Shallowness of Mass Media?
I just finished ‘Survivor’ by Chuck Palahniuk, author of ‘Fight Club’. The book was pretty good; there is a lot of social commentary in it. Almost like the plot is just an excuse to talk about certain things.
One section really helped verbalize some things I’ve been thinking for a while.
“We all grew up with the same television shows. It’s like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears.
The future is not bright.
…
Everything is so derivative.
A reference to a reference to a reference.
The big question isn’t ‘What’s the nature of existence?‘. The big question people ask is ‘What’s that from?’”
(End of Ch. 22)
That hit me kind of hard. Although I watch a lot less TV than most people, I still have a whole head full of television and movie knowledge and quotes. In normal conversation, myself and people I interact with are always inserting lines from movies that fit the situation. We’re considered clever if we can make a tie-in with our current conversation and a movie. How is that clever? It’s just parroting the lines we’ve heard. How can new ideas come if we just try to mimic what we see in the movies?
It feels like if we’re not careful, we’ll all just be like scribes in a monastery. Everyone thinking they’re working hard, doing good, but in reality just a copier. A tape recorder. How can we be independent thinkers if we program our speech to follow what we’ve seen?
I believe this line of thinking has some merit. I need to think about it some more.