Somewhere, there is a field…
November 13, 2006 by gbrown
“Somewhere, out beyond all ideas of right and wrong-doing there is a field - I’ll meet you there”
(quote from poet Rumi)
“I’m giving up TV” I told the customer service woman at Sky. I don’t think she had that option available on her customer feedback form. The pregnant pause across the telephone line confirmed that perhaps this answer didn’t feature on her flowchart. Perhaps I was one of the 1% of callers who were just plain weird, not adhering to any social script. No amount of special discounts, freebies or niceties were going to get this customer to stay, discard flowchart. Forthwith, my Sky TV subscription was cancelled.
That was 3 years ago, and apart from the World Cup and DVDs, the TV has sat gathering dust on our top floor of our 3 storey house. The aerial socket’s on the ground floor, the TV 2 stories above, hence very poor reception. The TV sits there with a coathanger sticking out the back looking feeling it would be better appreciated in another home. I like it that way, it reminds me of what TV means to me.
TV, newspapers had to go if I was to make room in my life for more books, learning and creative time. You see, one thing I realized some time back was that it’s no good trying to get ahead if we don’t first make a conscious decision to create time to do so. Brian Tracy put me straight some time back with his words “To do more you have to first do less”
Whether its TV or the free Metro newspaper on the London mass transit, media is rarely more than junk media in our modern lives, content that we can absorb to make us feel our life has some activity, some meaning. Ironically, it isn’t necessarily our lives we are living. All advertising, it seems, portrays anything but reality and often seeks to agitate the natural insecurities of “not being enough” in your average consumer.
We have nanotechnology and blackberries, but junk media reminds us that despite all of our historical progress, the human brain is primarily motivated by the need for survival – or as ethnologists would describe it - “fight or flight”. Of course, media is not about telling us how good we or the world is, but reminding us that there lies, around the corner, a force that threatens our security. Just as the saber-tooth tiger lurked in the pumpkin patch, germs multiply on your toilet seat and Domestos will kill “all known gerns”. As it did in the pre-industrial era for firebrand preachers, fear sells kitchen cleaning products, flu vaccinations, defense budgets, pharma stocks and newspapers.
If junk media is to work, we have to believe in the fear – whether that enemy comes in the form of germs, Islamists, acne, not having enough money or immigrants. If I accept junk media into my life, I accept its manifesto – the existence of the concept of rightdoing and wrongdoing, justice and criminality, “them & us”, “the war on terror” and so on. Scanning through the METRO’s headlines today I read with interest “Britain’s MRSA timebomb”, “Soldiers jailed for gun running plot”, “Doctor ‘raped two women in one night’”, “Food bug hits travel bosses at hotel” and then the sublime “Men ‘live longer on four beers a day’.
The METRO is handed out free to all commuters on London’s busy mass transit (The Tube). We read it because it is prescribed to us, without questioning. We all buy into junk media and its concepts of “right and wrong” because we all are unaware of the alternatives. To not watch TV, therefore, is almost anti-social.
Some people are perplexed that I don’t watch or read the news. “How do you know what’s going on in the world?” they ask.
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Thank you for your comment on my blog. I absolutely loved your post and the line that sticks with is “To do more you have to first do less”….how true, in quantity one can easily lose quality…and to strike a balance is the challenge of our times…and guess what!!! I don’t watch TV or read newspapers!!! I hope no one hears of this in the journalism department…