Our Excruciating Modernity

On all that is media

1. The first form of media I shall discuss consists of the public broadcast and televised communication of information. I denounce the current state of this form of media for in its delivery of pseudo-knowledge it has adopted an attention-craving approach that rests upon rampant pessimism, aggressivity and bias.

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The first of the traits of said media, pessimism, is found in its portrayal of the world. This depiction has typically and stubbornly attended to the least admirable sides of Man's nature and, therefore, poses a threat to humanity, its sanity and the various movements occurring within it. This media, rather than sharing images that inspire and strengthen Man, and could, by placing a meaningful emphasis on achievement, advancement, progress or even balance, allow Man to breathe freely in a world already dense with despair, disease and desolation, has chosen not only to abandon Man and leave him unattended in the fatal fog of our zeitgeist, but also to worsen his suffocation by confronting his attention with shockingly palpable proofs of all that is evil around him, of all that poses a threat to his children, of all that is deadly to his mind, body and spirit. Ultimately, said media has directed the attention of the masses towards the most threatening of earthly phenomena whilst omitting virtue and beauty from its bleak programs, which has transformed Man into a creature suspicious and fearful of that which surrounds him, into a nihilistic pessimist, into the very worst sort of cynic.

Then, the last two attributes of aggressivity and bias are easily observed in this media's perverse enthusiasm for covering the practices of our Modern societies which it describes as embodiments of the values and customs of the old ages whilst blatantly disregarding the major historical developments and levelling of inequality that has taken place throughout the world. Such a statement should not be seen as a call to rest and end all forms of activism merely because "significant progress has occurred" but rather, it intends to encourage the media and its disciples to put a temporary end to their intellectual and moral hatred of the Modern world, to the Hate Speech they have been engaging in for far more than 2 minutes, and consider the privilege, multifaceted freedom and

prosperity Modern Man continually and all too often unconsciously delights in. Now, I am not certain as to the underlying cause for the media's excessive vilification of the structures of our developed world, often accompanied by the identification of fictional or hyperbolised flaws for the sake of provocation, but perhaps it is to push an agenda of some kind, to generate feelings of power in the crowd and thus to create a mob, one blindly and uncritically gobbling up fallacy and riling up against hierarchical systems that have brought it everything except what it claims, which is in most cases victimisation, injustice and oppression. Camus described this best in The Plague, where he wrote "You could see even the most intelligent amongst them making a show like all the rest of studying the newspapers or listening to the wireless, in the hope apparently of finding some reason to believe the plague would shortly end. They seemed to derive fantastic hopes or equally exaggerated fears from reading the lines that some journalist had scribbled at random, yawning with boredom at his desk" [3] I find Camus's description to be not only topical but particularly accurate in regards to Man's consumption of media, yet it remains imperfect in this instance, for Camus's descriptive text portrayed a populace indoctrinated by the manoeuvres of, and herein lies the dissimilarity, an indifferent, passive and lethargic sort of media, which greatly contrasts with the West's relentlessly activistic media pushing agendas that differ in content but are analogous in approach and method.