Acute and Chronic Impacts of Media - Essay Example

Introduction Communication and individual minds have always shared complex and fluid relationships. Each of us is blessed with abilities to think, reason, critique, and to feel. Some individuals are able to use these processes differently to norms. However, we are social by nature. Our perceptions can never be free of influences external to our physical and intangible beings. People who are content to keep their opinions to themselves are rare. A primary driver of technology development and application has been the irresistible urge to influence others (Sanford, 1991). The ancient word-of-mouth method continues to suffice for families and closely knit communities built around shared faith or ideology. Art forms, crafts, print, film, and electronic media have progressively and additively become a bludgeoning war chest for the battle of others’ minds. Communication is a competitive endeavor. A captive audience can be won over and subjugated more productively than a group that has liberal access to dissent in every form (Brooks, Toth, and Toft, 2007). All centers of power in the communication universe seek to build entry barriers to isolate their constituencies from uncontrollable and external influences. The privileges of a Hindu priest continue to this day to be inheritable in the manner of royalty. Some of the most illustrious artists were unsung in their own lifetimes. Who knows how many remain undiscovered to this day? A publishing house needs more than writing, editing, and reporting skills, because a printing press and distribution network can only be built by those with very deep pockets indeed. Photographic equipment is widely affordable in only amateur genres. The numbers of earth citizens who can afford satellites in the sky with webs of reporters on the ground are not just ridiculously limited, but the elite have the predatory instincts of sharks. Mass Media ownership is an oppressive and undemocratic oligopoly. Paul Virilio is special because he has flown over the cuckoo’s nest of conventional communication (Virilio, 1994, Virilio, and Derian, 1998, Virilio, and Armitage, 2001). The trying circumstances of his early years in the propaganda of a World War and its aftermath must have honed his extraordinary faculties. His concepts of how society influences individual thinking are enabling filters to review contemporary media: this is the purpose of the rest of this document. Acute and Chronic Impacts of Media Phases of consciousness affect the total impact of contemporary media. Marketing Gurus warn us that appearances can matter more than tangible features in services such as communications (Payne, 2002). A lay person may view a masterpiece on a street pavement without a second glance. Not many will admit that they simply cannot fathom works of celebrity and fashionable artists. Venerated financial newspapers use an anemic shade of faint pink for their medium. Extravagance, opulence, and shrieking crowds distinguish celebrations of popular cinema from studious viewing of documentaries. The best known anchors of television stations have personae bigger than the facts they should present. We can listen to radio broadcasts of Heads of State, but all feedback is rigorously filtered (Kick, 2003). Truth is only one component of all that we hear, see, and read. The settings, intensity, frequency, and duration are variables in the hands of producers and their owners (Garber, Matlock, and Walkowitz, 1993). However, a review of casual conversation between adults in social interaction modes will show that peer and perceived superior pressures exceed by far, any influences that conventional mass media exert on our minds. Officers of organized religious establishments are extreme examples in this regard. Passionate followers of Islam are prone to hand out stringent physical punishment to those who voice independent interpretations of Scripture and philosophy. However, the powers of the Catholic Church should not be underestimated in this regard because of its relatively subtle methods. Even atheist communists are not above the blind propagation of dogma. That is why our first impressions on encountering any form of external communications are colored by what our heroes and icons suggest what we should opine about such expressions. Fluid Dynamics of Society The indestructible generation gap proves that thinking and values evolve. The rebellion of adolescence has so much value that the onset of adult freedoms is pushed ever downwards as we progress. Enthusiasm is thought to be an attribute of the young. Therefore, thinking does not only change with every generation, but within stages of the average human life span as well. Demographics, ethnicity, economics, peers, the immediate environment, and even sexual differences in physiology, all affect individual mental processes, and hence the influences of conventional media as well. Puberty arouses unquenchable thirsts for the forbidden. Academics share ivy crowns of arrogant and isolated thorns. Blue collar workers and the chronically unemployed view suits with public derision and possibly, private