A few years back I made a conscious decision to disconnect myself from all forms of technology, mainstream news media, and the obtuse detrimental consumerism of the common sheeple. I unplugged the television set from my wall, and shelved away my videogame systems, all because I wanted to remain intellectually focused on the important things I needed to grasp, and no longer wanted to be distracted and brainwashed by greedy marketing campaigns and the mindless, cheap interferences of day to day life.
I’ve always had a deep fascination with consumerism, and societies obsession with shopping, the addictions to sales events, and the desire to ‘want’ and own things we don’t need. Our modern society has transitioned into the selfish and the lazy, constantly seeking material comfort while enslaving us through mobile technology. If you go back and look at the history of consumerism you begin to ask yourself, is this always how it’s been or is this something we have recently turned into? When it comes down to the root of it all, consumerism stems from advertisement. There has been a massive effort for over a century for the government to try and use advertising as a way to convince people that that’s what we are.
Advertising is a huge billion dollar industry. It’s dedicated, explicitly, and openly to try to direct people to the superficial things in life. This is what consumerism is all about, or what the linguistic professor Noam Chomsky calls, fashionable consumption. The government creates consumerism to get the public out of their hair and to get them involved in consumption. If you can fabricate wants, make obtaining things just about within your reach, people are going to be trapped into becoming consumers.
In the 1920’s it talks about the need to direct people to the superficial things in life. Life fashionable consumption was a doctrine which has been explored all through progressive intellectual thought. Walter Lipmann, the famous intellectual of the 20th century wrote progressive essays on Democracy in which his view was exactly that: “the public must be put in their place so the responsible men can make decisions without interference from the bewildered herd.” The advertising industry just exploded with this goal and it’s done with great sophistication.
The ideal you see today is of teenage girls rather wanting to go the shopping mall and not the library to read. Or teenage boys rather wanting to stay inside to play videogames and not going out to be active. Advertising has turned a whole society into the perfect system which is the dyad of the pair: the pair is: You and your television set. Or your iPad. Or your internet. Constantly thinking about the latest gadgets and electronics you should own while obsessively checking your iPhone.
Allowing oneself to remain a prisoner inside a virtual world is exactly what prevents us to living the proper life we should be, all because all our time and effort is spent on gaining things we don’t want, we won’t need, we can’t afford, and we’ll eventually throw away. Unfortunately today, that’s the measure of a decent life.
And there are huge efforts that go into turning the public into the perfect consumers. Throughout the 1980’s the advertising industry realized that there was a sector of the population that they weren’t reaching, because that sector didn’t have income. This sector was known as children. Some business advertisers realized that they could work and get around such a problem, because the children didn’t have money but the parent’s did. So what advertisers did was begin to direct television programs for children to induce children to becoming aware of such products, and then informing their parents their need and desire to want it.
If you look at academic psychology departments there are programs that study different kinds of ways children can get their parents attention to buy them products. And if you watch children’s television programs, as I immensely have growing up in the 1980’s, these television programs and the commercials in between indoctrinate the children to try and get their parents to get them. These products that are desired by both children and teenagers are usually trendy and popular at that time, as advertisements also become publicized through word of mouth between peers. If all your friends own this specific gadget, I must own it as well. These trends also engages the parents into becoming competitive with one another, by rushing out as quickly as possible and swiping up these products for their children before the product is sold out.
The government knows that to do what they want, the public needs to be spectators, not participates, because then you got a properly functioning Democracy. Professional sports are another way to distract people and keep them focused on things that don’t matter. Sports offer the public a mindless spectacle while molding them into perfect consumers, all through the use of entertainment, competitiveness and aggression. Noam Chomsky said it best: “Sports is a competitive thought process that tries to entertain us through means that intensify aggressive attitudes.”
If you take a look at stadiums when attending sports games, every inch of the stadium is covered with an ad. Chomsky being the age of 88 tells the story of going to his first baseball game in the 1930’s. He remembers never seeing ads anywhere. And now everywhere you look there are ads. Every time you walk out of the house you see an ad. Every time you turn on the television you see an ad. Logging onto social media, listening to the radio, watching movies, clips on YouTube, or playing videogames; our entire life essentially became one large advertisement.
