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i do not think that the category "mass media mind control" explains much.
at the most elementary level, your ability to function coherently--to move through a given visual field and arrange what you see in ways that enable you to form causal explanations for your movements and to maintain the idea that you are coherent--in other words to not freak out at the complexity of visual information that bombards you as you walk through any given physical space--is contingent on your ability to limit information.
same goes for what you hear. your peceptual apparatus is as much about limitation as it is about reception of input.
the point is that human beings seem finely tuned data limitation machines.
that there is a social dimension to the perceptual apparatus that accounts for limitation is obvious, but at the same time formalizing what that dimension might be is a problem (because it is difficult to formalize the mechanism itself--in psychoanalysis, it is named as a type of repression--but like most psychanalytic categoreis, this is metaphorical)
second, i think that the degree to which people see themselves as powerless is a function of a series of specific spatial and political transformations--a list, short maybe to the point of incoherence, could include:
the reorganization of capitalism on an explicitly global basis, which tends to render the notion of nation useless
(the first making capitalism something that seems transcendent rather than a particular economic system with a particular ideology--the second being a way of thinking about the series of effects of the transnationalization of capitalism on lots of people to the extent that this geographic change requires an explanation--i think much of what is going on culturally around us now is a function of dissonance created by a realization that nation is being rendered obsolete by economic activity and a political/cultural climate that is incapable of even saying that this is the case, not to mention adapting to it--the rise of the far right [bushworld being a symptom] is understandable as a reaction against this process, a form of collective denial)
for working people, another element could well be the collapse of the types of organizations that wage-laborers had developed across the conflicts of the mid19th-mid 20th centuries (unions etc.) which symbolically functions as demonstration of the powerlessness of the public....
the effects of a geography-based campaign againsts the public that spins out of the suburban model--the elimination of public spaces, the atomization that follows from a car culture and tract houses and so on.
----the list can go on----any one of these transformations is enough to engender fear and/or to require explanation---it would be at this point that you might loop into things a shift in the general relation of public to mass media....
but i do not think that you cant just cut to the media because in a sense it prompts you to overstate the power of it, to act as if there are no other types of (more fundamental) explanations and to reduce the range of political action to cultivating a snippy relationship to your television.
in other words, i think that trying to explain why people do not think in broader terms about their world by referencing "mass media mind control" is the mirror of the problem you are trying to talk about because for example it reduces your effective range of political action to the distance that separates you from your tv set. it also implies that you can transform yourself and your world by turning off your tv.
i did an experiment: i stopped watching tv 4 years ago. following a similar kind of logic, i expected capitalism to tremble and revolution to follow.
yet here we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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