Toobage

[Mark Kohut]

Love that Solzhenitsyn quote.

And the post reminds me of that sorta-aphorism: Reality has a liberal bias.

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that television is being de-emphasized as a central part of
> the lives of many people (probably especially in groups that tend young,
> college-educated, etc.) It's not that visual entertainment or even
> television series are being de-emphasized, but that people are consuming
> them in a way that looks increasingly different from what the experience of
> cable television looked like for a really long time.
>
> People are spending more time on the internet. Advertisement is tending in
> this direction. In terms of TV entertainment, I have no cable service, not
> even basic. I have a tube with a streaming device that gets me Netflix,
> HBOGo, et al. So my engagement with the world via television consists much
> more of substantive narrative (that is, of art) than it does of overt
> 30-second advertisements, of channel surfing, of watching things
> accidentally//because nothing else is on. This is new for me in my life but
> I think I am probably not alone here.
>
> This means that my access to the pulse is different. TV being more
> art-centric (even if a lot of it is slick corporatized entertainment) does
> have the potential to render complicated things in a less absolute and more
> nuanced way, which is good. It also means that when I consume news, I am
> choosing to do so, exercising a bit more agency over what I consume than I
> did when my options were maybe a dozen cable channels. And I am attracted to
> more nuanced takes on the news, I like to think, but.
>
> Of course the bad part of this is that cable television is becoming ever
> less nuanced. And people who don't consume cable TV but instead choose what
> kind of news and how much to read have access to more un-nuanced outlets to
> get their news from than ever.
>
> It sort of seems to me (as someone who lives in Chicago and interacts mainly
> with young people who have college degrees and are not impoverished or
> really at much risk in their daily lives) that the general trend of the
> country is actually toward liberalism, toward irony (in a good way), toward
> tolerance, if not toward nuance, but that, in response to this, the part of
> the country that feels itself being left behind is really digging their
> heels in. And they are the primary ones paying any attention to the old
> model of television/news, so forth, and so they are the ones the news
> companies are marketing toward.
>
> Cable TV isn't the dominant portrait of American life anymore, I don't
> think, to the extent that there is one. It's just gonna take a while for the
> public to catch up to that fact. As long as people still think it is, it
> sort of will be, in a de facto way.
>
> Hopefully this all evolves. I think about that old MLK thing about the moral
> arc of the universe being long but tending toward the good.
>
> Also I watched The Case Against 8 recently and at the end Ted Olson, I
> think, offers this Solzhenitsyn quote: 'The line separating good and evil
> passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political
> parties either, but right through every human heart.'
>
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 3:30 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/its-too-late-to-turn-off-trump-20151209?page=2
>>
>> It's not an accident that Trump's attention span lasts exactly one news
>> cycle. He's exactly like the rest of America, except that he's making news,
>> not following it – starring on TV instead of watching it. Just like we
>> channel-surf, he focuses as long as he can on whatever mess he's in, and
>> then he moves on to the next bad idea or incorrect memory that pops into his
>> head.
>>
>> Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a
>> spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump
>> does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV.
>> That's his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his
>> voters, he doesn't realize that it's a distorted picture.
>
>
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