The Power of Technology & the Mass Media

It is difficult to argue with the notion that a society of advanced technology is unnatural and superficial. It may well be the case that the technology-driven "Medium shows us what our new needs are--how often, without it, we should not have known!--and it shows us how they can be satisfied by buying something" (Jarrell 421). It may also be the case that Medium is preeminently commercial and both manipulative and exploitative of the psychology of emotion and need and consumption, and that this fosters a kind of superficiality that ignores the great chain of being in favor of the "great chain of buying" (421). Low-pitched as it is intellectually and philosophically, the Medium is nevertheless powerful because of its immediacy and the ability, especially of television, to create an impression of the truth of viewed experience. This is deceptive, and it fosters a superficial experience of life because it is at one remove from "being there." Media technology, whether in the form of printed or broadcast or cyberspace medium, enables the recipient/consumer to engage with while being insulated from fire and flood and war, and possibly become desensitized to their impact. Jarrell also cites the insatiable quest for novelty in a culture dominated by the Medium, in which "all that is deserves to perish and to have something else put in its place" (Jarrell 425). In other words, technology makes everything, including human experience and emotion and belief, disposable.

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l's personality. The image of Peter Sellers in the popular film Being There, attempting to use a television remote device to click away a mugger is a testament to how undifferentiated or "unmediated" mass media and real life can be. Jarrell suggests that technology-driven media foster this lack of differentiation and mediation by the very power of mediating. As he puts it, mediation via the technology-driven Medium "sometimes is not even recognizable as mediation" (431). The whole effect is one that is unnatural, superficial, and pernicious, lending importance to the trivial (say, Monica's dress) and trivializing the important (say, a constitutional crisis over the separation of powers) by making all things equally important that are somehow made visually interesting and all things equally unimportant that cannot be described within fifteen seconds. But is the fault for all that is wrong with the culture to be laid solely at the foot of technology? If technology-driven society is unnatural, what is natural--no technology? Is it conceivable that the scientists and alchemists operating at the time of Mozart and Handel would have rejected such technological innovation as they might have achieved had they achieved it? Where should the

Category: Science - T