Our society is rapidly coming apart at the seams and people are seriously starting to lose it… Way too many Americans seem to be losing all sense of what is right and what is wrong. Way too many Americans seem to be losing all sense of what it means to treat others with dignity and respect… It is almost as if some sort of mental illness is spreading throughout our society that is expressing itself in thousands of different ways. We are seeing anger, rage, malice and brutality rise to very dangerous levels. Our population has become way too greedy, proud, selfish and hateful. America is on a very dangerous road and we need to wake up.
Krugman monitored a person through many trials and found that in less than one minute of television viewing, the person’s brainwaves switched from Beta waves — brainwaves associated with active, logical thought — to primarily Alpha waves. When the subject stopped watching television and began reading a magazine, the brainwaves reverted to Beta waves.
Researchers concluded that learning during sleep was ‘impractical and probably impossible.’ They reported that stimulus material presented during sleep was not recalled later when the subject awoke unless alpha wave activity occurred at the same time the stimulus material was given.
NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War… In other words, when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.
There is a myth in the advertising world that viewers will forget your message if you don’t repeat your advertising often enough. It is this myth that supports many large advertising expenditures… I would rather say the public comes closer to forgetting nothing they have seen on TV. They just ‘put it out of their minds’ until and unless it has some use… and [then] the response to the commercial continues. [Emphasis Added]
I suspect that the classes are moving apart psychologically and culturally. Even if incomes were mandated to be equal, the left-brain people and the right-brain people have different communication patterns. We may, therefore, split into two cultures, two increasingly separate societies.
As real-life experience is increasingly replaced by the mediated ‘experience’ of television-viewing, it becomes easy for politicians and market-researchers of all sorts to rely on a base of mediated mass experience that can be evoked by appropriate triggers.
The TV ‘world’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mass mind takes shape, its participants acting according to media-derived impulses and believing them to be their own personal volition arising out of their own desires and needs. In such a situation, whoever controls the screen controls the future, the past, and the present. (Nelson,The Perfect Machine, p. 82)