(Willingly) Lured, Lied to & Deceived

The title of this post should be more like "Entertainment and Social Media Are Going To Kill Us". You all do know that I have a problem with being over-wordy though. I am working on that. Anyway...

 I was just looking at the trailer for an upcoming documentary about a certain actor. The "celebrity" has been under fire for being sexually seedy and potentially/allegedly dangerous. The rumors about this person have apparently been around for a while. People not in the entertainment industry (aka "fans") are shocked and titillated and cannot wait to see this documentary. I myself am interested. 

Here's the thing. By believing in the illusion of celebrity and all that seems to glitter within that world, we allow ourselves to be deceived. We accept the deception - when it's called entertainment - to be part of our lives. We feel connected to the actors rather than the characters they portray. We let the stories portrayed color our perception of the people playing the roles. The attractive or smart or kind or loving person on that screen probably has zero in common with the actor. The better the actor, the more we buy the lies. The lies are only supposed to be entertainment, people.

She's already physically attractive.
I don't get it.

This creates problems in our lives. For years, I myself had trouble appreciating some of the people in my everyday life. That new person at work who was slightly shy and awkward wasn't anything like the cutely shy, sweetly awkward, and photogenically loveable character played by ~fill in the blank~ in that one movie or TV show. My boss was just a jerk and not the jerk that was just charming enough to make me want to eventually fall in love with him. My life was not like the ones portrayed in the movies. I was not going to speed through the highs, lows, and serious complications the way a fictional character does. My problems are never solved within a 30-minute episode (minus 10 minutes of commercials). When I hurt someone in real life, there was no sequel lined up where I could fix everything and undo any damage.

Life is life and "art" is art. Art might imitate life but it should never be the other way around. We don't have scriptwriters, a makeup crew, and perfect lighting in our real lives. We don't often get second-chance "retakes".

I was talking with one of my brothers the other day and he mentioned something about some young "influencer" who'd died in a very unnecessary way. He or she had fallen to their death while trying to take a selfie while balanced on a cliff (or something along those lines). When I hung up the phone and looked up the story, I ended up going down a rabbit hole, looking at other similar stories.

What is happening to us as humans? There is a whole generation of young (and not so young) people who are risking their physical and mental health to be internet famous. The term "Influencer" now bothers me so much.

Six or seven years ago, when I started doing product reviews, I joined sites like Influenster, Tomoson, She Speaks, and Buzz Agent. I did it to get free and "first-look" products. Now I mostly do my reviews on Amazon and Walmart. The other sites have gotten outflanked by the Instagram nation of serious influencers. These are the pros at garnering Likes, Follows, Shares, and so on. It has gone from people just trying to score free and discounted products to multi-million dollar opportunities.

Remember YouTube back in the day? When people were posting videos about side hobbies and random life events? Those days are gone, children. These days, some people base their entire livelihood on their video changes. It's all about sponsors, monetization, and fighting like junkyard dogs to hold your place among the big-money earners.

It must be in human nature to make a mile out of every inch. Movies and television - meant, I think anyway, for pure entertainment - have turned into some sort of instrument of mass social programming. Many of us base the way we act, dress, love, make love, parent, etcetera based on the make-believe world of the flickering screens. Social media outlets - meant, I think anyway - to connect us have become instruments for division. It's not about how to keep in touch with the people we know and love or how to help each other. It's more about how to look like we're "living our best life" and who's prettier or richer or sexier or smarter or more powerful? 

We are building our own destruction. We are putting up walls instead of tearing them down. We are doing more harm than good. By trying to appear to be the best, we are becoming the worst.

The thing about progress (if that is what it's called) is that curiosity pushes us forward and selfishness won't let us go backward. We have such a problem with being content. We see contentment as complacency and complacency as laziness. And look where we are.

Peace

--Free

Lulled by Shadows

Like a lot of people, when I am down sick, I tend to binge-watch television shows. I am down at least 2 days a week so I love my niece for providing me with a Netflix subscription. A couple of weeks ago, I started watching (for the first time ever) Grey's Anatomy. It has been a decent distraction - which is going to be part of my point here in a moment. While I was watching the show a few days ago, I had two thoughts that stay with me. First, Ellen Pompeo who plays Meredith Grey is probably a really nice lady but she has a voice that drives me bonkers. It's got a whiny I'm-a-cute-wittle-gurl quality that grates on my last good nerve. Second, the show is addictive enough that I keep watching even when I wish someone would dub over Pompeo's voice.