Today the speed with advertisements have increased and simplified immensely because newer generations are becoming more easily distracted by multiple streams of media. Attention spans have fallen from 12 seconds in the year 2000 (around the same time as the mobile revolution began) to a mere 8 seconds today. Many of the reasons for this is a information overload and the constant exposure to gadgets like smart phones, YouTube, social media, videogames, iPads, tweeting and instantaneous internet availability.
During this digital age the cognitive functioning in our brains are completely rewired because of being raised in a faster, hyperactive, more frantic society where we’re all used to getting instant information in 140 characters or less. Our neurological mechanisms in our brains process information much more quickly than they used to and they need to continuously fire off cognitive cylinders to stimulate our instant gratification. To achieve this sudden dopamine kick we have to be constantly distracted or entertained by rapid and overstuffed visuals and disoriented intensified sounds.
In this modern technological era where attention spans are much shorter, our advocacy for company brands in the last 20 years had to rapidly become faster and much more simplified to hold the attention of the consumer. Consumers now need to be immediately aware of the product without having to stop and think or they will quickly lose interest. Advertisers have also shifted their modern ads into subliminal advertisements, forming them into mere symbols & slogans so they became easier to remember.
For example: the letter of the (m) in McDonalds with its slogan “I’m Loving It;” The symbol of the (apple) for Apple Computer and its slogan “Think Different.” And the label of the (swoosh) in Nike with its slogan “Just Do It”. Today symbols, labels and slogans are always linked becoming one with the everyday psyche, in which the consumer doesn’t even have to think about it when the ad whooshes right past them. They already know what they saw. Explicit imagery of such popular brands has become as second nature as the dollar symbol, the crucifix, or the swastika.
When it all comes down to our countries collective obsession with consumerism and technology the openings of Black Friday sales is the quintessential example. Black Friday is the day American’s leave their homes during Thanksgiving dinner to descent upon department stores and big box retailers across the country to partake in rampant and apparently violent consumerism. It’s disturbing to actually stand back and witness this mass hysteria take place, because what you see is the disgusting display of savagery, idiocy and greed.
When you observe shoppers mindlessly floating through shopping malls it is difficult to differentiate between them and the zombies in the film Dawn of the Dead. Could this be the reason why zombies have become the new popular trend in mainstream pop culture today? Because to witness people viciously rush through a retail store and trample one another just to get their greedy hands on a 50 inch screen TV or the latest iPad is an absolutely appalling scene to behold. Black Friday is Darwinism at its finest.
The advertising agency is putting as much effort as they can to turn every aspect of the average American’s life to be devoted to consumerism and the need to own things. Even though many people think that what most people want are superficial things, and our dream is to just stay inside our home, sit on a big comfortable sofa and turn on the television, that’s not what human beings essentially are about.
We weren’t originally so superficial and obsessed with consumption. Take a look at a lot of the passionate working class American’s that live in these small rural towns who constantly protest about wanting to work in coal mines, rather than sitting around to do nothing or taking a government hand out. Simple handouts undermine their sense of dignity and self-worth of doing something significant.
Unfortunately much of the American population today have become so unnaturally ‘zombified’ to be something less than they should be, or want to be. How has it gotten so bad? Besides the use of advertisements, another way our government discovered to increase our basic need for consumption was to dumb down the general public, and there’s plenty of evidence for this.
Today a majority of American’s cannot name a single branch of government. Or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty four percent cannot name the country we fought in the Revolutionary war. Two thirds of Americans don’t know what the Food & Drug Administration does. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two Senators. And eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth. If that isn’t bad enough, a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map.
If these statistics are accurate than how are American’s passing academic courses? It’s been shown that the curriculum standards have been significantly lowered so students can pass the tests to successfully get through high school and college. More students pass, the school looks good, parents are happy and the IQ of the country slips two or three points. So is it really that shocking that seventeen other countries graduate more scientists than we do?
Take a look back at the reading habits of the British working class in the late 19th century. It turns out the British workers were better educated than the aristocrats. Some of the aristocrats would even hire some of the British workers to read to them while working. Most of these workers didn’t even finish the 4th grade and yet they read, they went to concerts, Shakespeare plays and were extremely knowledgeable in politics.
That doesn’t seem to be the case today. In this last century the advertising industry has been taking huge efforts into driving all this out of people’s heads, making us as ignorant as possible so we no longer have any ambitions, goals and passions. They are working as hard as they can to take away our motivations to work hard, our curiosities to want to learn new things, and desires to want to ask profound questions.
