I want you to take something as fact before reading this essay.

We live in a crazy society.  We are the most bizarre aberration of nature that walks the planet.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to go into the public and observe society during the holidays.  Holidays are special because for a sociologist or people watcher, it’s not unlike a feeding frenzy.  The human condition is so pervasive and readily available to observe that you don’t have to go far to get a lot of data.

Valentine’s day is now one of those.  I found myself at the Grove Shopping center in the middle of the day.  The parking structure can hold 4500 cars.  At the entrance there is a digital readout of how open spots there are on each floor.  Going into the garage the sign read FULL on every level.  Despite this, cars were pulling in by the dozens.  Once inside the labyrinth of the lot, there you have to circle at least one level before you can get out.

Swept into this, I found that every floor of the lot had at least 50 cars competing for spots.  Let’s look deeper though… what were these people doing?  They were spending their beautiful Sunday afternoon competing for spots so they could go shopping.  Shopping for Valentines day or night.  Pink everything was being moved around the mall.  People in festive valentines PJs walking around in public, but that’s okay since it’s all in the spirit of the day of love right?

Guys with Victoria’s Secret bags in hand because to be considered a “good guy” or a “good boyfriend” you have to participate and make Valentines day special.  So you buy flowers, chocolate, lingerie, so make reservations for dinner somewhere.  The point is you have to participate, and consume.  The average person thinks you are strange if you don’t celebrate or at least buy a card… or even SAY “Happy Valentines Day” to your loved one.  All this in the middle of a major economic recession. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/13/BUUV1BUI19.DTL)

Let’s retrace our steps:  Holidays… Crazy Parking Lots… Mass Shopping… Participating to be “Normal.”

How does this axis form?

TV.

Nobody wonders about our bizarre behavior because the images reinforcing that this is normal are flashed in front of your eyes at 30 frame per second.  But to make it entertaining, TV does something reality doesn’t do… it uses different cameras to place you inside the story from different viewpoints.  You never get to experience reality in this mode.  In reality, you are fixed in the position of one camera.  But during an average TV show you are flashed 350 different cuts (camera perspectives).

This number is not fiction.  I watched a sitcom and counted the number of edits, and cuts.  So in 22 minutes, you are shown 350 edits and different camera perspectives.

I propose that for an organic being, born and designed to have only one viewpoint, this is going to have negative neurologic effects.

The problem with my last statement is that it is subjective.  The word negative is the issue.  You see, if you remove the word negative from the sentence, it describes the mission statement of every good filmmaker or TV show producer.  They are trying to create a neurologic effect that keeps your interest.  So to do that they create imagery, camera angles and viewpoints that lure you in and keep your interest.

At first glance this seems benign enough.  But on further analysis, you see the side-effect of this process reveal it’s ugly head.  If your interest is peaked during a process, e.g. rapid camera cuts, you’re subconsciously allowing for the feeling of interest to be experienced while your eyes are watching a certain image.

The effect of this method of imagery is more deleterious than the kind that Plato warned his people of.

TV creates subconscious ideas about what is normal.  The more you see rapid imagery, the more you passively feel pleasure from what’s being shown to you.  And what feels good, is what we all desire.  So we begin to emulate that imagery.  We begin to dress like it, talk like it, and live like it.

While we live in those characters, the same feelings of pleasure are reinforced because the drug that feeds this desire in now around us.  “Reality” is created in TV, and TV then is manifested by reality…  A true Ouroboros.

The irony of the story.  All the people in the malls today, were only soothing the pains of their addiction to this artificial reality by buying things to become the characters they watch on TV Shows, which keeps them working (so they can make money to buy these things), which in turn can be translated as them being slaves to the illusions they choose to believe.

Self inflicted slavery.

A tough verdict to swallow, but look around.

The reason I started this essay with the request that you accept the fact that we live in a crazy society was this very point, that we choose to live in a world of self inflicted slavery.

In this new era, there is no need for whips to make people work.  As long as you constantly want, you will constantly work.  The system we set up was rigged this way.  In our world we have we work to make money, so we can live a life that stands up to the status definitions we are feeding ourselves through our televisions.

One can argue that this is been the process since beginning?  Everyone wanted to live like the wealthy or successful, or “beautiful” people of the society in question.  But there are key differences.

In the older version of this process, your the access to this kind of visual information was not as prevalent and it didn’t change as often.  Think of how fast you can change styles or trends by just creating a new look for a character on a show or commercial.  Where as in cultural groups there have always been the “trend-setters” of the herd, access to these people and their message was not as readily available and rapidly changing as it is in the world of television.

So now fashion changes every couple of months. What’s cool is a fleeting idea that can never be captured for any worthwhile amount of time.  To get proof of this point requires something as simple of monitoring the inventory changes at your local Banana Republic.  Every 3 weeks merchandise is pushed back ⅓ of the store until it hits the sale section in the back.  That is because every 3 weeks, something new is introduced.  I often wondered how many variations of a basic poplin shirt a company can make.

During the entire time I have been awake, and watching, I have counted 14.

TV keeps your brain in a constant cluster fuck.  Not knowing which way is coming, and which way is going you succumb and find yourself spending an hour of your life waiting in a parking lot so you can spend your money on another unnecessary item for an already comfortable American (I am referring to the fact that every American lives many levels above their counterparts in the rest of the world ).

TV teaches you about society.  What to wear.  How to be.  What to drive. What to eat.

TV teaches you who to be.

Now there’s a channel for every “person”, so that they don’t send conflicting messages on one channel.  Every viewer can find their comfort spot or characters and only watch shows like in that zone.  Now advertisers can market to a specific audience, making an already powerful weapon even more powerful.

Before I close this essay, I’d like to put a challenge in front of you.

Unplug your TV for 1 year.

You really don’t have a valid argument against me if you haven’t done this yet.  I haven’t had a TV for many years now… and what I mean by that is that there is no TV in my house at all.

Think about this statistic:  According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day.  That adds up to 28 hours a week.  That means that you spend 1 entire day of your week behind a television set.  That adds up to over 2 MONTHS out of 1 year behind a TV (4 hours x 365 days = 1460 hours/year; 1460 hours/year divided by 24 hours = 60.83 days per year!)

If you assume the average person lives 80 years, that comes out to 11.6 years behind a TV if they started watching TV at the age of 10.  That’s 15% of your life.  And now that screens are every where (literally in the palm of your hands) that number will increase.

Unless you can literally not turn it on, you won’t see the changes.

If there are those of you out there that are really, and I mean really interested in and bothered by what is happening with our world and our society, all you have to do is unplug your TV.

You will notice changes in your life after a short time.  The world will seem different to you, and

People will seem different to you, and you will see reality reality, not the one that has been implanted into our subconscious minds.

Every year the reality show we call reality gets more and more bizarre.  These changes are happening exponentially in this era.  Indeed we live in the era of the exponent.  Every is faster, and our technology progresses, we will be able to make things even faster, in essence accelerating the rate of the bizarre-volution.

Having read this, you are now faced with a choice:

Are you going to be a character or an observer?