business about media not primarily providing useful information to it’s recipients but delivering audiences to advertisers.

We live in a world of polymorphic international corporations that own the companies producing the goods filling our stores and supermarket shelves along with the ones responsible for pulling the strings on the puppets we see on our TV screens. And you have the innocence to believe they are not using their mass-media strength, the mightiest lever this side of tyranny, in determining people’s actions and choices, into making us frantically buy whatever products they churn out? If yes, think again.

I am not talking here about all kinds of overt or more subtle advertising like the already well known (but not less effective) product placement technique that makes any pimpled, teenage Tom Cruise wannabe go buy a Triumph SpeedTriple, even if he doesn't know how to ride a push bike, after seeing Mission Impossible, or a middle-aged accountant dreaming about stories of courage, intrigue and seduction, "empower" his wrist with the latest Omega watch or even indebt himself to the bone only to be able to feel like Bond... James Bond, behind the wheel of a DB something Aston Martin. No, I am talking about the much more perverse technique of scaring us away from each other and into buying (more and more) "things". The more they show us in their news(!) programs an unfriendly and perilous world “out there”, populated with natural or human generated disasters, with murderers and rapists, with gruesome accidents and the like, the more they turn us into a bunch of scared dummies, locked alone behind our doors, desperately munching on their pre-cooked, frozen food and guzzling on their carbonated chemical beverages, replacing any true and fulfilling experience and/or human contact with staring at their mass produced “safe” entertaining programs that do nothing else in reality but enslave us even more.

Divide et impera. Divide and conquer it is what they accomplished when they scared us into pathological levels of distrust towards our peers that we now come to perceive more as potential aggressors than potential allies, and into the consequently solitude, by feeding us their catastrophic “news” happening in our own neighborhood or on the other side of the planet alike. When the whole world seems nothing but a continuous menace, what can one desire more than the sweet comfort he/she might draw from the security of a new three-door-wattercooling-icecubepopping-digitaldisplay new refrigerator, wall size flat LCD-TV set, cold and “refreshing” Coca-Cola and pre-cooked Maggi dish or even worse, the ubiquitous “healthy” burger, pizza or spicy chicken wings?

I urge anyone to take a moment and ask themselves how much of what they see on TV news programs really and truly make them if not a better person then at least a more prepared one to face everyday life. Specialized professionals as airplane pilots or stock exchange brokers rely on specialized services for weather prediction or market analysis, they don’t get their vital information from TV! Emergency services, law enforcement agencies and finally coroners have direct means of dealing with accidents, catastrophes or crimes and never wait for the news programs to point out such unfortunate occurrences. So who really and positively needs the tide of catastrophic shit flowing out of the TV screens from the so called news channels directly into our subconsciousness? Well, the ones who want (and need) us scared and alone, protecting ourselves from a supposedly frightening world with whatever stuff they have to sell us, they need it!

Congregating people are less an easy to manipulate bunch, they don’t replace human contact with merchandise, they debate opinions, question what they are presented with as being the “truth” and ultimately forge up a live conscience hence a strength which is not to the liking of the mass merchants, the slaves of the spread-sheet reports and the mongers of the profit margin pie-chart.

We need to repel the attack of push media, we need to go back to reading (be it the printed word or the internet) and make our own choices about what we want to know. We shouldn’t accept brain-washed or cynical editors push their more than questionable choice of events in our ears, eyes and ultimately brains and souls because there is no single true benefit for us in this. We should be more open to other people even when not personally knowing them, gather and talk more, challenge the status-quo of how mass media presents the world, and maybe we’ll come to a point when we’ll need less “stuff” to shelteringly come between us and a world we might stop seeing as a constant threat. And maybe foremost we need to take the time to travel more as there is no better way of severing the ties that keep us pinned to our prejudices, our mental inertia and ultimately to our artificially induced feeling of insecurity. Abandon the "club-med"s, the sanitized impersonal resorts and make the true experience of the world as it is lived by the natives of the places we visit, and we’ll exhilaratingly discover that there are many more yet undiscovered friends out there waiting for us, than we have ever imagined.

