An Attempt at Manufacturing Discontent

- Rob Elver
Courtesy of New Quest, NQ 161.

I came across something Noam Chomsky mentioned about the media that shifted my notions about my TV addiction. It became important for me personally; for as a 39 year-old, I was a member of the television generation. Plopped in front of the TV as a child, I grew up in a demi-autistic trance, glued to the set. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that the eight or nine bleak channels I had access to could eat up the better part of summer vacations, or serve as a social glue for school conversations, but somehow they did.

Chomsky's idea is that people simply misunderstand how networks make their money. They think they are the audience, the show is the product and the TV channel the provider of content. This is a dangerous misapprehension of TV's business model. Networks don't make money by charging you to watch TV: the TV is free to you. What they do is to charge other businesses money to have access to you as you watch. That is, YOU are the product that they are selling to other businesses. CNN, for example, doesn't make money from news products for consumption by an audience. They manufacture audiences for consumption by advertisers.

The commercial media are multinational media conglomerates, whose true craft is the molding of our minds: once molded, their profits derive from the relative amount of debt or equity we are able to throw at their advertisers. Content is incidental. If CNN could broadcast a test pattern and still deliver the same number of optic nerves to their customers, they would. Overhead would plunge; profits would soar.

Watching TV isn't a passive process at all. All forms of media constantly refashion their users. Neither you nor the media are passive, any more than a dream and the dreamer are passive. A strange sort of relationship emerges, a sort of dance, in which one makes, or unmakes, the other.

I once thought that you could get around this by just ignoring the commercials. But content and commercials are part of a symbiotic relationship. Content drives us to become–out of shame or desire–consumers in need of expensive cars and encourages our blindness to their social or environmental effects. Making the viewer autistic, apathetic and amnesiac simply renders him more valuable for resale. The goal isn't to sell one thing rather than another. The goal is to craft exquisitely a population willing to work and spend endlessly.

That accomplished, anything can be sold, whether it's wars or hamburgers. So long as it has a price, the object of the sell is irrelevant.

If selling stamps suddenly became a commercial gold mine, CBS, ABC and NBC wouldn't be producing hard-bitten dramas about sexy lawyers and doctors engaged in hard-working but successful careers sewing together limbs or incarcerating serial killers. They'd produce shows about sexy, hard-working but successful philatelists who're always searching for that rare Louis XIV postage stamp.

The context of the relationship between the media and their 'product' colors the content of their communication. A master doesn't treat his slave the same way he does his son. CNN doesn't treat a well-turned audience as a rational collection of individuals, but as people to be shamed or terrified into compliance or paralysis. The media doesn't merely offer dreams and hallucinations to placate us. The dreams are more nefarious: they're guided hallucinations, seeking a mutation of the audience.

I've often wondered why philosophy is disdained in our culture. Why people are absolutely incapable of it. People live and die, but have no interest in understanding how or why or what any of it means. This has always seemed queer to me.

When my university-educated friends get together, we don't have a Symposium; we talk about Gilligan's Island re-runs. Maybe, TV has shaped us into people who respond only to trivia. It has flattened our personalities, taking away our interest in memory, reflection and depth.  The real horizon lies no longer in our hearts, but in the vanishing point of TV's blue cathode glow. After all, how is GM or Microsoft to make money off of personal insight? Can Microsoft copyright the word GOD? Can Monsanto patent the transcendental? There's no way for capitalists to make money from philosophical speculation.

Since CNN can't have advertisements for something that won't sell, they can't manufacture viewers who are interested in it. We become morons, more interested in buying Tommy Hilfiger underwear than knowing the root of our lives. Crippled as we are, we just become more lucrative. Philosophy descends in popularity and fashion ascends. We all lose a little
more of our humanity.

Quite a Copernican shift, and one that explains a lot about how our media-saturated society functions. I think of what Marshall McLuhan had warned us about in his book Understanding Media; that a sort of ecology was needed to contain the awesome forces of the new electronic media developed in the twentieth century.

Perhaps medicine offers a better analogy: just as viruses can mutate and malform the human person, so too can TV or the Web remake the human brain and body. Most would think that this remodeling can only be an improvement. I can't agree. Thinking of my summer vacations spent sitting in the basement staring at TV, I feel only that we were all cheated. Talking with my friends—now long into adulthood–about the inanities of cartoons or pornography simply confirms that we were.

Rob Elver is a freelance writer who lives in London, Ontario (Canada). He holds degrees in philosophy and theology. As a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, his primary interest lies in the interaction between popular culture and the history of religion. He has published widely, including The Catholic Register, Gnosis Magazine, Connections, and many publications local to southwestern Ontario.