{"id":311,"date":"2010-09-24T14:37:23","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T21:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/?p=311"},"modified":"2011-02-03T10:16:45","modified_gmt":"2011-02-03T17:16:45","slug":"reading-the-daily-me-at-the-end-of-the-century-of-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/?p=311","title":{"rendered":"Reading the Daily Me at the End of the Century of Self"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Yellow Kid, a popular 1890’s cartoon character in the Hogan’s Alley comic strip, lampooning the Spanish-American War and how irresponsible journalism fanned the flames by appealing to popular prejudice. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 (click on image for larger version)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Who will edit our future? <\/strong><\/p>\n

In the late \u201870\u2019s, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT\u2019s Media Lab, worked on the beginnings of the technology which is leading to a future where we might all receive news\u00a0only from the sources we\u00a0selected.\u00a0In his 1995 book, “Being Digital,” he described this news\u00a0source as the \u2018Daily Me\u2019.\u00a0Negroponte brilliantly anticipated all\u00a0the developments of personalized feed and social networking leading\u00a0up to the ultimate in technobanality, Twitter.\u00a0 One step further, and everyone will have an enhanced digital ultrasmart phone that you grasp\u00a0firmly as it measures your vital signs, stares at the\u00a0structure of your iris as it \u201creads\u201d your biometrics, then tells you\u00a0only what you want to hear.\u00a0When we\u00a0reach that point -and we\u2019re getting close- our communities will be limited to a huddled few at the bottom of an electronic valley of acceptable ideas, fearful of \u2018the\u00a0other\u201d, lurking just over the media induced peaks that separate us.<\/p>\n

With all the turmoil in the newspaper industry, Negroponte\u2019s ideas\u00a0occasionally surface, usually with much hand-wringing and\u00a0bemoaning of a lost past and fruitless searching for models that will preserve\u00a0some set of journalistic traditions or another.\u00a0 I am more\u00a0concerned about what forces will form the nature of our news\u00a0and our very hopes and desires.\u00a0Immediately before the Great\u00a0Depression, President Hoover held a meeting between the captains of\u00a0American commerce and Freud\u2019s nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of\u00a0public relations.\u00a0 The purpose was to celebrate the power of commerce, advertising and public relations that were driving\u00a0 America\u2019s growth. As\u00a0Hoover told them: “You have\u00a0assumed the job\u00a0of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving\u00a0happiness machines, machines that have become the key to economic\u00a0progress.”<\/p>\n

Bernays adaptation of Freud\u2019s theories of the psyche to\u00a0induce people to consume based on desire rather than need is\u00a0brilliantly documented in \u201cThe Century of Self,” a\u00a0 2002 BBC\u00a0documentary by Adam Curtis.\u00a0\u00a0 It tells “about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and\u00a0control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.”\u00a0He traces the history of Freud and Bernays efforts up through\u00a0their use in marketing political candidates.\u00a0Ironically, this\u00a0was first used in England by Matthew Freud in campaigns for \u201cNew\u00a0Labor\u201d and\u00a0 Prime Minister Tony Blair.\u00a0Freud (Matthew) is Sigmund Freud\u2019s great grandson and head of Freud Communications, a major\u00a0international PR firm that represents Pepsi and Nike,\u00a0among others. His wife, Elizabeth, is the second daughter of\u00a0media mogul Rupert Murdoch.\u00a0While \u201cThe Century of Self\u201d has been\u00a0shown to worldwide acclaim, it has never been aired in America.<\/p>\n

Bernays, more than ever, is relevant to modern politics.\u00a0 The documentary, in its first episode, covers how American corporate interests hired Bernays in an attempt to control what they considered the dangerous animal instincts of the masses, and dismantle everything they could from Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal.\u00a0 Democracy for everybody was just too dangerous.\u00a0 They saw a future where continued growth and benign integration of corporate and government rule would lead to a better America.\u00a0 But Wall Street and the financial community have never been able to constrain their excesses, with a history going all the way back to the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637, when a single tulip bulb might be sold for ten times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman.\u00a0 Perhaps tulip brokers were the historical precedents of hedge-fund managers, The collapse of the tulip and the derivative markets were effectively the same, leaving everyone else the poorer.<\/p>\n

