The Ebola panic in this country only a month ago was nuts. But now that fear - or paranoia - is normalized and taken for granted. They existed, almost certainly in the same proportion to the population as they do now. Parents weren’t paranoid about child snatchers and predators. When those of us over 40 were little, we generally had free reign over our neighborhoods and after school playtime. OmniMedia has the power to warp our imaginations and exaggerate threats. I worry that one effect is that we are more irrationally fearful. Social scientists and neuroscientists don’t know much yet about how Omnimedia affects us featherless bipeds. Add in reading and radio.Īll that time adds up to something bigger and more pervasive than media. Now count the time each day you spend with screens - mobile devices, computers, TVs and maybe video games. Imagine how much time your great-grandfather spent with mediated experiences and perception. Just a century ago, mediated information came through the written word, with help from photographs, paintings and the spoken word. Mediated perception is secondhand you see the crying on TV you read about the fire you hear people talking about the gunshot on a talk show. Direct perception verifies information with your own senses you see the sad expression you smell the fire you hear the shot and see the smoking gun. Think about two categories of perception or information gathering. "They released a deluxe edition for the newer system," I explained, leading to our lengthy, highly technical discussion of Mario Kart 8 for Wii U vs.The word “media” is now too small for the enveloping, saturating presence of mediated observation that we all live in today. He let out a sound like a deeply satisfied bear. I watched Farfar peel back the paper one his unauthorized second present and nod to himself. Plus," I said, tossing a second present onto Farfar's lap and picking up his blue Wii remote from the coffee table, strumming the rubber bands holding the battery cover in place with my thumb. Nintendo's already moved on to newer systems. "Don't we already have a Wii?" Then, more concerned, "How much did you spend on this?" “What is the Wii U, Gubben?" Farfar said, unable to keep the grin off his face as he balled the wrapping paper in his hands and stared at the box in his lap. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")” then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. “The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s.
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