Questioning Saturation

One issue that I find most challenging that has truly come to maturity in the past two years is the problem of media saturation of the individual. Of course, one can argue that the First Gulf War and the Lewinsky Scandal made a fine foundation to the current barrage of info-junk food. The effects on the individual that these continuous reports can have range from outrage to desensitization. For instance, i was working on a piece of media that incorporated an excerpt of the song "Dixie", and while adjusting the sound levels, after fifteen rather loud iterations, my wife voiced her consternation, and justly so.

What I question here is the effect that our media is having upon the masses in regards to a sense of social engineering. What does Reality TV's popularity say about American culture? And to take the point once further, what is the embedded reporter's role in culture? Is it journalism, or actually the newest form of Reality TV? What does the blurring of those lines represent to the youth, as well as showing the shaping of societal norms?

It might be trite to invoke the name of Michael Moore at such a time, but in his movie Bowling for Columbine, he finds that Canada, for all its similarities, has 1/12th the murder rate of the USA, despite comparable gun ownership rates. Some of his conclusions have to do with the mass media shaping of society from distorted/amplified 'social norms' as depicted on TV to differences in gun culture.

The question, returning to Reality TV, is what logical progression is American Society following? From the ubiquitous first-person shooter games like Quake and Unreal (which are used by the military for training by the way) to the Survivor reality games, to panicked reports of _tens_ of casualties during wartime when other wars lost thousands of soldiers, what role is the media and its representations of reality doing to desenstitize/hypersensitize us to accept death as a reality that somehow does not touch the media consumer; but is somehow a little unreal.

Patrick Lichty
Director of the Bureau for the Dissemination of Metastructures and Media Metaphors