THOUGHTSTYLE!
Now that you can plug into whatever messages you want, you need never think again. The debut of a ne
By Mick Farren
Somewhere out there, in places I never visit, people apparently believe that Tucker Carlson is perceptive, Ashlee Simpson is entertaining, Christmas with the Kranks is uplifting, SpongeBob SquarePants is part of a homosexual agenda, Left Behind novels are literature, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with oil, and it's mighty good eatin' at The Pig. With the sole exception of the eatin' at The Pig, I violently disagree with all of the above, but it's a supposedly free society, so I recognize their right to be held in contempt or merely ignored.
It's no secret that, at least since World War II, we have defined ourselves by our consumption. For more than half a century, the advertising industry has played our insecurity and alienation to corral us into demographics, and encouraged us to shape our personalities by our choices of transportation, clothing, cosmetics, toys, and appliances - even by our preferences in stimulants and medication. Lately, though, a new category of product has hit the marketplace, and it's triggering demographic war under the guise of culture. Once it was lifestyle. Now, for want of a better word, it's thoughtstyle.
The same lifestyle marketing that used to sell us the car of our dreams or the lingerie of our fantasies is now power-peddling fundamental philosophies, core beliefs, and political convictions. At the same time, the volume of modern media has become so infinitely vast, and the channels of available information so diverse, that we can, if we so desire, completely cocoon ourselves in a custom-designed data-womb of subjective perception and conditioned prejudice. The central, if hidden, irony of the grand rainbow spectrum of modern communications is that we can now - 24 hours a day, seven days a week - select a thoughtstyle and plug into nothing but the propaganda of our choice, and never entertain a single opposing view or variation.
Old-school, 20th-century consumer society was often condemned as infantile and narcissistic, but, in the 21st, infantile seems to have regressed to fetal, although the fetus is still narcissistic, constantly contemplating its own umbilical. And the problems seem to start when something unwanted and unexpected comes down that umbilical. Wasn't that the problem with Janet's now so-tired right breast? It wasn't that America saw a tit, but that the tit was embedded in the wrong context. The Bada Bing! sequences in The Sopranos come with a bevy of near-naked extras and bit players, but these are expected. Janet Jackson's costume failure arrived in the middle of the Super Bowl. It was a shock to the umbilical, and, to a fetal nation obsessed with security, shock is something to be avoided at any cost.
This may also explain why the news networks took it upon themselves to button out the horrified expletives when they aired on-the-spot tsunami videos. The word "fuck" is okay for the cast of Deadwood, or Chris Rock on HBO, but an anguished and wholly authentic Australian gasp of "fuckin' Jesus" from behind the amateur camcorder as the killer wave bore down needed to be expunged. Wrong word, wrong umbilical, but also so patently absurd that Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC's Countdown, risked a six-figure FCC fine by running the same clip, audio intact, and making the point that a tsunami comes with screams, curses, and profanity, and to pretend otherwise is the real obscenity.
But pretending things are otherwise is part of the attraction of a thoughtstyle. The poll that credited Fox News with having the highest viewership of the least informed viewers is now as tired as the Jackson breast, but it doesn't negate the fact that Fox is among the most advanced in the thoughtstyle business. It's market leader in cable news because it offers a massage of distortion specifically shaped to the predispositions of the intended demographic. Even a loop of synergy is created. The more prejudices and fixations are reinforced, the more comfortable the viewer becomes with the process. (That prejudices and fixations also fit the agenda of Rupert Murdoch is hardy relevant. And why pay Armstrong Williams all that money when the audience will believe the double-talk anyway?) Fox started with an approximate profile of its target consumer, but now, I swear, it has viewers eager to conform as closely to the profile as they can.
What Fox and its competitors may not have noticed, however, is that another form of synergy is at work. The quantum changes in our information delivery systems since (say) 2001 are still in a process of shaking down. How the relationships will pan out among print, the Internet, cable TV, broadcast TV, and, very soon, broadcast radio and satellite radio are far from clear. The media conglomerates would probably like their viewers hardwired, Matrix-like, during all their waking hours, but they may well drift away, if only to read People, listen to Rush, log on to some Christian website to get an ETA on The Rapture, or, maybe, while decrying the decline in moral values, jerk off to porn on pay-for-view. The wild cards of choice increasingly stack the deck and, for corporate media, the wildest is currently the blogosphere.
TV pundits may patronize, denigrate, join in, or elevate idiots as supposed blog gurus, but I smell the fear of the new tech in town. Writing on the website Wired News, Adam Penenberg paints an accurate if basic picture of the frequently misunderstood blogosphere. "It's not an economic bubble, where scores of startup companies run by fresh-faced 20-somethings are blowing through wads of venture capital in the hopes of becoming the first eBay or Amazon.com. Rather, it's a revolution in the dissemination of intellectual capital ... in fact the blogosphere has evolved into a sphere of memes and ideas that are constantly shaped by the millions ... it's akin to free-market capitalism, with information as its currency."
I'd argue with the comparison to free-market capitalism. Much of the blogosphere is a more anarchic cocktail - maybe with a stiff shot of nihilism and a flavoring of voyeur. I think, therefore I blog, and, if you're quiet, I'll let you watch. It describes irregular, uncharted, and unchartable trajectories. Organic, random, and wholly unpredictable, it's everything corporate controllers abominate. Sometimes it instigates, as with the pre-election scare that Bush would reinstate the draft, but sometimes it's the clean-up crew, as when it torpedoed CBS's news division with those Bush/National Guard memos. Previously powerless individuals create ripples in the Force and jerk the umbilical. Literate hookers and suicidal teens are on the same train as Bill O'Reilly, if maybe riding the metaphoric boxcar, while Google tosses them every which way. Even many of those moral-watchdog outfits with imposing titles - like Focus on the Family, which is currently going after SpongeBob - mostly started out as blogs/websites, with letterhead and a bank account to collect donations. But they, too, have their effect - if not the one they actually desire. Synergy takes no prisoners. Focus on the Family may well have hugely expanded SpongeBob SquarePants' existing gay audience, and I will never again wonder why SpongeBob and Patrick are so absorbed by The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.Published: 01/27/2005
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