Tofler and McLuhan brought us to the Future in our heads, before we could embody its experience. Naisbitt evaluated Megatrends, some of which came astoundingly true. One could well claim those views were biased in a US perspective. In India, terms like MN Srinivas' Sanskritization were more confined to intellectually charged academic environs. In the early 1990s when YD Phadke spoke of the criminalization of politics and politicization of criminals of Indian contexts, there was a more subterranean nexus in mass media of the day. That was what Sainath then identified in international media as the militarization of civil terms and the civilization of military words. The 'smart' bomb; the Daisy Cutter, and the semantic reduction of non-humanistic intent to a point of normalization. As would Chomsky term of imperfect democracies -manufacturing consent - in such nexus between war, commerce and the economy.
Today the blurring between news, content, entertainment and views makes for a cognitive challenge that even critical thinking training may find a challenge to help us with. Then an oversimplification of groups and identities leads to destructive stereotypes and loss of empathy with the human condition. There is a simultaneous opacity between civil liberties, ballots, and governments in power. Media hold up a pretense of forces of control when collision occurs between profiteering or greedy media and the covert government. Yet, those hungry for office will need to port images of chaos to lay claim to the office they adulate. So designer crimes, famine and economic warfare will have a share of time on news we pay for. Yes, we even pay for the decay of our state of affairs.
Beyond mediated images, the few who find solace in the human conditions are those who embrace the severity of the slide, and like a persistent desert shrub show up to offer life, as like the arteries in our bodies purifying blood. They, I would assume clamor no prime time, nor brook contempt, and walk their paths with footwear at most, while others claim to carpet the earth.
Even if more die on parched land that was once arable, than in flying coffins with wings, sorrow is also socialized in proportion to the financial estimate or loss of investment. The human race (if that were the term) has to come to terms with more existential questions. Is there an answer to Death? What is that phenomenon? What's Ethics got to do with the living? What's Courage got to do with Greatness? What's Reality got to do with Visioning?
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