Television, Trump and Buddha
There is an old Buddhist kōan in which a student asks his teacher 'what is the moon' and the teacher simply points to the moon and says, 'do not mistake my finger for the moon'. Analog and digital are similar. Here's how this helps us understand how we ended up with Donald Trump as president.
Two technologies, television and the Internet, helped elect Trump. Not with ads and not with fundraising or social media manipulation by the Russian, though these helped. The real influence on the American public has been years of watching television. When television first began the shows were written to emulate modern American life and to entertain. People loved television and still do. They watched more and more. The shows got more and more entertaining with more exaggerated plots, language and situations. Do you ever feel, after you have just seen a really engaging movie, that you find yourself talking like the characters, or feeling similar to how the character felt? It means you identify yourself with the characters. Well, with television this began to happen. Pretty soon people started behaving like TV characters who were written to be like the audience. TV writers recreated real life and the watchers started acting like the TV version of themselves. A feedback loop was created. As the audience enlarged, the sponsors didn't want to leave anyone out so they made sure the content of language and humor was interesting to even the least educated and uncultured of us, so we started acting like people even dumber than we were. Going back to the Buddhist kōan: the audience had mistaken TV shows for real life and were emulating it.
Television news went through a similar metamorphosis. Originally the news journalists were distributed information as neutrally as possible. The era of Hunter Thompson changed that. Newscasters started becoming celebrities themselves and adding their own twist, and sometimes twisted, interpretation to the facts. Rather than simply reporting facts, news agencies became news themselves, thus altering the content. There is web site run by an attorney, Ad Fontes Media, who looks at all news media and rates them for accuracy and bias. When television news first started this wasn't needed. ABC, CBS and NBC covered everything carefully and relatively neutrally. But once actors became newscasters and ratings were being fought for, news became entertainment while pretending not to be. Hence Fox News.
Then things really got complicated. We got something called 'reality TV'. I possibly shouldn't be writing about this because I have only seen one of two episodes of reality TV. It began when a TV crew followed the daily lives of a family, the Loud family in 1983. Pretty soon people who had been raised on TV were appearing on TV as themselves but were actually emulating the shows they had been watching. Life and TV got all mixed up. Then we got The Apprentice.
Just like Trump University, a school that was created to seem like a real school, The Apprentice was created to seem like Trump was actually working with an apprentice. Trump University was scripted to sound and act like an educational experience even though the content offered the student little useful information but, coincidentally, cost a lot. The Apprentice was scripted to seem like the apprentice was under the tutelage of a mentor, but really got no 'mentoring' of value other than narcissism.
Trump, and I'm guessing as I've said in other blogs, knows everything he knows from watching TV. He doesn't read. So what he knows is a virtual copy of real life. The women are beautiful, the men are smart and aggressive, and facts are rarely used. There are a lot of shoot-from-the-hip opinions that, remarkably, always seem to be correct. We never see anyone sitting down, plowing through pages of data and doing calculation. Who needs briefing manuals when you can just 'know' the right thing to do. Trump is playing a TV president. Too bad he never watched West Wing. Perhaps his language skills would have improved.
A similar phenomenon as the television reality mix up has occurred with the Internet. The Internet is a wonderful sourced of information. The largest compilation of data including maps, numbers, and videos ever assembled is at our finger tips. It has become our second brain, as many people say. But, once again, like the buddhist kōan in the first paragraph, don't mistake the internet for the real world. It has the capacity to be a bigger reproduction of the worldview then we hold in our heads, but it must be used skeptically. When people start making decisions based on the internet-world without correlating the results with the real-world we start getting that feedback loop that occurred with television, where the virtual version gets mistaken for the real version, so that the virtual version starts to take into account the action of people based on a virtual world. Polling data suffers from this anomaly now.
Perhaps the world would be better off if we spent more time looking at the moon than at the finger. In other words be sure you are not mimicking something that is already mimicking you and that you don't follow Google maps down a road that is impassible, regardless of how it looks through your windshield.
Two technologies, television and the Internet, helped elect Trump. Not with ads and not with fundraising or social media manipulation by the Russian, though these helped. The real influence on the American public has been years of watching television. When television first began the shows were written to emulate modern American life and to entertain. People loved television and still do. They watched more and more. The shows got more and more entertaining with more exaggerated plots, language and situations. Do you ever feel, after you have just seen a really engaging movie, that you find yourself talking like the characters, or feeling similar to how the character felt? It means you identify yourself with the characters. Well, with television this began to happen. Pretty soon people started behaving like TV characters who were written to be like the audience. TV writers recreated real life and the watchers started acting like the TV version of themselves. A feedback loop was created. As the audience enlarged, the sponsors didn't want to leave anyone out so they made sure the content of language and humor was interesting to even the least educated and uncultured of us, so we started acting like people even dumber than we were. Going back to the Buddhist kōan: the audience had mistaken TV shows for real life and were emulating it.
Television news went through a similar metamorphosis. Originally the news journalists were distributed information as neutrally as possible. The era of Hunter Thompson changed that. Newscasters started becoming celebrities themselves and adding their own twist, and sometimes twisted, interpretation to the facts. Rather than simply reporting facts, news agencies became news themselves, thus altering the content. There is web site run by an attorney, Ad Fontes Media, who looks at all news media and rates them for accuracy and bias. When television news first started this wasn't needed. ABC, CBS and NBC covered everything carefully and relatively neutrally. But once actors became newscasters and ratings were being fought for, news became entertainment while pretending not to be. Hence Fox News.
Then things really got complicated. We got something called 'reality TV'. I possibly shouldn't be writing about this because I have only seen one of two episodes of reality TV. It began when a TV crew followed the daily lives of a family, the Loud family in 1983. Pretty soon people who had been raised on TV were appearing on TV as themselves but were actually emulating the shows they had been watching. Life and TV got all mixed up. Then we got The Apprentice.
Just like Trump University, a school that was created to seem like a real school, The Apprentice was created to seem like Trump was actually working with an apprentice. Trump University was scripted to sound and act like an educational experience even though the content offered the student little useful information but, coincidentally, cost a lot. The Apprentice was scripted to seem like the apprentice was under the tutelage of a mentor, but really got no 'mentoring' of value other than narcissism.
Trump, and I'm guessing as I've said in other blogs, knows everything he knows from watching TV. He doesn't read. So what he knows is a virtual copy of real life. The women are beautiful, the men are smart and aggressive, and facts are rarely used. There are a lot of shoot-from-the-hip opinions that, remarkably, always seem to be correct. We never see anyone sitting down, plowing through pages of data and doing calculation. Who needs briefing manuals when you can just 'know' the right thing to do. Trump is playing a TV president. Too bad he never watched West Wing. Perhaps his language skills would have improved.
A similar phenomenon as the television reality mix up has occurred with the Internet. The Internet is a wonderful sourced of information. The largest compilation of data including maps, numbers, and videos ever assembled is at our finger tips. It has become our second brain, as many people say. But, once again, like the buddhist kōan in the first paragraph, don't mistake the internet for the real world. It has the capacity to be a bigger reproduction of the worldview then we hold in our heads, but it must be used skeptically. When people start making decisions based on the internet-world without correlating the results with the real-world we start getting that feedback loop that occurred with television, where the virtual version gets mistaken for the real version, so that the virtual version starts to take into account the action of people based on a virtual world. Polling data suffers from this anomaly now.
Perhaps the world would be better off if we spent more time looking at the moon than at the finger. In other words be sure you are not mimicking something that is already mimicking you and that you don't follow Google maps down a road that is impassible, regardless of how it looks through your windshield.
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