The Power of All Media

Update:  Being There should fit into this somewhere, but I never saw it and can't find a spot. 

I have had many conflicted opinions on all media.  This may be because I myself have been powerfully affected by things I later concluded were not good for me.  I downloaded the TikTok app only a couple of months ago in order to watch my daughter-in-laws videos. It rapidly became something I pointlessly devoted too much time to, and today I simply deleted it. Because the algorithm keeps showing you what you want, you get the impression "Gee, there are way more people concerned about this than I thought," many of them knuckleheads. TikTok does not just show you what you like, but what you hate and can't resist looking at and getting steamed. You also are exposed to people you would seldom meet in real life, who have formed their opinions about various groups and ideas from TikTok and social media itself. I find myself thinking Wait a minute.  I know hundreds of people in that group in real life.  I can think of examples who fit your stereotype of them, but mostly not. You simply have no idea what you are talking about. Related: Gell-Mann Amnesia. 

Yet this is also why I have long considered movies dangerous as well.  They give you the impression that you know things that you don't, in insidious fashion. You believe you have thought this up yourself, with your sharp discernment of those around you, when you have actually been led by the nose.  When they convince you that it was your own idea, they might have you forever.  As far back as the 80s (or more) I could tell that people's opinions of Christians, especially the  fundamentalist/Southern Baptist/evangelical/Pentecostal/born-again varieties, could not possibly be based on folks they had met in great numbers in New Hampshire.  They are thin on the ground here now, and were scarcer then. Yet the people I talked to at work, and even the people in the mainstream denominations spoke authoritatively, as if they knew exactly what was up with those folks. 

Or not the movies.  Books and magazines told us stories as well, and we become confident we have seen the world more clearly than others. My wife once got so involved in a character when she had read too far into the night and had to make herself go to bed that she prayed for his coming day of decision on the morrow. I cannot accuse. In the summer of '73 I stood in my backyard and was filled with intense longing to walk toward Middle-Earth, if only I could know which direction it lay. Into these discussions people swiftly include the power of the theater, and then in almost hushed tones that storytelling around the fire is most powerful of all, able to unite tribes over generations, huddled together like the rabbits in Watership Down. Where else would we learn about life and how to live it? Without a scaffold of narrative we can't even observe much around us with any understanding. I think of my brother as more media-created in his personality than I am, but it is the household my children grew up in that sounded like a wisecracking sitcom every evening and every ride in the car. 

I have always been a little sheepish about how much TV I watched every evening in high school, when I was supposed to be conquering the world with my vast intellect but instead watched three episodes of Gilligan's Island every weeknight, including two of the same episode. I have now decided that the near-mindlessness was the point. Leading up to my senior year of college I would come to panic wishing that my brain would simply turn off for ten minutes to give me a rest. I wasn't watching television then. There are many kinds of meditation, and even the early Buddhists considered watching fish in a pond could be meditation.  Sitcoms activate just enough of the brain so that you can't think about anything else very long. You can give yourself over to its spell.  When I try to be silent in my own head the noise gets louder, as my own radio station takes over.  But Gilligan could capture the stage and keep it, giving me my moments of peace.

We consider Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney to be a novelty, but where else are we to learn about the world, really?  They are all dangerous.