During the industrial revolution much of the working class hated the industrial system because it was destroying their sense of worth. It was destroying their identities, their sense of fulfillment and their rights as independent people. The Industrial Revolution, which took place from the 18th to 19th centuries, was a technological transitional period during which predominantly rural societies in Europe and America became industrial and urban.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late 1700s, manufacturing was often done in people’s homes, using hand tools or basic machines. And the vast majority of people worked in agriculture. Many were small-holders, that is, they kept small farms, growing crops and keeping a few animals to provide meat, eggs and dairy produce.
There were also many skilled craftsmen such as blacksmiths, carpenters, builders, potters, weavers and tailors. These skills would mainly be self employed, but they might have apprentices. Most tradesmen lived above their shops, and sold the goods that they made on the premises. There were many jobs selling food, like butchers, grocers, bakers, cooks, and people who ran inns and taverns, where food and drink could be obtained. People at the time felt they had an identity, a purpose, a place, something they were contributing to society that could benefit the common man.
Industrialization and technology changed all that. It was a marked shift to wage labor, powered, special-purpose machinery, factories and mass production. While industrialization brought about an increased volume and variety of manufactured goods, it also resulted in often grim employment and poor living conditions for working classes.
Industrial machines was crushing the everyday worker, taking over all the kind of jobs that originally gave the working class a sense of identity, a self of themselves. Skilled self-employed trades became non-existent and were replaced by modern machines. Personal trades which took a sense of creatively, pride and self-worth were no longer needed in this modern, cold, mechanical world of mass production.
Workers essentially became herds of sheep, robotically marching into factories or assembly lines every morning, struggling to find some kind of purpose and fulfillment. They were no longer considered a person or individual. They became simply a number, just another body. ‘Hands’ was the label that was given to the industrial worker at the time. Because hands were all that was necessary to do the job that was required. Easily replaceable and easily forgotten.
Many regarded wage labor and industrial working conditions as not very different as slavery. Karl Marx used to state that selling labor was a form of slavery. If you sell something you created (let’s say you’re an artist) and you make something and you sell it, you’re not selling yourself. If you sell your labor, you’re selling yourself. You are losing your dignity and independence and it became an attack on your fundamental rights.
These kinds of civilized working conditions are still relevant today. In this modern technological era of product manufacturing and corporate labor, thousands of retail sweatshops, factories, and warehouses like Amazon, Sears and Wal-Mart, inhumanely push their employees to the brink of psychological collapse. These companies set a very high bar and a low tolerance condition, giving employees no rights at all. Unfortunately because of the economic crises, these corporate companies are the few jobs available which offer high enough wages to raise a family without holding a college degree. These same kinds of themes run right through many blue collared, uneducated working class Americans. It is the same in England and it is the same elsewhere.
What happened to such drive, motivation and sense of dignity? And why have we become so superficial and selfish, while only looking out for ourselves? Economist and philosopher Adam Smith predicted such a dystopian society by stating, “All of myself and nothing for anyone else.” Consumerism and technology has created a detached society in which normal human instincts and emotions, solidarity mutual support is kind of driven out of people. People not stepping in and helping other’s when in need, instead standing around filming it with their iPhone, so they can be the first to post the video on YouTube.
Mobile technology and global communication has become both a blessing and a curse for modern generations. This unhealthy obsession of fame, celebrity gossip and pop culture has always been front page news. But the difference during the celebrity era of the Golden Age was that the media did their best to cover up the controversies and mistakes that celebrities tended to make, so they wouldn’t go public.
Today the media’s intentions seem to have taken a more sinister turn. Not only do the media do its best to exploit and ruin the reputations of celebrities, but the more mistakes a person makes, or unlikable they seem to be, the more famous they ultimately become. There are various so-called celebrities, with absolutely no talent whatsoever, but because of their sex appeal, wealth and infamous reputation, they aren’t only idolized by much of the public, but they are able to obtain millions of social media followers all around the world.
Social media, especially Facebook, can give a person an amazing insight into the pathology of people’s self-esteem, narcissism, hateful intentions and true self-nature. I use it merely as a clinical study tool for psychological diagnosis. People today no longer feel the need to keep their lives private. Many take numerous ‘selfies’ on almost a daily basis, simply to receive compliments, responses and likes to reinforce positive validation from others.
