Something occurred to me that I have not heard much and I'd like to strengthen the meme.
The problem with television is twofold:
1) The makers of shows are not responsible to the viewers of shows. Only to the advertizers. Shows are design to be containers for ads, not to be informative or entertaining. It happens that both information and entertainment do happen, but only accidently. So we could view television as the disease vector spreading the advertizers memes: "Buy our crap or you are a worthless waste of space!"
2) We have to pay for advertizing even if we don't watch televison in higher prices for everything that we buy. If you don't think that advertizers "adjust" their prices based on what they pay to advertize, then you must be from some really weird brain-dead planet. I know that some people argue that the current system serves us in that we now have a huge choice in products available to us. This agument however is wrong. Or as a good friend of mine says: "It's not EVEN wrong." Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
So a new meme might be: given that we have to pay for it anyway, wouldn't it be better to pay for it more directly? And maybe have more direct control over it as well? Unfortunately, getting from the current system to any other system, let alone one that would prevent some scum-sucking low-lifes from skimming off huge profits for basically no real return, seems impossible. Sigh.
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Something occurred to me that I have not heard much and I'd like to strengthen the meme.
The problem with television is twofold:
1) The makers of shows are not responsible to the viewers of shows. Only to the advertizers. Shows are design to be containers for ads, not to be informative or entertaining. It happens that both information and entertainment do happen, but only accidently. So we could view television as the disease vector spreading the advertizers memes: "Buy our crap or you are a worthless waste of space!"
2) We have to pay for advertizing even if we don't watch televison in higher prices for everything that we buy. If you don't think that advertizers "adjust" their prices based on what they pay to advertize, then you must be from some really weird brain-dead planet. I know that some people argue that the current system serves us in that we now have a huge choice in products available to us. This agument however is wrong. Or as a good friend of mine says: "It's not EVEN wrong." Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
So a new meme might be: given that we have to pay for it anyway, wouldn't it be better to pay for it more directly? And maybe have more direct control over it as well? Unfortunately, getting from the current system to any other system, let alone one that would prevent some scum-sucking low-lifes from skimming off huge profits for basically no real return, seems impossible. Sigh.