Yes, how media destroyed the individual. Well I don't have to research this one, I can rattle off the million things, which float around in my mind, at any one time, on this topic.
Lets not confuse this with social media. As soon as you google this topic, it comes up with how social media has messed with people. No, this is much more simple. It is just about media, as a whole and how it has messed with us.
In 1980, when I first started high school, I lived in a posh suburb. Every morning on my bus, on my way to school, there was a man who read his Australian Financial Review, while the bus driver had a contemporary music station howling out the latest top 40 songs. The DJ seemed to broadcast a theme of sexual innuendo. At least that's how I saw it as a 12 year-old who came from a good Catholic family! This shock-jock media was very different to the guy on his bus, would read the Australian Financial Review. The DJ provided the backdrop of things that many people were not ready to digest, until they finished their cornflakes, because it was too early in the morning and so it goes.
This is a great example of what media does to different people. It can turn one person into a share market junkie and the next into someone who misbehaves in nightclubs. It was right there on my school bus for all to witness. It's called postmodernism - everyone is doing something different.
The truth of the matter is that we were all born into this world as individuals, whom the media had not had time to shape, at that point. It starts to shape people when they are old enough for it to influence them - maybe on the school bus!
Postmodernism happened in the 60s. It happened before television started in 1956 and before radio started in the 1920s. Prior to postmodernism, people were more likely to be better people, of higher moral fibre. Certainly, before the 1950s, there was not a middle class in Australia and there were not middle class jobs to which people could aspire, or not many.
When I was growing up in my reasonably posh area in the 70s/early 80s, I can remember all the inground swimming pools and home extensions being built in my neighbourhood in the late 70s. This was to push up the price of real estate. The media pushed it onto people. My family was not this way inclined and in many ways perhaps that was a good thing.
Real Estate played an important part in our lives, whether we wanted it or not. The Sydney Morning Herald made most of its money in its Saturday Real Estate section, prior to the internet. This gave everyone in my street a great insight into how much their homes were worth. This meant my neighbours would give us a hard time if I had not mowed the lawn, raked up the leaves, dug the weeds out of the garden or cut the edges. The media and the real estate agents drove the idea of homes and gardens being beautifully manicured and the pressure this put on people was enough to drive anyone insane.
The media made people feel obliged to have every little thing. Suddenly the media advertised a new sort of car and we had to have it in our driveway, just like our neighbours and the gods of money could see that it was good, because that fancy car in the driveway pushed up the price of real estate.
The clothes we had to wear, if we were the well dressed person about town and the socioeconomic data, broadcast on the media, put us into certain categories, which we felt we must maintain, no matter what. It all affected us subconsciously. This had devastating effects on the sort of careers we wanted and the kind of romantic partner we hoped to find. The divorce rate should be a case in point.
I didn't need to see how social media drove all this nonsense, because I had seen it all prior to then. I must admit that these days I look at it all and laugh out loud, because social media has put all these revolting nouveau riche tendencies on steroids. It's horrid/awful ― Joseph Walz
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