envy. Girls mature before their brothers, while wives age faster than their male spouses, who additionally, pass through monthly reproductive cell production cycles without inconvenience. Paul Virilio has traveled a long and mortal journey of the intellect during his illustrious life. Even he must have suffered moments of mental imbalance, and hopefully enjoyed many passionate encounters, during which his responses to external communication, conventional media or otherwise, has been somewhat deviant from his own norms. Nothing better can be expected of the laity. Boys will certainly disagree with censorial adults about the benefits of pornography in conventional media, even if most adults are conscious of the political niceties of such matters. Sexually promiscuous communities must look on in amused wonder as powerful people from the first world are disgraced for harmless peccadilloes with willing partners. Paul Virilio has always fought broad generalization as in the attempted labeling of his school of thought: an implication of this is that each individual has a unique response to every contemporary media input, and this response is dynamic as well. Genres of Media No television station can match the authority of a prescribed text book. Even parents cannot match teachers in shaping student minds. Our favorite channels may not be the ones to which we turn in emergencies. Pastors have this kind of incident-related attraction as well. The most successful sports people and actors routinely and effectively endorse brands that they may not patronize in reality. The powers of a newspaper decline dramatically after just moments of headline scanning, especially on a day without a reportable disaster or scandal. However, a long abandoned and inconsequential magazine may render invaluable relief for enveloping fears in the waiting area for a session with a devilish dentist. We encounter some forms of communication rarely, but their effects can outlast more frequent exposures of other genres. That is why even the unmarried and divorced can easily mouth wedding vows. A stirring sermon may convert an avowed disbeliever. Presidential hopefuls can lose innumerable delegates and super-delegates with no more than one faux-pas. Popular music channels and free search engines work in sub-luminal manner. They assure us that their good intentions are truly free lunches. Yet we are helpless insects in their webs once we are addicted to use and visit them at least once every day. Witness how Internet business grows at the speed of thought. The variability of individual responses to conventional media is exacerbated by the wide array of communication forces that congregate under the umbrella term ‘conventional media’. Trenchant criticism by international media of governance forms in some poor of emerging countries may ignore similar abuses of individual rights in the home bases of former colonizers. Literacy is another debilitating factor because fluency in one type of English may not honestly capture the original spirit of any media content in another tongue and script. Limits of Media Influence The effects of Dromology may be less in the orient and with the wisdom of experience, than it is with mainstream audiences to who Virilio largely relates. That is why the Chinese response to the reception of the 2008 Olympic Torch by Virilio’s fellow citizens has been somewhat low-key compared to the histrionics on the streets of Paris. Fiction has more values of stress relief and pure enjoyment than what the conventional media establishment may like to think of its buffoonery. Posts on popular web sites and related electronic facilities of social interaction, show that carefully managed press conferences with accredited members of select media have little to do with ingrained beliefs and true opinions. German, Japanese, and Italian media supported their sides of World War II until their militaries had surrendered. The media in Cuba and Venezuela may turn coats as abruptly as Poland and other European Union membership hopefuls have done recently. Such delusions of the contemporary media establishment may be secular rather than limited to the domains of a few despots. Records of civil uprisings show that common people may not abandon their indigenous and internal longings, even though their behavior conforms to the harsh pressures of fascism. Public expressions of support for the positions taken by powerful sections of media may not reflect the truth about how supposedly free people feel and think (Dobbs, 2008). Chronological Relationships in Media The additive efforts of synchronized media make cluster bombs in Virilio’s lexicon, of information. Indelible images of terrorist strikes help to assuage consciences hurt by even sterilized reports of how suspects are pried upon, detained, interrogated, humiliated. Thus an elected President of the United States is able to justify invasion, torture, inhuman incarceration, and other kinds of administrative abuse that would make even dictators cringe. Successes in Internet marketing of books is another example of how one form of media can help another in reaching out to