Pondering the following quote which I saw on Facebook today. The irony of that sentence isn’t lost on me 🙂
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” – Marshall McLuhan.
It puzzles me that many otherwise intelligent people argue that the Internet has democratised media and so the above could not be true in the current age. Â In reality, media companies are aggregated and conglomerated like never before – they are owned by rich media czars. It’s certainly true that the mechanisms for news distribution have been democratised and are now much more affordable thanks to social media and web publishing software. However, what people talk about is determined by mainstream media. We retweet, repost, add colour to and debate the topics that we’re encouraged to believe are important. Whether’s it’s “shirt gate” or Adele not singing on Bandaid30, it’s all such rubbish. Often mesmerisingly trivial banalities dressed up with complicated ideological arguments to suggest it’s something more important.