Fellow Consumers.
The idea of televisions watching you has been in the vanguard
from the inception of their invention.
No commercial television was broadcast, ever, without some kind
of market survey having been previously executed.
We were watched then.
It all may seem a bit big brother-ish, 1984, Brave New World
sort of thing.
No souls being captured here, though.
Or did Lenin imagine that cameras captured souls, similar to
concerns of the Mennonites and other religious orders.
Really, this concern over digital spying is a question of
religion.
Many people believe their lives are improved by owning a device
that delivers entertainment media to their eyeballs and brains.
That belief is marked by the attitude, perhaps, “well, it is
just what you do”.
Or marked by the simple “shock and awe” of the dazzling screen.
Religion has never been a one-way street.
If you allow yourself to believe, you give up your soul to the
institution.
What you want and what you desire in life, what you imagine to
be true, is all pre-defined by the administrative structure of the
organization.
Of course, they watch you and keep tabs on you.
In our modern world, this process is called marketing.
Marketing is one of those funny words from the lexicon of our
modern day priests, the economists.
Spying and marketing are synonymous, no?
The day the first human went into a store to purchase a product,
was the day the economists figured out they could sell us all a bill of
goods. Of course, there were not a lot of economists around in
the early days of capitalism and the subsequent rise of communism. But
the economists folk quickly figured out that there was a golden opportunity to
administer power. So came a new language of religion, with fancy words
like markets, consumers, gross national product, and even jobs.
Anyway, since it is a free country, you are allowed to allow
yourself to be spied upon.
And buy whatever is sold to you.
No harm there.
If you don’t want to be spied upon, then you have to turn the
device off and put it on the street for some lucky recycler to pick up and put
it to good use.
If you choose the latter, you then would have to have the
courage to pay attention to and be responsible toward the immediate world
around you.
Fancy actually taking notice of the world we live in…..
and you get to keep your soul in the bargain.
 | |
| Fun Things to Do Without Television - Mali 2004 |