people. Book shops and expositions have not disappeared, but the modern reader may access lifetimes of text without ever visiting any physical retail bookshelf. Special supplements in newsprint help with the phenomenon which Virilio has labeled as the logistics of managing perceptions. While environmental activists have to resort to extreme attention-grabbing antics, sections of industry and even entire governments may do so by simply buying column centimeters. This has maximum impact in terms of managing perceptions when media campaigns are timed with anniversaries and world events. These powers are so extreme that brand owners pay millions of dollars for just seconds of exposure during our favorite sports events and shows. It is an established marketing tactic that campaigns across various categories of media must be closely coordinated. What you see on entering a store has to match the last thing you hear before switching off the car radio Children (and their paying parents) are suckers for candies, sodas, junk food, and toys full of lead from China, promoted through media in ways that are able to disengage us from the reality and rational thinking for which Virilio seems to yearn. Media and Other Social Influencers It is one thing for Virilio to expound information dissemination in a war format, and to revisit the role of propaganda in the violent days of his youth, but what of the patriotic fervor of victors? Does intellectual objectivity matter if survival is at stake? Can anyone criticize his or her flag? Clinton became a President after standing in a picket to protest Vietnam, but can he do the same for Iraq? Is former President Carter partly responsible for the storm over his support for dialog with attackers of Israel? How should responsible media report on Catholic Church stands on homosexuality, genetic engineering, and the rights of female clergy? Contemporary media is a service. It has to serve its audience. It cannot survive if it transgresses boundaries set by people at large. The world is not homogenous. There are large and fundamental differences between the communities with which Virilio has had first hand experiences, and the peoples of other continents. Cultural norms of North Africa suggest that Virilio may only have to cross over to the other shores of the Mediterranean for a new picture of how powerless the information machine he so despises, can be. Though media is overpowering, Virilio overlooks deep lines of segmentation between races, ethnic groups, and countries. These differences are decisive factors of confrontation, including violent conflict. The entire Middle East region of the world may be seen as a collective victim of reflected conflicts between desperately opposed power brokers of the media. Similarly, the alien nature of the western media may be responsible for chasms of misunderstanding between the people of the African heartlands, and the rest of the world. The China Template The vast population of the sprawling land mass of China is as heterogeneous as the citizens of any multi-racial peer nation. Refugees from Tibet who plead for some form of secession, have mostly lived their adult lives, or have been born, outside China. The vast majority of protestors, who the western media love so dearly, have little actual experience of living in modern China. The Chinese response to these provocations has been muted. One can discern a similar detachment with respect to the restoration of independence from colonial rule for Hong Kong. The transition of governance has not resulted in the kinds of decline that many biased observers had tried to portray. The spirit of pragmatism is sharply apparent in the growing trade links between China and Taiwan. Could it be that media projections of the Chinese dragon are distorted? Even if the horror stories of the Cultural Revolution are true, it would still mean that China has been more responsive to world opinion than any other modern nation. Polite consideration of the views of adversaries, painstaking reflection on the states of affairs, diligent sifting from facts from the sensational, and unvarying allegiance to the interests of the constituency, are some features of conventional Chinese governance that even the most democratic of countries will not deny. Has Virilio experienced modern China? Encouraging Signs of Change Social networking web sites accommodate even a minority of one. The costs of publishing are fractional compared to other media and the potential reach is much wider. The Internet is not only egalitarian and respectful of individual rights, but so influential that most bastions of media Moguls now have their own vibrant online versions (Have Your Say, 2008). Virilio has not been openly ecstatic about the World Wide Web, but it addresses most of his implied concerns in large measures. Globalization makes it easy for people to mix with others from far away. Never before have such large numbers of people become world citizens, moving across continents at will. Satellite transmission allows us to spend quality time amongst cultures that we have never met in real life. We may not have succeeded completely