There actually have been numerous studies which have shown that one’s obsession with ‘selfies’ (especially the ‘duck face’) are signs of severe mental illness, such as depression, NPD and even psychopathy. Social media, online blogging and the simulated world of the internet can become a way for some to create different alias and identities, and safely hide behind their computer screen, which can perpetuate their true inner self, such as attention-seeking, self-entitlement, racism, sadism, and self-indulgence.
Social media’s intention is simply self-comparison. It’s to basically promote, brag to others, become envious, encourage extreme narcissism and present a false distorted perception of who you are. Some even feel that the number of ‘likes’ or comments they receive personally reflects them as a person. We no longer have genuine modesty or humility. Everything is exploited out there in the open for everyone to see. Social media is a competitive manipulative world where people socially compete to present to others a distorted view on how much happier they are.
In today’s modern age advertisement and technology go hand in hand. They are both constructed and contrived with enormous conscious effort. Look at the television and movie industry. There’s what is called ‘content’ and ‘fill’. The content is the ads. The fill is the movie (car chase, explosions, sex, violence) that keeps people in their seat and watching so they will still be there for the next ad. If you look at most commercials, much of the creativity, originality, thought and funding is going into the ads (content), not into the movie (fill).
In the newspaper industry this is what they call the ‘news hole.’ You lay out the newspaper and first you place all the ads because that’s what really matters. Then there’s these small spaces left for the news stories to keep people reading. All the work that is put into advertising costs literally billions of dollars a year and a huge part of the economy goes into this.
An interesting aspect into consumerism has to do with basic economics. Anyone that took an economics course knows that the marketing economy is supposed to be based on ‘informed’ consumer’s making ‘rational’ choices. That’s what we’re taught our economy says. Turn on the television and take a look at the content. Do you really believe they are trying to make informed consumer’s to make rational choices? If this were the case, we would have a market economy of let’s say General Motors, put out an ad which would present a system showing the characteristics of each vehicle and the consumer reviews of them. That would create informed consumers making rational choices.
That is not what you see. Instead marketing puts huge efforts into trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices, to undermine marketing economies. That’s what marketing is all about. Ads for a car present a football hero, an attractive model, or a car doing something outrageous like driving up and over a mountain. Those are the images you see and the information you are getting.
The same marketing systems run elections the same way. They want to create a uniformed electorate which will create irrational choices, most often against their own interests. We see it every time one of these political extravaganzas takes place on television. Right after the 2012 election President Obama won an award from the advertising agency for the best marketing campaign. It wasn’t reported in the United States but if you go to the international business press executives they were euphoric. They said they been selling marketing candidates ever since Reagan and this is the greatest achievement we have.
Moral decline within the foundations and interworking of unbiased television has long taken over respectable journalism, and the slow decay of integrity, fairness and decency within the world of the news media is now presently expired. I can’t really pinpoint exactly when this deterioration actually began, but it seemed for years now to have been a slow and inevitable progression.
Greedy corporate drones have taken control all aspects of our news media, replacing ethical reporting with cheap sensationalism and tasteless exploitation. News outlets today all throughout America, whether it is from the left or the right, exploit the less fortunate, purely to boost ratings and increase their audience numbers.
News outlets such as CNN, ABC News, MSNBC and Fox News have become equally as infamous as the corporate puppets who host them, such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Nancy Grace, Glen Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Alex Jones. These exaggerated larger than life caricatures are purposely instructed to provide audiences with loud, crass and obnoxious behavior, while stirring up controversy, paranoia and provoking aggressive debate, simply for higher ratings.
Different news segments seem to demand vapid and artificial personalities like Megyn Kelly, Dr. Phil, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Stephen Colbert, Gretchen Carlson, Anderson Cooper and Kimberly Guilfoyle. Each host’s personality is meticulously engineered and manufactured by studio executives, while required to obtain specific attributes that either involve exuding their sexiness or advocating their buffoonery.
When corporate goons discovered that the ratings for their new stations would skyrocket with frank, unbiased and unprofessional news hosts, various media outlets allowed such colorful commentators like Bill O’Reilly, Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to possess their very own time-slot and show. Media executives constructed specifics sets for each host, with some studios resembling the likes of a tacky day-time game show.
These television shows, radio stations, YouTube channels, and podcast downloads have given each performer a platform to have the freedom to angrily rant and rave, bully their guests, and stir up racism, fear, mass hysteria and segregation, along with spewing their biased and unprofessional social commentary.
