How The Media Persuades
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
There’s always a frame around the things we hear, whether it be intentional or unintentional. Take the media, for example. There are only five or six mega corporations that disseminate information to us about what’s going on in the world, and really, if you watch much Television, you’ll see that they’re really not giving out much real news at all. There is a bottom line to take into account and jeopardizing the corporation’s profitability isn’t an option.
We’re a nation of TV addicts. According to A.C. Neilsen Co (those are the ratings people), the average American watches more than four hours of TV per day. That is twenty-eight hours a week. Two months out of each year. By the time you are 65, that’s nine full years of television.
When we watch TV the same thing happens to our brains as happens when we hear a story. . . our critical minds shut down and we absorb what the story is saying. In other words, we become passive vessels which grants the whatever message the storyteller wants us to receive to sink into our other than conscious and carry us to where they want us carried.
The days of real news, the kind of news that kept us engaged in the world, are over. Instead we have infotainment and celebrity gossip. Could this be happening on purpose? Could the ‘powers that be’ have taken a hint from Lao-Tzu when he said, “People are difficult to govern because they’ve too much knowledge.”
I overheard a conversation in line at the supermarket. A young woman, probably around seventeen, was looking at an entertainment magazine talking a blue streak to her father about who’s dating who, and what this one’s wearing and why such and such is going to be a great motion picture. She could name every one of the celebrities from front to back. And after a few minutes of this the father simply said, ‘Do you know who the Secretary of State is?’ She did not. And this wasn’t a kid. This was an older teenager.
The girl was absolutely unashamed of the fact that she didn’t know. Willfully ignorant. ‘What difference does that make in my life?’ she stated. And what does this illustrate? Increasingly, the media diverts our attention from what is truly important and funnels it to starlets in rehab, or sharks off the coast of Florida or who is in rehab. All kinds of things keep us in an modified state so that we do not object very loudly.
Another way to keep us off guard is the way they have figured out how to divert our attention to terror. Notice the terror level never drops down below orange. Keeping us in a permanent say of fear helps them to point at one thing (terror) while, with a slight of hand, they are enacting something like the Patriot Act which chisels away our civil liberties.
What are some ways diversionary tactics can be used to help us in business? And, maybe more importantly, how can we use our critical persuasion skills to protect ourselves when others are trying to persuade us?
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