{"id":668,"date":"2007-11-08T01:15:11","date_gmt":"2007-11-08T01:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=668"},"modified":"2007-11-08T01:15:11","modified_gmt":"2007-11-08T01:15:11","slug":"are-we-big-brother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=668","title":{"rendered":"Are We Big Brother?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interesting article from Salon.com, an excerpt from a book by Michael Massing: We are the Thought Police<\/a>. It suggests that Orwell’s dark future is enabled not by oppressive totalitarian control of the media message, but by the audience’s reluctance to engage with certain kinds of challenging messages:<\/p>\n

In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a great article and worthy of serious consideration, but I don’t entirely buy it. I think, first and foremost, that the role of the media-audience is not a static and passive one. The audience as discussed by Massing sounds challenge-avoidant and change-resistant. The desire to avoid challenge leads to the desire to avoid information; fair enough, this is quite a dramatic formulation but there’s a lot about it that makes sense.
\nMassing seems to be arguing that the audience cannot change in any fundamental way; that they will always switch channels to watch the cat being rescued from the tree rather than the horrors unfolding in their war.
\nIf I’m reading this excerpt right and he is arguing this, then I think he’s wrong; in fact, I think that’s precisely where the top-down control via the media takes place. A responsible media that was intent on serving the public rather than on advertising revenue would continue to play an unpleasant war, slowly acclimatising the audience to the kind of content it wishes to share. Audience tastes can change. If the media stuck with this message, it would slowly become more and more acceptable.
\nHowever, there is no incentive for mainstream journalism to take such a road at present. The audience that exists now is not acclimatised and there is little money to be made in changing this. So the same cycle perpetuates – the media plays it safe, and the populace rests easy with the same old mythology.
\nAnyway, go read the article, it’s great and anything that references Orwell intelligently earns brownie points from me.
\nAlso good from Salon: a short article about the US-Iran belligerence<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. Let’s repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America’s political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interesting article from Salon.com, an excerpt from a book by Michael Massing: We are the Thought Police. It suggests that Orwell’s dark future is enabled not by oppressive totalitarian control of the media message, but by the audience’s reluctance to engage with certain kinds of challenging messages: In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, … Continue reading Are We Big Brother?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-aM","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}