Is There Anything Real Anymore?

I don't like ranting, so I'm going to try to be positive. But this is just getting crazy.

A few weeks back I watched "That Thing You Do". Great movie from Tom Hanks about a band forming in the 1960s and all the things bands experienced in those days. At the end, Tom was nice enough to tell us what happened to each of the band members. Such-and-such became an insurance salesman, such-and-such bought their own Jazz club. I was interested in the story, so I googled it, hoping to learn more.

There was no such band. There were no people named that.

I'm not trying to dig into Hanks -- this cutesy BS has become commonplace in fictional movies. At first we had fiction and we had documentaries. Then we had fiction that was "based on a true story" which meant that it was, by and large, true. Then we had "docudramas", which meant large parts were rewritten to make a good story, but some parts were true.

But still, mostly the movies were categorized as fiction, so you could kind of figure it out.

Along comes Michael Moore a few years back, and now we have the documentary which is really ambush political commentary. Nothing wrong with that -- a lot of folks love Moore and his work. But it's not a documentary. It's Michael, who already knows the answers and is using the medium of film to convince us he is right. The best word for using a medium to propagate a political viewpoint is "propaganda", which describes Moore's work quite well, like it or hate it.

You turn on the TV and now you have "personality journalism", which I actually like. I never bought the idea that journalists were Vulcans anyway. Give me a schmuck with an attitude that I understand doing the best he can to explain what happened today. That's a real, personal, human way of hearing about any story. But it used to be that journalists pretended they could obfuscate all of their feelings, and we pretended whatever came out of the Old Gray Lady was gospel. Those days are long, long gone.

I remember seeing this phenomenon of total manipulation first in car commercials. Once the technology came out to do cool things with CGI, all of the car commercials had crazy things in them. It was neat -- you knew that what you were seeing could not be true.

But it's not like that anymore with car commercials. Now the trick is to mix in the CGI so that you really have no idea if what you are seeing actually happened in real life. Cars racing in a line? Maybe it happened and maybe it didn't. Truck racing out onto a half-bride over a large canyon? Probably didn't happen but you don't know. Cars dancing on their bumpers? Must be fake. Cars moving around like ballet dancers? It's possible with well-trained drivers, but perhaps it was just easier to have the computer sketch it up. Who knows.

I know conservatives like to talk about how things were better "back in the day", and I'm not a conservative, but I would like to point out that we are missing a huge hunk of what is real and what isn't in our society. If you grew up on a farm, if a something died, it was dead. If somebody walked up to you and told you a barn burned down last night, you knew that -- guess what -- a barn burned down last night. Today, even if you have a face-to-face conversation with someone who tells you that something happened, they're likely as not just duped by some media they saw. Nobody actually observes anything anymore, it seems: we all just watch video presented by somebody else.

Almost every piece of media that our generation interacts with is trying to pass itself off as being true. Our kids are being bombarded daily with various conflicting ideas that all appear to have visual evidence of their truth, but are cleverly manipulated to play to their emotions.

This was cute when it first started, but it ain't such a good idea anymore. The degree of critical thinking skills required to understand what is happening won't develop in the next generation until they are in their 20s, by which time they may have given up on critical thinking altogether. I know it's a common refrain to say "but those kids are a lot more media savvy than we give them credit for. They're smart consumers and don't buy everything they see" but I think that's hogwash. Perhaps it was true 20 years ago, but not any more.

I worry that we live in such a media-manipulated world that kids completely give up their intellectual birthright to make decisions and judgments. In fact, it appears that we are actively trying to teach our children that making decisions and forming stereotypes are bad things -- as if being able to use induction (even in an imperfect manner) and deduction is somehow tied to evils of the past. We seem to want a generation with their mouths agape, eyes wide open, passively accepting whatever input we can shove down their throats.

I have to meticulously cross-check information I receive. Not just things that challenge my beliefs, but even worse, things that confirm my beliefs. Those are the worst. How many people, every day, are hanging out around the same old internet water coolers, hearing stuff that they can say "heck yeah!" to, and never checking to see if any of it is factual or holds up in an argument? It seems we don't care anymore what is real or not. Just tell me what I already believe, tell me it's all true, throw in some jabs at the people who disagree with me, and make me feel good. After all, it's all relative, isn't it? Nothing's really true any more, is it?

Is it?

### end rant ###