in nuclear disarmament, but the information war of Virilio’s time has been substantially emasculated. Islamic banking, Yoga, Mother Teresa, a ceremonial White House reception for the Pope, pacific yearnings of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and political activism by Buddhist monks, are striking examples of how ancient religions have begun to shed fundamental robes for more secular expressions. The faithful of today are more tolerant of other perceptions, and the trend is set to grow. Competition forces brand owners to make their products and services responsive. Crude oil and U.S. military dominance remain powerful monopolies, but it is not as easy as in the past to manipulate the perceptions of paying customers. People respond with alacrity to freedoms of choice. They can be lured to experience new things, but regular and sustained custom requires honest compliance to expectations, specifications, and to reality. New movements on small scales have begun to make large impacts. Selfless help for the impoverished and abandoned women of Bangladesh attracts the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. Chavez has not suffered the premature elimination of Che Guevara. Brazil has blazed new truths in ethnic harmony, inclusive governance, and alternative energy. Environmental consciousness is higher than ever before, at least in modern times. Women are freer than before. Subjugation of human rights has not been eliminated but it is much harder to sustain in hiding now. Building Blocks for a Better Future Assertive action for positive change is a better way to pay tributes to Paul Virilio than to wallow in self-flagellation and wonton criticism. Only rare introspection, courage in the face of a hostile establishment, the persistence born of wisdom, and undiluted devotion to the search for truth could have produced the path-breaking body of work that marks the life of this remarkable and even timeless thinker from France. It is a waste of time to debate whether Virilio is relevant for media analysis: let us spend energy instead on how the media can be made to serve us rather than the other way around (Alia, 2004). .Lesser regimentation and more freedom for developing minds will reduce the powers of glamour and the fanciful (Perse, 2000). Young activists who think in the fashion of Virilio, and who are immune to manipulative efforts by media, tend to have liberal backgrounds in primary education. Such a movement should also extend to make quality secondary education more accessible. Everyone should afford sound college education, and it should be possible to learn throughout life. This will keep media in its place in the service of society, and out of hands with illicit designs. The media needs controls so that it remains in the domain of reporting facts. Audiences should be able to stay informed when they reject papers and stations that seek to impose any form of bias on them. Reality shows in which audiences select winners, debates in which everyone can take orderly part, web logs which give equal opportunities to all, and institutions that do not run for private gain, are concrete and realistic milestones on the path to progress. Conclusion The liberation of people from the oppressive hold of conventional media is as much a hallmark of this millennium as are the neglect of the ozone layer and the very vitality of earth. Even though some elements of the media establishment survive, they are circumspect because counter-weights of influence have flowered (Mann, 1994). The powers of deception of information weapons have turned on their owners. Colonized, subjugated, and poor social groups have developed their own means of communication. Maoists in Nepal have followed communists in India by seizing power through popular mandate. The King of Bhutan is the first mover towards democracy in the kingdom of his ancestors. Worms have begun to turn. Virilio can rest and rejoice after his valiant battle, and we wish him a long life in peace and freedom. References Alia, V, 2004, Media Ethics and Social Change, Routledge Brooks, N, Toth, J, and Toft, J, 2007, The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, Rodopi Dobbs, M, 2008, The Fact Checker, web site of the Washington Post, retrieved May 2008 from: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/ Garber, M, Matlock, J, and Walkowitz, R, 1993, Media Spectacles, Routledge Kick, R, 2003, Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies, The Disinformation Company Mann, T, 1994, Congress, the Press, and the Public, Brookings Institution Press Payne, A, 2002, The Essence of Services Marketing, Prentice-Hall Perse, E, 2000, Media Effects and Society, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Sanford, B, 1991, Libel and Privacy, Aspen Publishers Virilio, P, 1994, The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press Virilio, P, and Derian, J, 1998, The Virilio reader, Blackwell Publishing Virilio, P, and Armitage, J, 2001, Virilio live: Selected interviews, SAGE Have Your Say, 2008, web site of the BBC, retrieved May 2008 from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm Read More