Because of technological expansions of worldwide communication, to receive fair, balanced and factual information from American news sources has become a globalized joke. Especially after witnessing the 2016 election, an embarrassing public display which seemed to play out more like a reality television show rather than a real political election. Political parties don’t mean a thing, and the events are being orchestrated by the media for the oldest motivations in the world, which is money.
And it’s not just the money from the Clinton Foundation or from the Trump Foundation, but from all the various advertisers and promoters. There seems to be a fair bit of money that is spent on presidential campaigns and political rallies, while using the media to assist them to really put on quite a show. Many of the rallies seem to be very effective, so frighteningly effective perhaps that some of them, especially Trumps rallies, actually remind me of the Nuremberg rallies.
During these political debates there is a large amount of campaign rhetoric and very little discussion of policy issues. This is for very good reason, because the public opinion on policy is sharply disconnected from what the two party leadership and their financial backers want. Policy is more focused on the private interests that fund the campaign with the public being marginalized.
One of the leading political scientists Mark Galleons came out with a study on the relation between public attitudes and public policy. What he shows is that about 70 percent of the population has no way of influencing policy and they might as well be in some other country. And the population knows it.
This feeling of helplessness has led to a population of Americans that are angry and frustrated, and they are not acting constructively in trying to respond to this. There is popular mobilization in activism today but taken in very hateful self destructive directions. Many seemed to have taken the form of unfocused anger and aim them towards vulnerable targets. These kinds of attitudes are corrosive between social relations and that’s the point.
The point is to make people hate and fear each other and only look out for themselves while not doing anything for anyone else. And the media isn’t doing anything to help the situation. Instead they seem to exploit these hateful attitudes, which is why much of their news stories focus directly on racism, anger, prejudice and hatred among different races, classes and cultures.
We all depend on our technology today to immediately inform us about the news and what is going on in the world. We expect the media to be objective observers of the daily events. But they all have a warped greedy agenda and they will only report something if they know they will make a financial profit. And to make that profit, they have to obtain high ratings, and to obtain high ratings they have to put on a show, detrimental or not, that people will want to watch and talk about.
The 2016 Presidential Election was not a real Presidential Election. It was a circus sideshow, and Donald Trump, the clown that he is, provided that show. And we all tuned in. In pursuit of profit, the media companies twisted our view of the world in pursuit to make money. They affected the election in a way far beyond what any kind of political or personal bias might have. They bent the news to feed our insatiable need to be amused, outraged and entertained at all costs. And in this case, along with the help of Trump’s expertise in both television and social media, produced one of the highest ratings ever for a national reality television program, even if the cost was the well being of the nation.
Today we are constantly plugged into an increasingly computer-dominated society in which ordinary human interaction is almost non-existent with one another. Much of us have developed absolutely no social skills whatsoever and the way we communicate is rarely ever face to face, but digitally through texting and tweeting. This is why online dating is extremely frustrating, because many who communicate today coldly choose to interact through texting or social media, and never vocally over the phone.
This newer form of communication also has made us completely disconnected, impersonal and emotionally removed with one another, and it seems to have brought out the worst in all of us. When it comes to the virtual realm of online blogging, what one finds are largely disruptive, inflammatory, hateful comments among people, or what online bloggers label as ‘trolls.’ Inside such a distorted technological reality digital correspondence can personally detach users and affect our empathetic skills, creating an extreme form of emotional removal leaving us hollow, empty and spiritually devoid of any genuine feeling.
Fortunately deep down within each of us there is a ‘need’ to liberate ourselves from consumerism while artificially unplugging ourselves from the mental enslavement of digital technology. Outside the superficial world of consumption we all have the desire to become independent, develop hobbies, and become creative. We want our lives to have a purpose which is why we become passionate about something significant or worthwhile, so we can help others and change people’s lives for the better.
Self-worth, dignity, doing something meaningful, that’s essentially what we are, and its taking huge efforts and a large part of our economy to drive these humanistic instincts out of people’s heads to make one think that all we want is more commodities. Sadly government indoctrination of material comfort and technological distractions has turned people into what they may even want to believe, which is mindless and detached consumers who sit on a couch and watch television all day. Let’s work on changing that.
— Matthew A. Sheldon
Matthew Sheldon's Creative Writings 