> My friends & I have been talking about media stampedes,
> especially about the recent hoarding of rice in the USA
> and Canada. The headlines scream "rationing" and
> "shortages," but in America all that means is people are
> being limited to buying two 50-lb bags of rice at Sams or
> Costco.
>
> It's no news that the rate-of-cycle on news stories has
> increased dramatically in the past twenty years along with
> a general shelf life decrease in all media. I see this
> going hand-in-hand with an increased use of
> anxiety-inducing media techniques, from screaming
> headlines to a broader negativity in popular arts and
> culture. The advertising profession is renown for
> employing anxiety-inducing imagery (status differential,
> solution-to-problem) to appeal to unconscious motivations,
> to reify in the mind of the consumer "need for product."
> These techniques have evolved to a dark art for quite a
> while (from the almost inobtrusive "Burma Shave" ads to
> the insidious "Get laid with a quadruple-blade razor"
> images on TV) and are now firmly planted in
> attention-grabbing statements in politics and media.
> Remember the Reagan-era concern about the use of "hot
> buttons?" It didn't go away, it was simply flushed down
> the memory hole.
>
> Anxiety is the hardest-to-identify of our base instincts,
> it's integral to the problem-solving and risk-assessment
> engine of ego - the grand mechanism that defends the
> elusive specter of Self. Gotama used a didactic style to
> address this, through long discourse employing empirical
> disproof (not this, not that). It's a method of bring a
> mental feature into starker relief against the background
> noise of the those infernal and distracting aggregates.
>
> The implications for a civil culture are clear when
> societies might rush to a premature solution against a
> perceived threat, but it's also problematic in the
> sciences where the regime of falsification is required to
> decouple evidence from belief and professional ego.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_cascade
>
> OK, those are your talking points. Now lemme see
> watchugot.
>
> /leebert