The use of crowd psychology to manipulate the public has reached a new height in a world where candidates refuse to entertain any questioning of their positions, other than by their chosen media sources.\u00a0 Consider the Fox network, who are well on their way into subverting our political discourse into nothing more than \u201creality TV\u201d, complete with the drama of train-wreck candidates whose spouting nothing but homilies to angry people makes great TV.\u00a0 They give us Glenn Beck and presidential hopefuls huckstering for questionable gold investments, while major private corporations fund \u201cgrassroots\u201d movements to stir up public anger that can then be manipulated by Bernays techniques, appealing to desires that have nothing to do with our real wants and needs or the reality in which we live.<\/p>\n

Most of those funding the Bernays\/Freudian manipulations don’t live on Wall Street or Main Street, but Billionaire’s Row. Forbes 2009 ranking lists 248 private companies each with in excess of $2 billion in annual sales. Their owners, unlike a Wall Street publicly traded corporation regulated by SEC laws, can do whatever they want with their vast fortunes. If you scratch the surface of many of the most conservative and fringe movements, you will find that many of these companies or their owners are behind them. For example, the Koch Brothers,(#2 on the Forbes List) in their “war against Obama”, have given more than $100 million dollars to right wing causes.<\/p>\n

Those who follow only one source of information leave themselves open to all sorts of manipulation.\u00a0 The links below will let you read the lawsuit against Goldline, which lists the celebrities and politicians involved in the scam.\u00a0\u00a0 Watch the BBC video. Read the New Yorker article. In politics, investments and poker, if you don\u2019t figure out who is the sucker in the game, it\u2019s probably you.<\/p>\n

– – –<\/p>\n

The BBC Century of Self<\/p>\n

http:\/\/video.google.com\/videoplay?docid=6718420906413643126#<\/a><\/p>\n

Goldline Lawsuit<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.crafthugheslaw.com\/Goldline-International-Gold-Coin-Class-Action.shtml<\/a><\/p>\n

Billionaire Koch Brothers funding of fake grassroots initiatives like repealing California\u2019s greenhouse gas law (Prop 23).\u00a0 Site with links to New Yorker article and other useful sources.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/californiawatch.org\/watchblog\/new-yorker-investigates-koch-brothers-4261<\/a><\/p>\n

@ John Hulls 2010 \u00a0(This article is from the upcoming edition of the Russian River Times)<\/p>\n

The cartoon in the caption and where the expression, “Yellow Journalism” originated.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Yellow Kid comes from an era when Hurst and Pulitzer were actively promoting the US involvement in the Spanish-American War with sensationalized reporting to inflame the public and drive up circulation, featuring giant scare headlines and imaginary drawings, scandal mongering, faked and overly edited interviews and a host of other tricks all too common in today’s media. \u00a0The Yellow Kid was so popular that Hearst stole the cartoonist, R.F. Outcault, away from the Pulitzer papers which was not difficult as Pulitzer was becoming ever more erratic and hard on his employees.<\/em><\/p>\n

The more sedate New York Post coined the term “yellow kid journalism” in a February 1898 \u00a0piece decrying Hurst and Pulitzer’s warmongering. \u00a0Their editor wrote, “”Thus far the question of war with Spain has been made alarmingly sensational only by the few yellow-kid newspapers of the country, which are ready to sacrifice the truth and inflame popular prejudices to open wider markets for the reading of journals which each day must contradict what they published before.” \u00a0 The term was soon shortened to “yellow journalism”. <\/em><\/p>\n

For a scholarly and entertaining description of The Kid and social, economic, racial \u00a0and journalistic issues of this colorful time, I recommend Mary Wood of the University of Virginia and her excellent website at: <\/em>http:\/\/xroads.virginia.edu\/~MA04\/wood\/ykid\/intro.htm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Yellow Kid, a popular 1890’s cartoon character in the Hogan’s Alley comic strip, lampooning the Spanish-American War and how irresponsible journalism fanned the flames by appealing to popular prejudice. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 (click … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321,"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somewhatlogically.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}