Helsinki - a city with problems. A step back in my journey

If anyone should know what a city with problems is all about, than one living in Bucharest, Romania is maybe the best qualified for the position. A city of about 3,5 millions suffocated by the litter most people carelessly scatter around and that administration is unable out of incompetence and corruption to pick up, covered by a dome of foul air generated by the relentless puff of archaic busses, trucks and the remaining industry at the outskirts, not to mention the literally tens of tons of dirt floating in the air, make it a true “connoisseur’s choice” in survival challenges. If I would also mention the rotten roads and hysterically violent road manners of people using them, maybe the picture of the traumatic experience that this city can provide it’s unfortunate inhabitant, would get closer to reality.

With this kind of haunting background not far behind me I instantly developed a kind of concerned solidarity when the lovely woman from Helsinki I met a day before and that was now sitting in front of me casually sipping her coffee, told me the town she was living in was facing some “serious problems”.

As myself had over the past days the experience of a rather relaxed, clean and civilized city, my mind rushed towards dramatic hypothesis of bloody night time gang wars painstakingly covered by police and mass media alike in an effort not to scare away the money spending tourists or unaprehended serial murderers or rapists, or even the ravages of massive suicidal waves brought on by nordic weather induced depression. With the egoistic consolation that even rich cities in civilized Scandinavia are not exempt from trouble I urged my companion to tell me everything about in minute detail. And she did...

To my unadulterated bewilderment she went on to tell me that rabbits, yes, you read well, rabbits are becoming one of Helsinki’s major problems. The little brown fluffy and always scared creatures seem to roam freely in the city causing unrest and sometimes panic among the population that sees in horror their bushes and flowers nibbled with insatiable appetite by these little monsters in disguise. Hearing this I did not know what to do: laugh hysterically or feel insulted. And then the primitive streak inside me expressed itself bluntly: ”why don’t you catch them and eat them?" I asked with a savage innocence. It was time of my companion to come up with a long and confused face that told everything about what she thought and felt about such a savage and brutal idea. It seemed to say: “What do you think we are, animals?”.

And things did not end here. As if to try out my ability to come up with primitive stupid solutions to what was perceived as a grave problem for the city, she went on to tell me that the rabbit menace was not the only one, that another vicious attack threatened almost the fabric of their calm, orderly and polite society: seagulls!!! The cheeky and always hungry birds developed, due to the absence of any kind of coercition or repression, such an inconsiderate attitude towards the principle of private property that they dived skillfully and fearlessly to grab whatever the victim of their choice was eating, be it a humble hot dog on the street or a juicy noble steak on the terrace of a fancy restaurant. What a pest!

So that was it: rabbits and seagulls, the two grave problems the city of Helsinki had to face. For the moment I just felt mildly amused but then I tried to explain this naïve shift in perception on something that hardly can be called a “problem” by any standards. Was it that by nature we humans can’t just enjoy our good luck and need to invent problems just to give ourselves a sense of struggle that will give us purpose and direction?. Is our recently acquired, at the scale of human history, level of comfort in contradiction with our deep rooted atavisms? It very well might be so. As a species we had to fight for our physical survival for so may tens of thousands of years than not even a full hundred years since we seem to get it more easy in this respect (at least a fortunate minority of us..) just can’t wipe clean a long memory of struggle.

I dare coming up with a suggestion to the issue: let people in rich countries get their fill of anxiety driven efforts not out of some ridiculously made up situations but by the ongoing drama that is still very present in so many parts of the world. It might very well give every one of us a new sense of measure in evaluating our own personal universe.

I know it is harder to feel more connected to the drama of people some thousands kilometers away than to the petty inconvenience taking place on your front lawn but the effort is well worth doing. The technological society is giving us the means to be in real time contact with even the remotest parts of the globe. Wouldn’t it be healthier for us as a race instead of wasting our time in think-tanks of what to do with rabbits chewing on our back gardens to make a sincere and real contact with realities in other parts of the world and learn about people over there and THEIR problems. This could be the first step to a wider frame of conscience that most of us refuse to develop by cowardly sheltering ourselves from experiencing of how an important part of the planet’s population lives. Even when we travel far form our insulated bubbles of comfort we do so in closed circuit resorts that look and feel aseptically the same all over the world, only to be left undisturbed in our indifference. If we go on like this let it be of no wonder that we’ll feel increasingly alone and unhappy in our soft cocoons. Only solidarity and the action into making a positive difference in the dire state of the world today can fill the emptiness people in western societies are confronted with, brought by the absence of a true sense of fulfillment and ultimate purpose.