ARTelevision

I felt overwhelmed by my parents and wanted to feel like a free and separate being.
I was rebellious and developed an attitude.
I was primed for outside influences.
Popular mass-media culture was an escape from my daily life.
I internalized the rebellious attitudes that were being promoted and sold as mass-media products to my demographic.
They were designed for me by huge corporations that had spent millions and millions of dollars figuring me out and they had an influence on shaping my attitudes toward the world and my self image.
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I mean, my self-image was pretty significant, since it’s who I thought I was.
I would look in the mirror and try to emulate the look of my favorite pop stars and actors.
The lyrics of popular songs filled my head. I listened to pop music and then after that I thought I was going beyond that by listening to alternative types of music – often the more obscure the better. That way, I felt I was being more unique, original, and creative in my tastes. I felt I was above the types of more mass-produced music that were more popular than the type of music I was listening to. Whatever it was at any particular moment, I played it very loud. Playing it so loud was a sort of aggressive, assertive, attitude-type thing.
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A big part of my self-image revolved around the type of clothes I wore.
They were defined for me by advertising campaigns and peer pressure.
It was important to me to fit in to the group(s) I had fallen in with.

It’s hard to draw the line between my own internal projection of the adolescent rebellion I was experiencing and the way I externalized that into my social and political attitude and views. They were connected in a very direct way. The types of fashion, music, TV, and movies that I liked directly fed the attitudes I incorporated into my self-image.

Above all, it was important to think of myself as a freedom loving, cool, fun, risk-taking, unique, interesting, and creative person who was different from adults who looked staid and boring as they lived their lives around me. It was important to believe I would not become like them because I was not like them. All of these ideas were marketed to me by commercial entities. I can’t really tell which ideas were my own and which ones I simply picked up from the media and the products it advertised and I consumed.
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My parents were, by all accounts, good people whose only fault may have been that they tried perhaps too hard to be good parents. They were involved in a positive way in my life to the degree that I felt the need to rebel. If there’s something to blame there - for me developing adolescent rebellion - I’d have to blame myself for having a lot of intelligence but no maturity. I worked on my family’s farm and later in business and several other venues for years by the time I was 16. So, it wasn’t life experience I lacked – more just perspective. To tell you the truth, relative to the lives of my peers, I’d say I was a normal adolescent.

The influence of mass media on my life was enough to create self-image and behavior patterns that were clearly reflective of what was being promoted and sold to me.

Identity and behavior are deep and essential parts of a person. Mass media and consumer culture had a major influence on my life - even more than the influence of my parents or traditional institutions.
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If anyone had asked me if I was shaped, influenced, and manipulated by mass media I would have denied it vigorously. I prided myself upon my individuality and my strength. Of course, as an intellectual, I saw a lot of Americans shaped by consumer culture – but they were the opposite of me as far as I could see. They were conservative and shaped by the boring supermarket and shopping mall culture of the targeted middle class. That’s what I considered to be “mass culture” – not my radical anti-everything-that-I-was-rebelling-against subculture or my alienated, cool, and in-the-know friends. We were cynical and smart, we thought.
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We believed because we had moved to the edge of popular culture – far away from the middle of the bell curve – that we were not the manipulated customers of the huge conglomerate multi-media and fashion giants we sensed other Americans were. Of course, it was simply a path staked out before us every step of the way by successions of thoroughly researched marketing groups who catered to the evolving, ever-changing leading edge of “youth culture.”

As a group, we had targeted economic resources. Marketers who had mapped the course of cultural movements ahead of us were tapping them. mapping them, influencing and manipulating us. When we perceived this, we claimed our favorite icons of celebrity were being “co-opted” by the consumer culture that threatened to neutralize the “authentic” voices and expressions we consumed. This tended to move us toward even more peripheral status where the patterns of co-optation reoccurred.

