What’s this all about?

It all started when…

In 1985 a book was published very much with 1984 as it’s inspiration, influence, and maybe even raison d’etre. It’s title was Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman.

Postman’s book was inspired by the notion that while the western world fretted over the possibility of our free and democratic society being brought to its knees by an (oppressive) centralized regime —it was written during 1984, after all — we were already in the thrall of a more insidious form of control and social degradation. One that had been depicted decades earlier than Orwell’s harsh dystopia but resonated less in the popular imagination because at the time of it’s arrival there was yet any obvious analogy to the world portrayed. Orwell’s grim rendering of a nation-state that had its boot set firmly on the neck of its subjects was easier to fear because it already existed in one form or another for generations. The dystopian image Postman saw the world evolving into was the one Aldous Huxley imagined in “Brave New World.”

Here I want to go a step further. At the time, there was no internet or social media or 24 hour cable news or mobile devices we keep in our pockets that are powerful enough to be used to guide 120 million Apollo-era spacecraft to the moon. I want to explore the media ecosystem as it exists today, and the ways in which it not only fulfills Postman’s thesis, but is now about something more than entertainment — and something less. I want to look at ways the media ecosystem shapes what we know, how we behave, how we see ourselves, how we see others, informs our sense of identity. And how so much of that depends on how it distracts us. From ourselves, from others, from the world as it is, from the world as we’d like it to be.

I hope this space can serve as a break from a modern media landscape that does not overtly subject the media consumer to propaganda, but instead enables them to intentionally seek it out.