I was thinking and considering this recently. TV is such an influence on all of our lives. In a world of consumerism that is relatively new to us, and a world of computers --how much more powerful has the influence of TV become.
I recently watched a documentary on a guy named Eddie Bernase who was really one of the most influential people of the 20th century. He was Frued’s nephew and learned to employ the use of marketing consumer need by appealing to the unconscious using his knowledge of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories…
Before this century American culture was marketed goods and services based on need, not desire. Interesting shift. He was also used in many propaganda media campaigns to gain public support for various wars, police actions etc. He thought in general the American people were stupid and easy to manipulate through TV. Joseph Geobbels (however you spelt it…) was quoted as saying he was very influenced by Bernase’s tactics.
Ok, now that we have come from 85 or so corporations owning our media down to like 4 in the last 20 years, how informed are we really as to the truth of things? Is it all just corporate media hegemony trickling facts and figures down that benefit the few? Distracting our minds from important events or ideas with dumb talk about Brad’s Pitt and Angelina Jolie?
Are the politicians in Washington real? Is there really 2 parties, or just one party that gives the appearance of 2 to separate us diverting our attention from the truth that corporations are in bed with big govt??
Just a thought, I am not saying I am right but one has to consider such things when we are talking about all these bailouts that Greenspan says is “socializing losses, while privatizing gains”. And when we have a monetary policy that is based upon exponential expansion of debt to stave off collapse. An inflationary money system that degrades the value of our dollar, and makes it so you need to work and compete even harder to maintain the lifestyles you are so accustomed.
I am speaking from an American perspective of course.
I am British and I don’t own one. Wasn’t allowed to watch it as a child; if we did have it on, I was the kid so didn’t get a vote about what to watch anyway.
TV can be fab. I myself have a strong interest in Cheryl Cole, a popular British TV presenter and singing star. But if you are wondering whether people are trickling things into your brain through the tv people, it’s time to turn off and go for a run or something.
What is truly amazing is the difference between CNN International & CNN Regurgitated for Domestic Consumption…
A study of William Randolph Hearst provides one with but a glimpse of the death knell for American Journalism.
[quote=“TheGingerMan”]What is truly amazing is the difference between CNN International & CNN Regurgitated for Domestic Consumption…
A study of William Randolph Hearst provides one with but a glimpse of the death knell for American Journalism.[/quote]
Or just watch Fox news and BBC for example. Really different worlds.
I’m more interested in what you are thinking than what the media puppets are paid to be saying.
I guess I value originality over parody.
Thank God for the Internet 
in 2008 everything should be taken with a grain of salt.
Fox News, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, etc…all have an agenda they promote, because savvy producers know which demographic watches THEIR network, so of course they cater to them.
The internet is full of idiot savants who mistake information for knowledge and who for the most part have no idea how things work in the real world. It is a haven for conspiracy theorists, people who love to hear/read their own words, agoraphobic nerds and other nutjobs (like the kind of morons who think the moon landing was faked etc…).
I however think a large majority of people are intelligent enough to recognize the source and the slant with which it delivers.
If you can sift through all the double speak you can actually get an idea of how things really are. I feel a lot of people readily do this.
EDIT: I just saw an ad for Democrats Abroad on this website. Interesting.
[quote=“Gifthorse”]…TV is such an influence on all of our lives. In a world of consumerism that is relatively new to us,…
Before this century American culture was marketed goods and services based on need, not desire. Interesting shift. [/quote]
This is a common but false notion. There was plenty of advertising in the 19th century and every century before that and it was as much based on the vanity and greed and desire of consumers as today. And the production of cheap mass produced goods that fulfilled the middle and especially working class desire for “nice” objects certainly began much earlier than this century. Do you think William Morris chintzes were selling because they were oh so functional and necessary?
[quote=“Jack Burton”][quote=“TheGingerMan”]What is truly amazing is the difference between CNN International & CNN Regurgitated for Domestic Consumption…
A study of William Randolph Hearst provides one with but a glimpse of the death knell for American Journalism.[/quote]
Or just watch Fox news and BBC for example. Really different worlds.[/quote]
Yes! Both of y'all! I have developed quite a contempt for those who watch Fox "news" for anything more than entertainment value--and those people are most of the people taking up space in my home town.
Yes, OP, I think a LOT of people DO think like T.V. because they don't have a better reference. They watch t.v. so much that they don't live their own lives. T.V. is not a thirty minute interlude of entertainment, as it was when I was a kid. It's a constant and heady distraction that drowns people's existance!
I didn't have a t.v. for years and people were just gobbsmacked to find that out. "What do you do?!" Read. Talk to real PEOPLE, live me LIFE?!
I have t.v. now, but I hate it and it's never on when my son isn't home, and then it only plays sponge bob. In fact, I was talking to a friend who was reccomending that when I move I should get satalite and have more channels. At first I though, wow, that would be great! Then I thought again and told her that I guess I do have more channels already, but I never watch them, so what's the point?!
O.P. also has a great point about marketing to need, not greed last century. Get online for a moment or two and look at some old commercials. They're all about needfulness or conviences like a lighter iron, or a built in roller-press wringer on a washing machine. No one irons any more, and washing machines are sold on based on energy consumption or style considerations. It' s no longer even immagined that a woman would be washing her clothse by hand, of course. The machine is not considered a convience any longer.
Those aren't the best examples, maybe, but the comercial I saw when I first returned to the States, of the woman dragging in from a hard shift wearing a taco suit, her two dumbass teenagers not even looking up from the couch where they were texting--and her having the taco job so they could afford the texting--Boy! That ticked me off. I get ticked everytime I think of it, actually. What the hell has become of us?
So yes, O.P., I think Americans are dumb and easily manipulated by what's on t.v.
Um, most of your lives. I haven’t turned the TV on much in a long time, except for the occasional Mythbusters or Daily Show. This week I’m busy building a gingerbread house, thereby avoiding all the false realities of which you speak, and creating my own false reality. 
I dunno. All human activity is basically dumb. Can never decide whether moderation or obssession is the key.
Humans have a certain amount of downtime; their brains need it to process things. We have to do things that are not intrinsically ‘useful’, sometimes, in order to recharge.
A gingerbread house is utterly pointless, YET, it will give DB pleasure to plan and make it, and show it to his friends, and to the people who will see it and eat it. A dumb TV show is also pointless, but it allows us to sit down, forget about things while they whirr away and resolve themselves in the background. They may spark creative or other ideas, or inspire us in some way to do something else.
Or not. The same as if DB stood around his kitchen obsessively making cakes, never doing anything else. It’s just fun. If you’re doing anything more than is healthy then you’ll always be a target of some sort.
I am more talking about TV commercials, and news media than TV shows for entertainment…
For instance election coverage, politics, what news stories get attention, what others do not. What opinions or stances are marginalized, which ones are discussed.
I don’t think TV is a particularly good thing in the main, but it’s more or less here to stay. There’s no point me going on a moral crusade about it in anything other than my personal life. I don’t watch much, and when I have kids, I won’t have a TV at all. That’s about the best I can hope for.