|
roachboy, yes, except it's just not TV that functions this way. It is all mediated reality. This begins with our inability to distinguish between our representations of experience and the words we use to describe them.
Subsequently all further conceptual and material reifications of the real, such as works of art, photography, film, TV, etc. function in exactly the same way. Millers ideas aren't new. Susan Sontag's "On Photography" accomplished a similar analysis of photographic imagery and drew similar conclusions. Marshall McLuhan's work engages many of these issues as well.
I've concluded that this inability to distinguish between the real and the representational is rooted in framing conventions, which are after, all based on the mehod in which the human being focuses on discrete objects/events within an overall field. The reduction toward absurdity seems built in to our perceptual/conceptual apparatus.
That said, all verbalization, reification, and all media are control mechanisms. This relates directly to the basic points raised in this thread.
Again, the issue is not whether hierarchy/authority/control paradigms rule lives and societies but what kind and what methods are optimal.
__________________
create evolution
|