1/12/00

Pop culture makes me nervous. It's hard to tell if we're really paving the road to hell here, as it's so easy to feel, or if it just seems bad because this is where we have the most detail. It's easy to see the past in a rosy light, and much harder to do that with the present, which is at least part of why people tend to become more conservative with age.

In light of the AOL-TimeWarner merger, announced yesterday, I've been thinking about how much our society encourages consolidation and conformity. Do all societies do that? I suppose for a society to work smoothly, there has to be a degree of simple conformity within the members. I guess I'm a little bit of an anarchist when it comes to that. One of my favorite pins reads: "Ask every question; question every answer"

The fact is, every society probably needs to ostracize the fringe in order to keep things running at least moderately smoothly. I guess I'd like to see our society able to incorporate more and more of the fringe without silencing it.

As more and more huge companies merge to make mega-companies, we lose more and more of the real diversity that I imagine existed in the past. In some ways, that might be good -- we're probably more unified as a society as a result of watching the same news in the evening. But it makes me uneasy to image millions upon millions of people mindlessly vegging out watching the same sit-coms and dramas, buying the same clothing in Miami as in Flagstaff as in Bozeman, eating the same food... Even if you buy your clothes at a different store from me, they're probably the same brand. And even if they're a different brand, they're probably the same style. (Actually, I'm not a good example of that because I don't really wear the same types of clothing that most people do, but you take my point.)

Instead of real diversity, though, I think mass media has created conceptual "classes" or groups of people and set them apart, against one another. Rather than creating a whole in which each part plays a role, we have a fragmented society in which emnity, though under the surface, is the norm between different groups, which perceive themselves to be in competition for a limited number of resources.

The similarities between different brands of cars, types of fast food, or other restaurant chains, gas stations, office supply stores, and many other large businesses are more cosmetic than anything else. The more of these big corportations that expand into every little town in the country, the more each town begins to look alike. I go to my home town in Wyoming and can find the Gap, J. Crew, and Polo stores (all of which sell essentially the same stuff, from what I can tell) all right on the square. Eddie Bauer, Hagen Daaz and the Nature Company fill in some gaps. I can get the same shopping right here in downtown Boston -- so why leave?

We're very complacent about the envelopment of our society by large corporations. In many cases, we don't even think about it (though we would sit up and take note if the power company decided to play bully), and some people are unreservedly enthusiastic about not having to step out of their comfort zones when they go on vacation. You can go skiing in the Rocky Mountains and still settle down with the kids for a nice familiar Happy Meal at the end of the day. It's a little creepy.

All of this sameness encourages us not to think. We get in our ruts and stay there. This encourages us to become the idiots walking around that you see every day. One person alone is smart; people together are sheep. I'm sure that you've gone through the occassional (or, if you're either very irritable or very unlucky, not so occassional) day in which you encounter a mind-boggling amound of human idiocy.

People react better than they think (it's easier to react, that is, not that the reaction is better than the thought-of action) and the more conformity and uniformity there is in society and day-to-day life, the less we need to think, and the more we can be on auto-pilot all the time.

The bigger companies get, and the more industries one company controls, the more the trend worries me. Phillip-Morris owns Kraft, so they control a large portion of the market for both a major addiction and basic need. Now AOL and Time-Warner are one, controlling some major media outlets in different realms, meaning they can control the kind of information we get.

And the bigger they get, the more their potential for controlling and manipulating the way we work, live, play and think.

What I'd really like would be for people simply to question their actions and assumptions sometimes. Is that so much to ask? Before we're all swallowed up in Mega-Omni Corp...

For someone who agrees with me, go here.

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