Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainI’ve gone on a diet. No, not food, I don’t believe in food diets, this is a diet to preserve my sanity.
I’m going on a NEWS diet. Or perhaps I should say an “infotainment” diet. Or perhaps a “useless bullshit that only makes me depressed” diet. Any way you look at it, I’m cutting back on my consumption of “news”.
And that’s exactly how it’s created and marketed, a Consumer Commodity for our Consumer Economy and Lifestyle. 30 years ago, we had the “Today” show in the morning, and it was what, an hour? And what, 4-5 stories, covered in-depth, no bullshit about which “celebrity” had been caught shagging which OTHER “celebrity” where. And locally, we had one, maybe two local papers, and maybe the Movers and Shakers got the NYT or Chicago Herald from the newsstand. No USAToday (McNews) and on Teeee-Veeee, we had news at 6AM (maybe) 6 PM, and 10PM. ½ hour shows. None of the “24/7 News” crap we’re awash in today.
Yet, people still managed to consider themselves well-informed. Indeed, I’d say the people of 30-40 years ago were probably better informed than today’s Consumers, awash in their endless sea of Britney Baby Watch and Missing Pretty White Girl of the Week.
The point of all this rambling is that I have come to an epiphany of sorts. Constant bombardment with Tales of Woe that have no direct bearing on my life, or that I can do nothing to effect a change in have pushed me further and further into the deep pit of depression. So they mixed up an injured girl in a coma with a dead girl from a car wreck. Sad, but how does that affect my life? Alligators in Flori-DUH are eating retiree’s little dogs. Again, this affects me up here in the Rust Belt HOW? Fred Phelps and his inbred family of “lawyers” have their own Federal law passed against them. Again, what does this have to do with the availability of Kalamata olives in Chalmers? Shark attacks on the East coast or Downunda? Ditto.
These news corporations, Shee-Yit… OK, class, what’s the primary goal of a commercial corporation? Ah, who said “Making MONEY”? You get the Gold Star for today. Now, how does an outfit like FAUX or BS-RNC (sorry, Keith, but you work for whores) make that money? The same way every other company does, they refinance their debt….Oops, sorry, I got the info-schlokers confused with the banking industry…. No, they sell a “product”. And what IS that “product”? No, it’s not Wolf Blitzer shilling for Rove, or some twichit showing off her new plastic boobies while she tells us of the latest drunken dude to fall off a cruise ship while puking, it’s our EYEBALLS. Yes, Fellow Babies, the Infotainment industry makes their money by selling other commercial corporations on the idea that you’re going to sit there, slack-jawed, looking at the advertiser’s messages with the same discernment you just gave to the 15th Natalie Holloway update of the day. And the MORE of these Eyeballs the news company claims they can deliver, the higher the price they can charge for their space, and the more money they make for their stockholders, who probably rely upon the WSJ or FT and little else for their news…
So, here we are, we know everything there is to know about almost anything of no consequence, but are we WELL INFORMED??? I don’t think so, no more that you could consider someone who lives on double-Thickburgers or that obscenity Burger King advertises with all the Men Behaving Badly in their advert to be well fed. You’re stuffed chock-a-block to the gills with “stuff”, but there’s no nutrition there. It’s Junk Food, only this is for your brain, not your gut.
And what happens when you subsist on a diet of junk food? You get FLABBY. Junk food for your gut=flabby gut, junk food for your mind=flabby mind. Simple, no?
So that’s it. I’m off the constant barrage of infotainment. From now on, I plan to apply some filters to what I’m seeing or hearing, like:
Is this relevant to MY life?
Is this a situation I can affect a CHANGE over?
Is this in the news purely for its sensational value?
Is this a disguised advertising piece, dressed up like a news story?
That should cut down on the amount of CRAP I’m overwhelmed with daily. Should be able to tell in short order how it affects my depression. I’ll get back you on that.
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