Who Are You Being?

My last blog mentioned boorish behavior in the cyberworld. The inference was that we'd never misbehave in real life. However, that isn't quite so.

The environment our children live in is a sea of messages bombarding them from all sides. There are cumulative effects on society so crucial that many stakeholders have devoted much effort and invested many resources to study.

Universities, for example, exist by generating the products of such research for governments and private sectors. They support psychology departments, political science departments, forensic and rhetorical studies--the list goes on. How humans influence other humans is a keystone of the curriculum at all levels.

Advertisers, of course, sell their media outlets on how impactful they can be to influence behavior in the buying public. They conduct studies with focus groups, polls, statistical analyses ad nauseum. They even experiment with laboratory subjects--one study, it is rumored, shows sexy ads to monkeys to see how much more sex they participate in as a result. (Personally, I am not excited by lady monkeys--such is my prejudice).Then they testify to Congress how insignificant is the effect of violent media on impressionable children. Different audience--different spin.

Newsmedia strive to grab the viewership/readership/bloggership with every possible device that thrusts their product frontmost in the face of the potential audience. Interestingly, the paparazzi display the most aggressive behaviors, justified in the pursuit of "the story."

Celebrity idols become role models and grasp media dominance by out-outraging the others. They model crazy behaviors as a viable lifestyle; by defying taste and public flouting of the law, they grasp the antihero role and exploit vulnerable adolescents who, seeking to assert their own worth, are conned into into copying them (and buying their DVD/CD/T-shirt, etc).

TV hosts keep upping the ante to draw audience loyalty and foster the illusion of connectedness with the schlubs in front of the set. They create fake Kaffe Klatsch discussion programs where the topics are ever more intimate and ever more informal. They make blatant ploys to buy the viewer, like giving Cadillacs to the studio audience. They hit the special event circuit and become celebrities themselves, touting their books/websites/events.

Even newsmen become stars, and symbolize success as power icons. Their wardrobe, their makeup--every aspect of their presentation is nuanced for effect. Even when they are unshaven, it is for the cinema verite effect--to draw the viewer into the created reality of their story. Small wonder if the public begins to question the reality of anything they show us. Small wonder if symptoms of cynicism and anxiety are more widespread among our youth.

Magazines, radio, internet sources--all of these add to the pool. They reinforce values that in reality are counter values. You only have to sell something when it is something people would not naturally choose to do otherwise. But the bandwagon effect of the constant dinning has its effect on the society as a whole, and there are perceptible effects. Rappa style is a counterculture value, one that has been presented to our young people as if it is courageous, strong, "representative" of pride in oneself and one's own "hood." But when Anglo teens in suburbia pose as gang-bangers in the inner city, you have to ask, how tenuous is their understanding of reality?

Educationists, whose job description used to be the preservation and transmittal of existing culture information and values, now try to compete with the cultural messages promulgated in media by conforming with the values they represent.So they add computers and websites; they teach with videos,movies, events, activities; they hire consultants; present through new routines, new bells and whistles.

Now there are new relationships being defined between teacher and student. The ideal of e.g. diversity prevailing in the media forces schools into a non-committal relativism. Facts aren't important: attitudes are. What you learn is irrelevant except if it fosters teamwork and getting along with everybody. The goal of being lifelong learners fosters the notion that there is no settled truth--all is subjective, all is dependent on staying in motion, on keeping up with today's "truth". Exercises in school are valuable only if they encourage self-esteem, and mastery of a subject or skill is meaningful only if it helps the student to express herself.

And how the student chooses to express herself is modeled by the standard of what she experiences on all sides in the media environment that cocoons her. In fact, kids cocoon themselves in the media of choice--from the available list of packages--so as to drown out the excess of what they can absorb and to reduce the stress. Yes, the blank silhouette dancing with the earphones is in total control of her world--but it is an alienated self-absorbed world, uncluttered with the actual demands of physical existence, whose challenges to survival they have to learn to deal with in real time. And many fail to acquire the means to survive, and their escape too often ends in tragedy.

They adopt behaviors and attitudes as demonstrated to them in the media as a means of shaping who they are. They believe that their worth and success as people is not based on what they actually have to work with; they are disappointed in the comparison of their "sucky" personal shortcomings with the "perfect" and successful examples they see in the media. They are lacking the perspective of experience to disentangle their image of themselves as unique figures against the ground of the projected images they are surrounded with. They try to emulate those icons and thus to place themselves in the center of the picture.

"If I am Lady Gaga, I am powerful and sexy, and that is me surrounded by adoring men." "If I am Justin Bieber, I am sooo hot, and the girls will desire me."

Of course, the reality is, everyone knows that kind of thinking is unreal. Also, of course, the fantasy is, saying it is so will make it so. There is no "there" there, as the lady says.

***

There's a story about the fish that drowned.

It goes like this: a man found a fish flopping on the riverbank, took it home and taught it to breathe air. He was so proud of his feat, he'd take it on a leash to the park for walks. One day, they were crossing a little stream. The leash slipped, the fish fell into the stream and it drowned because it had forgot how to breathe underwater.

There is an ocean of media messages. It overlays our real lives and it seems as if it is the real world because it is so all-pervasive. People begin to think it is the real world and begin to behave as they see people in that world behaving.

Unfortunately, it is an imaginary kind of existence. People forget how the real world operates and how to swim in it. Everybody is swimming somewhere in the same ocean of media messages, but these days, too many of the fish are drowning.