Something else occurred to me (and not for the first time ever) is probably not news to anyone: TV shows and movies seem to be socially programming us. And before you stop reading because you think I am riding my theory horse named Conspiracy, let me try to explain what I mean.

social-programming
Noun  (uncountable) 1. The process by which the ideas, concepts and beliefs of the society in which we live are ingrained into our psyche. The process is usually by authoritative decree or by assimilation. 2. The ideas, concepts and beliefs of our social environment that become ingrained in our psyche. (from yourdictionary.com)

Usually, when I watch television shows, I'm not in thoughtful mode. I watch TV when I don't feel well or want to be distracted from serious thought. One evening though, I was paying attention to how a particular episode of Grey's Anatomy made me feel.

What I realized is that I was equating the actors' real selves with the characters they play. As if I just knew that the actor portraying the doctor with the great hair and nicely twinkling eyes must be as sweet and charming in his own real life. And the same with the other actors portraying the smart, on-the-ball surgeons. They must all be just as smart and on-the-ball in their real and everyday lives, right?

I realized that we are being lulled into blurring the lines between entertainment and reality. This is why we have people who are obsessed with being Instagram-famous. This is why so many people who have real and ordinary lives don't think that it's enough to have real and ordinary lives. There are people portraying themselves online as being more "attractive", wealthier, and more well-traveled than they actually are.

By the way, I found this video interesting and thought some comic book fans might want to see it

Entertainment focuses on the "X" or the mysterious "it" factor of certain people. TV shows and music - any visual media - will make us feel that we should want to be more like the people we are watching.

One thing that pulled me out of being hypnotized by Grey's Anatomy is that I noticed that as smart and accomplished as all the characters are, they have the same shortcomings as real people who try emulating them. Most of them are sexually confused or loose with their bodies. Some of them are - in spite of all their career success and material wealth - lonely and unhappy.

Why wouldn't the writers just show these people as a little more perfect? They could still have some good plotlines without exposing these kinds of flaws to the extent they do. I think that this is done on purpose. Maybe the writers leave in all the misery so that the viewers connect with the characters' flaws enough that they don't see the rest of how they are being programmed to want all the perfect stuff. I don't know if that made sense, but I'm sure that most of you can see what I am trying to say. If we were trying to be as perfect as the characters but were feeling the loneliness and pain in our own lives, we might realize that no one is meant to be like the characters.

I know some people who get so involved in fictional characters and storylines that they lose track of what's going on in their own lives. Entertainment, in general, is training us to base our real-life goals on fictional people. We are starting to get our ideas about intelligence, beauty, morals, and other things based on scripted situations.

Former Facebook Exec
see what he says

We have people living their lives - or trying or pretending to - based on something they have seen onscreen. Entertainment is a powerful hypnotist. We take our cues about current fashion and trends from what we see celebrities doing - in real life or onscreen. Even our emotions are being hijacked and re-trained.

In TV shows and movies, there are all kinds of cinematic tricks to keep us focused on imaginary worlds and made-up lives. Camera movements and music - swelling or ominous or era-specific - to cue out tears or laughter or nostalgia. We can get so emotionally moved by these scripted stories while our real-life suffers.

In real life, we forget to check in on people off-line. We give more emoti-hugs, emoti-smiles, and emoti-waves instead of the real thing. We make hash-tagged trends and share our social media "thoughts and prayers" instead of taking time to actually spare a real thought or prayer for the people in our real lives.

I guess the thing we have forgotten - or been brainwashed out of remembering - is the important rule of "everything in moderation". Media doesn't want us to remember that because entertainment is designed to addict us into a distraction from real lives and real people and real issues.

There has been this trend in my very own family that I despise. Most of my family is on Facebook. That's fine because that is a great platform to share photos. The problem I have is that Facebook has replaced that occasional hey-how-are-you kind of phone call. It's replaced the keepsake wedding invitations and birth announcements. It has even replaced those little printed obituaries that my mother used to keep in her Bible.

So my problem is not with Facebook - or any other social media platform. My problem is with the people who have let them replace parts of life. When you don't make the phone calls, how can you pick up clues in someone's voice that they might not be "fine"? Without those paper invitations and announcements, how do we sit around one day and start looking over those memories? And what do I fold up to keep in my Bible to remember the dead?

There are even executives from some social media brands who see problems in these platforms.

So, I guess I just want to ramble on here about how we have let things get out of control with media. We are losing ourselves and our daily reality. We are becoming programmed by the things we created to enjoy. With all the talk of developing advanced AI, maybe we ought not to be worried about AI or robots taking over because we've already given in to something else.

Before I go, while I was searching for images to post here, I found this article on this blog. The photo of addiction that the blogger posted is perfect.

Another rabbit hole you might want to go down has to do with something called "priming" as it relates to people as consumers. You can start here if you want.


Peace
--Free