Rather than creating our own mindsets, we were led down predictable paths. The carts of consumerism were ineluctably positioned before our adolescent and post-adolescent horses. Wherever we stood at any moment, we were still buying things that continued shaping our minds. Music, movies, television, manufactured products and fashions still defined who we were to ourselves and to each other.
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How all this affected our minds is difficult to precisely define – not because it is not demonstrable in our every thought, action, expression, and presentation of self. It is hard to parse because it is nearly impossible to separate the millions of commercial images, sound bites, snippets of dialog, body postures, and attitudes we soaked up, internalized, and imitated from anything personal or interpersonal which was uncontaminated by external “entertainment” and consumer-oriented programming.

We were vulnerable because we wanted certain things and we were insecure because we felt we lacked them. These desires were exaggerated – even created - by the culture we inhabited. Our very vulnerabilities, while utterly natural products of the struggle to become oneself were also the urges, which moved us to acquire packaged solutions - advertised as having the ability to fill our needs. We felt the need to become more like the advertising we responded to because it presented icons and ideals of the qualities we admired.
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Our very rebelliousness was exploited by packaged messages of rebellion. Commercial interests executed the paradoxical situation of filling society with anti-social messages because they were selling to our needs and desires to be anti-social. Our rebellion became another parameter of our targeted demographic profile. We knew this, yet we continued to consume the messages as if we could separate the message from the messenger.

The recording industry sold the images, sound, and lyrics of those on the fringe of social acceptability, thereby bringing them on to center stage of the culture of entertainment we inhabited. The television and film industry, the fashion industry, and the creators, producers, and distributors of video games, books, magazines, and comic books mirrored this process.

We did not, would not, could not acknowledge the absurd situation we found ourselves in – we were trapped. To acknowledge that everything we had become had been spoon-fed to us by manipulative and exploitative individuals and corporations who, in deep ways, did not share our beliefs was too much to admit. The condition was one of dysfunction and borderline sanity. We were creatures of culture who wanted desperately to stand apart from our culture as individuals. Yet we were herded sheep-like to contribute to our own corruption.
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It went something like this…

I’d get up in the morning with a negative attitude and reinforce that attitude by scanning my walls for the pictures, posters, and artwork that projected the images of pop icons, rock stars, movies of the day. – or more esoteric political or surrealist visions.

“This sucks” was my mantra. This meant that the world I was forced to live in was essentially beneath my level of intelligence and taste.
Of course my root attitude was simply a product of adolescent hormones. I craved constant reinforcement from the media-saturated environment I drew around myself. So did my "peers." We exerted "peer pressure" on each other - which amounted to extra impetus to continue down this road of total vulnerability to the media-infused lives we were all living.

The books I read explained why “This sucks.” The music I listened to carried “This sucks” as it’s primary message. The rest of the embedded messages conveyed by my type of products proclaimed things like: “You are one of the few people who can express true rebellious individuality,” “This product here is different from the other products of our consumer-oriented, mind-dulling world,” and “The people who create this are “true artists” expressing things that are not encouraged by your parents or traditional institutions,” etc.
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The utter absurdity of the behaviors I engaged in did not occur to me. I would play music filled with negative messages so loudly there was no other brain activity possible. It never occurred to me that I was programming myself. I called it “Listening to music.”

I would put headphones on and the zone inside my head stopped being a brain and became simply the empty space between the speakers – filled with raucous and overwhelmingly negative blasts of dysfunctional noise, street slang, and bad English. I mostly sought out the “alternative” or “subcultural” varieties and believed these illusionary descriptions bestowed some sort of special, unsullied, or artistic qualities.
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Eventually, I began “enhancing” these experiences with drugs.
This was the next step in deepening the process of saturating my brain with the debilitating nonsense I called, “my favorite things to do.”

I was irresponsibly randomizing neural connections that had formed during a lifetime of socialization. I was a parody of my former self - pushing the quality of my “entertainment” toward the threshold of the psychotic episode.

Being an artist and an intellectual, I rationalized all this mind-dulling stuff as “Keeping up with what’s going on in the world,” etc. I also thought it was "...no big deal, it's just entertainment."

I was a rationalizing machine. I could crank out arguments that, I believed, could bulldoze any attempt to question my “lifestyle.” I was an utter hypocrite, addicted to the things I was defending.
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