Brainwashing is so gentle and sudsy.
Classes like this are so important for teaching us that we must stay well informed. It seems everyone has an agenda these days. You don’t know it, but right now I am invading your psyche, conniving you into cogitating just like me. Opps . . . I’ve said too much.
I was glad to see Stephen Colbert make it into a class setting. I love that hilarious malfeasant for challenging everything that makes reason cringe and justice weep. Plus, he shares my hatred of bears which means he knows a thing or two about who is really trying to take over the world.
Recently, I was educating myself by reading a little of that literary giant and prognosticator, Michael Crichton. Come on, he predicted that dinosaur cloning thing would go South, now didn’t he. In this book, State of Fear, he talks a lot about how the media is shaping our beliefs about global warming. It was a tad over the top and decidedly one sided in approach, basically challenging every media indoctrinated misconception every held on the subject. Wonderfully, everything he proposed was exactly what I was willing to believe, so it worked out great everyone. Crichton got the money and I now get to rant in mildly more informed ways about how there is now bloody way they can predict what the weather is going to do. If the weatherman can not even get the three day forecast correct, how is a scientist by simply studying 1 of the Earth’s 10000 glaciers supposed to know that I should not be investing in beachfront property and in that in50 years, parkas are out and Bermuda shorts are in.
I always find it interesting how many of the top news stories are about catastrophic weather events that kill 2 people. I have to wonder how many people die each day by slipping in the shower. Probably more than two. Where’s the coverage on the dangers of cleaning armpits. Weather sells for some reason. Look at the weather channel and tell me your not impressed that it is -50 in Yellowhorse (or is it Whiteknife, I can never remember).
All that was to comment on one of the 20 reasons to study media from sociology class. “The media require us to learn and use critical thinking skills.” A spin on that is that if it is a requirement, then why don’t more people do it. I like what Adorno had to say about popular culture “manipulating the masses into passivity” and “easy pleasures”. It is a lot easier to nod my head when there is a news story that confirms that the weather is changing and people are dying, than to do the research to see if this claim is indeed true or simply based on a computer simulation that takes three variables. It is also a lot easier to watch Simon Cal make fun of yodeling yokels than do my homework. Whoever first said “learning can be fun” probably made a lot of money off the naïve.
On that note of procrastination, I’ve been to youtube since it was mentioned in class. The technology is pretty cool. Nostradamus and I have been predicting this is the way the Internet was headed for a while now. I was on the most viewed page and indifferent to the content. Maybe I need to play with it more, but my initial impression was that there are a lot of morons out there taking poor quality cell phone videos of themselves doing approximately nothing. I’ll give it another gander next time I am approaching a vegetative state. Which is right . . . Now.
Well, Peter Mansbridge was on the The Hour right after Christmas predicting that global warming would be one of the largest issues in the media, the interview is here: http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1270 but I can’t promise that link will work since it does not play the vid with my mac
I think one of the reasons we keep hearing about it is because the other political parties want to use it as something against Harper. The other reason, of course, is that this is Canada and it is not living up to its reputation of being freakin cold. However, yes, it is completely easy to agree with things the media feed us. I don’t know if you ever took the soci crime & deviance class but it talks about how “moral panics” get worked up through the media like when all those public service ads were going on about crystal meth, or smoking, or teen pregnancy in the U.S. I mean, the news can make us fear anything…including terrorism. But yes, I have had one or two close calls in the shower and there were scary.
Youtube is not that bad if you know what you are looking for. I find there are almost too many videos, and a lot of 30 second crappy things. But if you want a clip about something, it is pretty BAM, there it is. Plus, is it ever fun to put your own video up and watch the number of views go up.
You have it totally backwards!
Accepting the global warming predictions is not “passivity” and and “easy pleasure”, but doing nothing is! Once you’ve accepted that global warming is a problem, your life doesn’t get easier, it gets harder! The lazy way is to ignore the warnings (or to support the corporate viewpoint) and to NOT change your habits – That’s the “easy pleasure”. Once you’re concerned, you have to re-think all your buying habits, standard of living, degree of convenience, etc.
About your criticism of science: You’re taking a rather dangerous stance, don’t you think? You’re making assumptions about the research that’s been done and the science being used: (“if a weatherman can’t even predict 3 days in advance how can he predict 50 yrs?” and “they study one of earth’s 10000 glaciers”) and even worse, you’re cracking jokes about how great it will be when we get rid of parkas for bermuda shorts. Geologists can tell what the AVERAGE temperature was in a given location on earth a million years ago, and that’s what we’re talking about here is averages. The average temperature of the earth is rising. Yes, the earth goes through cycles of climate change, but the change in the last 50 years has been greater than any other change (besides ice ages). Even if the earth’s temperature is naturally on the rise, humans are accelerating the change, and there’s proof. Besides, scientists don’t study just one glacier and then make conclusions about the whole world. The phenomenon of warming is not disputable, it’s a fact. Only the reasons are disputable, and I’ll take the safe road and change my habits now.
La Joie De Vivre
Ahh, but I was not promoting changing Parkas for bermuda shorts or advocating that one should do nothing to change wasteful habits. I own a car but ride the bus, and we recycle. What I was saying, was that you can not produce a model that would possibly predict what global changes might or might not be occuring in a system that complex, and that numerous fallacies abound that are propogated in the media. Although Crighton is by no means the expert I would site, he does provide a wealth of hard scientific sources that are very compelling. At best global warming is inconclusive is my position, but like you I don’t believe we should keep poking the monster if we don’t have to. If we can’t dispute science then what’s left. Thanks for commenting.
OK, that’s more reasonable.
I just saw “An Inconvenient Truth” this afternoon. It provides models for evaluating global temperature and CO-2 levels, and the raw data on what’s been happening over the last 650,000 years. If you think there’s no hard data, or that the data is inconclusive, you have to see this film.
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