HOW THE ELECTRONIC MEDIA IS ERODING OUR CULTURE!

In the current modernity of America, culture is no longer the creation of the traditions and legacies of our family and communities. Today, culture is beamed and transmitted via satellite from studios in Hollywood that seeks to profit under our capitalistic system. Television, as well as the motion picture industry and soon the internet are all working to together to capture and shape the thoughts, beliefs, behavior and attitudes of America, the young and impressionable being the most vulnerable. The reason being is that socialization and acculturation is simply the product of emulation...with whats being emulated coming more and more from the big and small screen.

The benefit and the curse of television is that it exposes people to a wide variety of phenomenon, situations and events that people are not exposed to in their own real environments. Thus, they have little means of reconciling fact from fiction from the template that their environment sets. Consequently, reality can become easily distorted in degree and or kind….with people consciously or subconsciously accepting it as reality. If one simply looked at the Evening News, their perceptions of black males would simply be that of criminals and athletes, which is definately a display out of proportion with black male reality.

The failure of the medium to be able to show you the whole picture, which is impossibility, leads to a distortion of scope and proportion. When a TV show about “Desperate housewives” or “wife swoping “is advertised or seen, its sets subliminal attitudes that erodes the institution of marriage. Once something appears on TV, it is glorified simply from the fame and attention of being transmitted to millions of households. Once it becomes glorified, it becomes popularized and becomes larger than life and more acceptable to emulate. Thus, programming that reflects dysfunctional families or programming that lacks socially redeeming merits works make such behavior more acceptable which leads to more people behaving this way than would have otherwise. One can say that it simply art immitating life, which is true to a degree. The problem is that Art distorts scope thus making a reality larger than life than it really is...which normalizes the behavior and makes it more wide spread.

TV is simply a destructive and corruptive influence on the mind and unfortunately, black people spend more hours a day in front of the TV than any other racial group, studies have shown. Far too many black families feel that Cable TV is a necessity and not a luxury. We thus have 500 channels to shape and corrupt our culture and self image, as well as, stagnating our mental growth. Tangentially, all the videogames that we play through the Cathode Ray Tube of TV’s are only fanning the flames cultural erosion. We spend far too much time in pursuit of electronic fantasy, escape or entertainment…and it is hurting us.

This is what some folks would say is the absence of personal responsibility on black folks part and something that cannot be blamed on white racism. However, I disagree in part. The reason being is that until the inequities that resulted from past racial oppression are removed…the effects of social negativity from the dominate culture will have a disproportional racial impact. Any actions by this society that disproportionably impacts the poor is also in effect racist, because blacks are disproportionably poor as the consequence of years of racial oppression. Thus, the impact of TV upon the poor magnifies upon black people because so many of our people are poor.

If I am trying to recover from pneumonia and I am in a rather warm room with other more healthy individuals, opening up the window will have a worse effect upon me than the healthy. Or if there is a virus being spread and my immune system is still in recovery from past sickness, the virus will have a greater success upon me than others simply because of my condition. Black people in America are still in recovery and thus we are less immune to the spread of social viruses that come through the electronic media. Whites are less affected by it and thus feel no need to control the medium, thus restricting profits and pleasures for white media and the consuming white masses.

It is not a plan or conspiracy to destroy black people via television, unlike that of the proliferation of drugs and guns into the black community. It is simply the nature and consequence of capitalism manifesting in the entertainment industry. There are more profits to be made by pushing the moral envelope and by being controversial than not. Once the moral envelope is pushed out, it then becomes acceptable and the new benchmark to supersede in regards to the next pushing out of the envelope. After a period of year and gradual pushes, the moral erosion is not that detectable from year to year. However, when one compare decades, the moral erosion becomes so egregious that it makes the change in attitudes and behavior of the new generation perfectly clear. However, this is the fundamental means to winning the rating competition and market share in the capitalist entertainment medium.