Total Media Fast: Day 19, Reflections on Narratives
News and social media are designed--with increasing effectiveness--to acquire, maintain, and direct our attention. This attention is a valued currency in our modern age...the manufactured consent in the age of social media. The narratives that are sold appealing not to reason, but to the fast-thinking limbic systems of our emotional brains. And in representing the value of these narratives to ourselves, we will defend them...using reason to support a point of view planted in our emotional matrix... never realizing that the marketplace of narratives is using us to propagate itself.
To design a powerful and effective narrative is to "win" the culture war. That is, the ones who fight the culture war will never win. They will financially engage in a war that ultimately benefits the peddlers of the central narrative... and only themselves in the short term. The soldiers' lives are marred by the fight, but the businesses that sell them their clothes, their phones, their guns, and their bullets make out like bandits. As it is with this medium that I write into, it is the merchants of the medium itself that are the winners of the culture war...not those that fight with gusto.
The revolutionary act is to intentionally and consciously direct our attention to address the suffering in our own lives...and the lives of others. And that does not mean eliminating convenient scape-goats. It means a self-reflection to understand our part in the problems.
To design a powerful and effective narrative is to "win" the culture war. That is, the ones who fight the culture war will never win. They will financially engage in a war that ultimately benefits the peddlers of the central narrative... and only themselves in the short term. The soldiers' lives are marred by the fight, but the businesses that sell them their clothes, their phones, their guns, and their bullets make out like bandits. As it is with this medium that I write into, it is the merchants of the medium itself that are the winners of the culture war...not those that fight with gusto.
The revolutionary act is to intentionally and consciously direct our attention to address the suffering in our own lives...and the lives of others. And that does not mean eliminating convenient scape-goats. It means a self-reflection to understand our part in the problems.
Comments