My friends & I have been talking about media stampedes, especially about
the recent hoarding of rice in the USA and Canada. The headlines scream
"rationing" and "shortages," but in America all that means is people are
being limited to buying two 50-lb bags of rice at Sams or Costco.
It's no news that the rate-of-cycle on news stories has increased
dramatically in the past twenty years along with a general shelf life
decrease in all media. I see this going hand-in-hand with an increased
use of anxiety-inducing media techniques, from screaming headlines to a
broader negativity in popular arts and culture. The advertising
profession is renown for employing anxiety-inducing imagery (status
differential, solution-to-problem) to appeal to unconscious motivations,
to reify in the mind of the consumer "need for product." These
techniques have evolved to a dark art for quite a while (from the almost
inobtrusive "Burma Shave" ads to the insidious "Get laid with a
quadruple-blade razor" images on TV) and are now firmly planted in
attention-grabbing statements in politics and media. Remember the
Reagan-era concern about the use of "hot buttons?" It didn't go away, it
was simply flushed down the memory hole.
Anxiety is the hardest-to-identify of our base instincts, it's integral
to the problem-solving and risk-assessment engine of ego - the grand
mechanism that defends the elusive specter of Self. Gotama used a
didactic style to address this, through long discourse employing
empirical disproof (not this, not that). It's a method of bring a mental
feature into starker relief against the background noise of the those
infernal and distracting aggregates.
The implications for a civil culture are clear when societies might rush
to a premature solution against a perceived threat, but it's also
problematic in the sciences where the regime of falsification is
required to decouple evidence from belief and professional ego.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_cascade
OK, those are your talking points. Now lemme see watchugot.
/leebert
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