Is life in the US following a Hollywood script? Has anyone else noticed that the media clips of the recent storming of the White House would fit in perfectly with 90% of the movies on Netflix? It’s a little weird - the costuming of the “marauders”, the crouching, fleeing Congressmen & women, the National Guard asleep on the Capitol’s steps, the walls topped with razor wire. Yikes! I never really expected to be watching movies on the news. But here we are - “The Pandemic”, “American Coup”, and coming soon to your screens - “The Fall” (of Democracy)...? Does the film and television industry have a hand in forming our values, or does it reflect them - or both? Much of what we see in movies, and on some TV reality shows, depicts the ugly side of humanity. The majority of movies we see are fast paced, exciting, violent, sexy, and full of special effects. The really-bad-guy is often pitted against the not-so-bad guy. We identify with that not-so-bad guy. Life has unfairly dealt him a lousy hand of cards. It’s okay when the not-so-bad guy leaves chaos and destruction behind him because his mission is good and he is trying to bring the really-bad-guy down. And the good-guys these days? They seem to have disappeared from the screen almost entirely.
And then there’s TV and the Internet. We are living through a pandemic. Restrictions placed on everyday life have caused a great deal of hardship, especially for less affluent people. Adding to these difficulties our mainstream TV news media fills our screens with pandemic stats and short clips of horrendous events - wars, extreme poverty, floods and earth quakes, military coups, murders, child abuse, theft, drug busts. Social media is riddled with half truths, lies and, more and more, outright hate. How much of this can we absorb without becoming detached, desensitized, depressed, paranoid? Is it possible to be bombarded with all of this without suffering some effect?
We know that a thumbs up or down on Netflix will eventually yield viewing suggestions more to your liking. We know, or should know, that liking/sharing/commenting/ on social media drives algorithms to feed us more of the same type of content. So changing the way we engage with social media can change the flavour of the experience it delivers our way. We should realize that all news media is biased and plays to its base, but there are alternatives not afraid to challenge the status quo. You can write you own script. You do not have to be a media sponge.
