Kevin O'Keefe well describes the all-pervasive use of video (digital technology) via the Internet to capture, instantly disseminate, and record for history any events deemed worth recording by someone, anyone. He ends the letter by adapting Descartes' famous philosophical proposition “I think, therefore I am” to “I saw the video, therefore it happened.”
Well, not quite. O'Keefe also observes that “we were introduced to the idea that Big Brother (a benevolent government) was watching us” in George Orwell's prescient novel 1984.
Benevolent? I don't think so. 1984 was set in a time of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation, dictated by a political system governed by a privileged party of the elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as “thought crimes.”
Some of the language in Orwell's novel - such as “Big Brother” - can now be found in contemporary dictionaries. One such example, one of my favorites, is “newspeak,” which Orwell describes succinctly as a language “designed to diminish the range of thought.”
Enter the advent of advertising, that crafty profession designed to invade our minds and alter our behavior to get us to buy something - a product or a politician.
The online market analysis group eMarketer.com expects U.S. advertisers to spend “$171.01 billion on paid media this year, up 3.6 percent over 2012 spending levels.”
Now marry that estimate to the fact that “political advertising will hit $8.3 billion this year, with half of that money spent in August, September, and October” (borrellassociates.com). And eMarketer “expects TV to continue to capture the largest share of paid ad spending in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.”
Here's the thing about television. It's not real. Television and all other digital media presents the viewer with substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience in lieu of direct experience of the world.
As O'Keefe points out, video coverage of such “events” as the U.C.-Davis pepper spraying of sitting demonstrators or of Rodney King getting beat up by the L.A. cops have been instrumental in alerting the general public to the miscarriage of justice.
However, in the main, viewers are watching interpreted representations of the world as a substitute for what is going on in the world. You “see” what the producer of the program, the corporate ad, or the political ad wants you to see.
So here's the question: Who can afford to spend the kind of money it takes to convince, sell, and in other ways lead U.S. citizens into buying things - and politicians?
The obvious answer is “those with the money,” the six massive corporations that dominate the U.S. media landscape: GE, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.
The “privileged party,” Orwell wrote in 1949, “seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.”
Unregulated capitalism, the all-encompassing, invasive presence of media large and small in our lives under the control of a few who have been given license to distort the truth by Citizen's United, is the terminal constitutional cancer of our times.
Democracy is under assault as never before in the history of our nation.