Does culture create media, or does media create culture?
There was a point in history where there was a more equitable balance to be struck between culture and media, each feeding the other, and at the benefit of one class or the other... but let's not sugar coat it: in all stages of of human intellectual evolution, the word and the image have been used to manipulate the minds, the opinions, even the very souls of those affected by what they hear, what they've read, what they think they've heard, what they think they've read. Coming to today, at this very point in time, the country that purports itself to be free specializes in isolation by melodrama, barriers by religion, boundaries by classification, boxing by regionalism, delineation by false culturalization. It doesn't have to be faith based propaganda, even though that is the most common form of mindshare assessment cited... no it is any article, any piece of faux journalism, written solely for a specific thought and mindset which, these days, translates to clicks, to touches, to fingerprint and surface area, which all translates to dollars. The analytics coldly say so.
The ideas of the Enlightenment, the great age of philosophy that so informed the deists that were this country's founding fathers are now dead and we've reverted to a modernized form of lingual feudalism: the nation states at large are determined to factionalize the remaining public before they have the ability to use what tools they have available to become truly educated. People being people, and lives being as stressful and packed with everyday material survival as they are, people strive to learn more, to know more... but they are concerned about being left behind, given the stream of conscious forms of newsmedia they are subjected to on a daily basis; all of which leads to a lazy hivemind mentality: whatever is the most visible must be the most true and therefore must be the most correct thing for them to think, to follow, to utilize in making everyday decisions. It could be branding, it could be family, it could be social media population of any form you choose but in either case it is the first page of a search engine, one designed to mold itself to their daily routine, designed to show them what they most wish to see based on their history, their views, the sites they visit most frequently. This homogenization of thought, this funneling of philosophy has created a bottleneck at the doorsteps of the minds of Man. However will they learn when they see only what they hope to see, only what perpetuates that which they already wish to believe or think they know? How can they ever expand their mindset if all they read, speak, think, hear is pure repetition, pure pattern, only changed by those they deem worthy to fade change one set to the next? Modern rebellions are quelled before they can arise simply by silencing words seeking tongues to attach to.
In this day and age there is, in America, a culture lost, desperately looking to be found but distracted and heavily fed by a market seeking to box them with hype and hyperbole, market and marketing, policy and politics, religion and atheism. There are no foundations to be built when the mausoleums come premade, above ground, and floodwater tight. When we wake up to find that we've lost our words and, with them, our freedoms, there will be no history from which to inform us: the revisionists and the viciously religious will have seen to it, and will have armed their well stocked and well moneyed and well watered compounds, prepared for the shocked and horrified audience, stirred into action by their own complacency in the end, marching in rage to their doorstep.
