Mass media manipulation
Mass media is rotten with manipulation. People are brainwashed. Corporations get more money. Governments exercise the control. While we are struggling with the taxes and consequences of those wars they push so much. Let's dive into this little bit deeper and see if there is something we can do.
What kind of manipulation is possible with the mass media machine? Pretty easy to suggest that in authoritarian governments it becomes a hotbed of propaganda.
How about financial manipulation? Let's suppose media is a fair watchdog in general. Some big news agency is starting to push some paid material. Then if someone notices this, competitor agencies get a perfect material to cover. So by getting those money this news agency ends up risking their reputation. So there is no open manipulation in that sense. But then if some rich group of people decides to manipulate the market. They can pay a good amount of money to a bunch of smaller "watchdogs". Now it gets difficult to see the "truth". So we also have some financial manipulation going on.
Manipulation doesn't have to be big. If we view it as a bias utilised for some kind of agenda, every person might have one. Cause everyone has a different world view. Sometimes we like to push our owns. So every journalist involved in the business is a potential manipulator in that sense. In fact biases are used all the time to present main actors of the news. Certain emotions are summoned towards the sides of the conflict in the spotlight. Issues are created out of thin air. And so on and so forth.
Do those news really affect us? They go down from the thought level to emotional perception. When one reads a certain article it gets triggered in different ways. It doesn't have to be an instant effect. Also sometimes it is. Like a hatred towards some political figure. Other times it is a pumping of a certain idea again and again. Which gradually makes a certain point of view. Which then affects the emotions.
Furthermore it is not limited to the people who consume. It affects all of us. Once a group of people gets a certain emotion from the media outlet, this can be transferred into collective. Then every folk out there can access this material. All you have to do is present a certain composition of content. Like text, video, pictures etc. Make an impression. And let it be seen by a number of people big enough. You start to afraid of something like a nuclear war, and just coincidentally there were a bunch of news released about the potential of nuclear weapons usage in some conflict. I'm not saying that there were no actual consideration to use one by the government. I'm trying to see our personal function in this opera.
Those emotions towards certain issues are translated into behaviour. So everybody has to shovel the garbage in their own ways. Some paint, others blame or kill or starting to prepare for the nuclear war. All kinds of behaviour not necessarily good or bad. There is no limit to the ways of human expression. We can see that people are social creatures. On one side they express individually. On the other side they seek consensus all the time. When the majority thinks a certain thing is normal, it is very hard to say the opposite. It is very normal to the human nature - to conform, reach a consensus and break it. Total conformation to a certain idea leads to a dead end and stagnation. So it is very exciting to push emotions towards each other, reach a consensus and then break it. And so the life brightens in different colors again and again.
What can we personally do about this? First of all, it is not something or someone to blame. It is just the nature of a human to process the information which comes into ones boundaries. It doesn't really matter what kind of information comes in. It should be processed somehow. Since the life is never the same. It evolves all the time. There should be something to process. Possibly some news about the world around us.
The media machine serves a population by providing material. Guess what material people want the most? Exciting garbage. Digging into how bad certain political figures are. How bad is the government. How cruel is the war. Stuff like this. Which is not really constructive. It is over saturation with negativity most of the time. Which effectively perpetuates a victimised position the population takes in front of the higher powers. The real problem of a victim is it does not act. It is just holding those emotions inside. Not letting oneself to behave. We do this all the time. We accumulate those negative news inside. But since we don't want to act on this, we need more and more. So the news agencies feed us with more. Until we finally burst into personal revolution. What can we do about our world?
You may argue, well those things are real and necessary. I don't want to read shiny unicorns. I want a reality. The brutal truth. Well just because you focus on the brutal truth doesn't make much difference to the issue. Cause I suppose you want to solve the issues somehow. Some issues are not solved by digging into them. Cause we have a limited potential to express emotions towards news. If every person finally acts on the emotions coming from the news, there is actually a chance to resolve presented issues one by one. Ones you act on emotion, you let it go. Next time you will not be as excited to act. So you naturally begin to filter the information coming in. You are not as excited to read new article in the same spirit anymore. Since you already experienced the outcome.
There is a fight between personal boundaries and the mass media "machine". Not an easy battle. Do I want to process a certain kind of information? Let something affect me on the lowest level? Do I want to act unconsciously towards someones agenda? Sometimes we just act in the society and solve certain issues, that we think are worth of spending energy on, but we get a negative outcome again and again. Like a citizen going to vote for a politician who he never actually met in his life. Or a person grinding enemy nation with friends by the cup of beer. And it just turns out to be positive to someone else. Well it is better for this to happen. Cause after a while we begin to realise a certain manipulation is going on. And we finally let it go. Instead of guessing its existence. It is not about good or bad. It is just better for the life to happen in any way.
So what we get from the news machine is the result of our own interest to express in life. We have to be cautious of the way we do this. But we better do than stagnate. Otherwise the machine is starting to push the conflict zones again and again, until there is so much hatred. Until some people are actually picking guns and go volunteering to kill other people. Those conflicts supposedly might have been elevated earlier. As we have seen it does not matter what kind of emotion we got, and what amount we hold inside. So killing is not a necessity in any way. But it is more likely for the person to kill with the big anger inside, instead of a small one. Otherwise there would be not enough energy to pick a gun and go thousands miles somewhere to do this.
It often turns out that governments are not merely expressing the will of the society. They are corrupted instead. There are corporations who profit. There are people who gain. There are all kinds of interferences regular people can possibly do nothing about. There is massive propaganda. Control of people under regime. For those kinds of manipulations to cease, the solution becomes pretty much the same. Personal action in life.
It just happens that people who live under authoritarian regimes are more like We than I, and it's more difficult to take personal action instead of waiting for the collective all the time. So the regime actually strengthens. When there is a need to take a revolutionary action, which is not supported by the regime. There is a big tension between such government and its society. Ones the citizen starts to act on its own emotions, it faces all kinds of obstacles and dangers, starting from interpersonal conflicts, ending with government suppression.
But if we do, after a while there is a chance that we realise which emotions are the result of a manipulation and massive suppression for generations of such a government and which are more close to the personal nature. Cause you know a president was born around the same time, he has a mother telling him to be like everybody else, and a drinking neighbour, complaining about politics. In that sense it's the whole nation trying to resolve some big tensions inside.
I personally think the mass media is just a translator and all those corporate manipulations and authoritarian regimes are dead from the beginning. So it will be abandoned after a while. In much the same way, as I would probably not read this article again anymore. So enjoy your life in that mess, and don't let negativity stub you down.