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Have we become media junkies? Are we becoming numbed to the spiritual values of our past? Or are our lives being enriched by close encounters with the culture in which we find ourselves in the final decade of this millennium?
Douglas Rushkoff, in his recent book, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, offers up some interesting insights. For him, all exposure to media is a learning experience. He also suggests that we tend to learn the most when we think we are learning the least. Then our defences are down. When we are "relaxing" with the media, the "viruses" containing the agendas of their creators implant themselves most efficiently in our minds.
Rushkoff sees all mass media as part of a monolithic system of interconnected interests that truly has a life of its own. As with any organism, its purpose is self-preservation. Any thought or idea present in the system that is contrary to the self-interest of the media organism will be isolated and destroyed, just as a body isolates and destroys foreign viruses.
To be successful at implanting alternative values--Rushkoff calls them agendas--into the media, one must implant them as a virus designed to mutate often enough to keep ahead of the media's natural defence systems. He sees many television programs as having strong agendas meticulously designed to evade the natural defences of the media and to implant themselves deep into our minds. Many of these show up in kids' television.
Although there is much that media cannot do, certain values can be, and likely are, deeply influenced by what we and our children watch. For one thing, it is from the media that we learn to be Americans and Canadians. Here we learn what is valuable, what issues need to be discussed among ourselves and by our political representatives. Here we learn where we fit into the North American socio-economic categories. In other words, here we learn not what to think, but how to think. In the battle for hearts and minds, teaching people how to think beats telling them what to think any day.
Children who spend 15,000 hours in front of television learning how to be Americans and Canadians, will, if they are regular church-goers, spend about 1500 hours in religious instruction by the time they leave high school. Should the principle of the tithe apply in this situation? Somehow 10% religious instruction versus 90% indoctrination into the ways of popular culture doesn't seem balanced. I hope we are doing better in our own families.
Burton Buller is executive director of MB Communications, a Manitoba MB Conference radio and television ministry.
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