Just remember to add YouTube Tiktok Facebook X etc to the Watch television —
— TV doesn’t have the influence it had when people were making these phrases.
they were pre-internet
In the ’80s, cable TV streamed hundreds of channels and there was no pause or rewind.
They played whatever constantly and there was no stopping it once you turned it on
So the fear of the ’80s was that they were implanting subliminal messages into the cable feeds
John Carpenter made a movie called “they live” in 1988 which is where the whole “consume obey watch TV” came from
But in the ’90s they started to have the internet
And once videos began to take over the internet in the mid-2000s, especially when dialup died and Broad band was King, videos on the internet replaced TV
But then something really weird happened:
As long as people believe that what they were seeing was made by “an Everyman”, it was safe
He wears a flannel shirt he must be one of us
He says what I like to hear and gets mad at what makes me mad
He must be one of us
And the rise of the parasocial relationships between influencers and new media consumers
Hence there’s millions / maybe billions of people that don’t realize that there is no fundamental difference between the dangers of corporate TV and dangers of New Media:
Except New Media has a slightly greater Danger: the widespread belief that what they are consuming is citizen journalism and more honest so long as it is not traditional media
And that traditional media is irretrievably fictional as contrast
The danger is in the belief
But All need to be scrutinized the same
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