Entertainment-culture is gaining momentum worldwide. Throughout the last twenty years, more and more individuals around the globe have been fully metabolized into the psychosphere of technological-spectacle: TV, Hollywood, video games, sporting events, and so forth. For many, these activities represent leisure-time and a way to connect with the larger, outside world. However, this rapidly spreading global phenomena of technological-spectacle is having a tremendously negative impact on society’s collective ideologies, culture, and overall health. Most importantly, the rest of the world is now consuming media at the same pace, and in the same forms, as those living in the United States.

In 1985, social critic and author Neil Postman wrote possibly his most well-known work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, a book that examines “media as metaphor,” from Plato to Billy Graham, while comparing and contrasting the various shifts in media-mediums: oral, typographic and televisual. For Postman, the major shift is from a typographical to televisual epistemology. In other words, as opposed to the height of the printing-press, in the world of 24-hour TV, what society understands about the world, what people talk about, how they talk and how they understand themselves becomes totally immersed in the world of personalities and images.

In some ways, Postman was echoing the message of Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film, Network, in which the main character, Howard Beale reminds the audience:

“We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds… We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing!”

Here, the fictional character Howard Beale is correct: society, in the 21st century, largely understands the world through TV, film, video games, and the internet, as the average person spends more time with these mediums than they do their families, friends, coworkers or classmates. But, more importantly, how does this bode for our politics? During the time Postman was writing his now famous book, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, the United States, had a former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, as its President. That fact should never be forgotten, as it perfectly symbolizes the superficiality of modern politics, and not just in the U.S.

For example, Erik Gandini’s 2009 documentary film Videocracy portrays an Italian society utterly obsessed with celebrity culture. As a matter of fact, the first late-night TV program commercially broadcast in Italy (1976), featured a game of “striptease,” where contestants would call in the program and answer trivia questions. When the contestants answered correctly, a masked-woman sitting in a chair would discard another piece of clothing. In the documentary, one elder says, “The local factories were complaining because their workers were staying up so late that they couldn’t work the next day.”

However, a more sinister reality plagues Italy, namely the fact that Silvio Berlusconi, the three-time Prime Minister of the country, also happens to be the nation’s most well-known media mogul. On a side note, according to the Forbes 2014 list, Berlusconi is the 182nd “richest person in the world.” But Berlusconi’s wealth is not the most important dynamic at play. What he’s decided to do with that wealth, which has been to build a media empire to achieve his political ends, is the key dynamic. Here, he has been extremely successful.

In Italy, 46 percent of the nation’s youth remain unemployed, increasingly alienated from the culture they see plastered on their televisions and billboards. The political discourse, like that in the United States, continues to digress, for the most popular cable talk shows and radio programs feature the most vapid and reactionary political discourse imaginable, distorting very complex issues and providing little nuance when discussing humanity’s most pressing issues. Indeed, it’s very difficult to have a meaningful conversation in thirty-second sound-bites, interspersed with commercials and sporting scores.

Of course, Hollywood films, like television shows, reinforce the dominant culture. That’s been known for some time. Yet, the way in which media entities create culture, primarily through capitalist-monopolies, increases in complexity as the decades move along. In order to properly socialize society, many media entities have broadened the scope of their advertising efforts, bombarding audiences with positive messages about certain films or artists through a multiplicity of outlets. For instance, as David Croteau and William Hoynes point out in their book Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences:

“When Warner Bros. released the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, its parent company AOL Time Warner pursued an elaborate multimedia strategy to cash in on the Harry Potter franchise. AOL’s online services provided links to various Harry Potter Web pages, including sites for purchasing the Harry Potter merchandise that AOL sells. The company’s movie information site, Moviefone, promoted and sold tickets to the film, while company magazines Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly featured prominent Harry Potter stories. In addition, AOL Time Warner used its cable systems and cable networks for massive promotion of the film, and the company-owned Warner Music Group released the Harry Potter soundtrack.” (pg. 43)

Undoubtedly, society can no longer proclaim to have organic forms of popular-culture. These various films, shows, artists and songs are now pumped through every inch of society’s daily lives, inundating humanity with Hollywood culture, further altering and bastardizing the ways in which humans understand class, gender, politics, ecology and even life itself. Without doubt, none of this would be too much of a worry if humans weren’t spending inordinate amounts of time consuming mass-media.

According to David Hinckley from the Daily News, “Children aged 2-11 watch over 24 hours of TV per week, while adults aged 35-49 watch more than 33 hours, according to data from Nielsen that suggests TV time increases the older we get.” Additionally, Hinckley goes on to note that Americans over the age of 65 consume, on average, more than 50 hours of TV per week. These numbers are significantly larger for African Americans, as they watch a disproportionate amount of TV programming.

To be clear, the intersection of class and race plays a significant role in determining these statistics, yet the negative results remain, for many young African Americans, particularly women and girls, are consistently absent from the modern-media-landscape. The women displayed on TV programs are light in complexion and weight. They resemble plasticized models, air-brushed and digitally altered. Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry’s 2012 film Dark Girls brilliantly explores the internalized racism inherent in modern-media depictions of black women, reminding viewers of sociological studies in which young black girls were given a white Barbie and a black Barbie, then asked to choose which one they wanted to be when they grew up. Of course, an overwhelming number of black girls chose the white Barbie.

Today, in China, over 3,000 TV stations are available for people to consume, with more and more American shows being in high-demand. Back in 2010, the American magazine The Economist happily noted that commercial TV is “surging in China. The article goes on to speculate, “And then, who knows? The notion of China as an exporter of culture may seem far-fetched. But it was once hard to imagine the country churning out advanced telecoms equipment.” For now, China is not an “exporter of culture,” however Chinese citizens are indeed consuming massive amounts of Hollywood culture, with contemporary shows such as House of Cards and Gossip Girl becoming extremely popular in the communist state.

In Brazil, people are spending around 3.5 hours per day watching TV; they spend an additional 3 hours per day on the internet and the amount of Brazilians accessing the internet from the cell phone “jumped from 79 thousand to 212 thousand in six months [from late 2010 through early 2011].” As Andréa Novais mentions, “Despite having 14 million illiterate people, Brazil has experienced a significant growth of the use of digital media.” What does it mean when the rate of internet usage in a nation outpaces the rate at which illiterate citizens of that nation learn to read? We’ll soon find out.

On the other hand, as Novais also points out in a different article, “In Brazil, having a TV means to be socially included.” This is particularly true in Brazil’s “favelas,” or shantytowns, where people are relegated to second-class citizen status, completely detached from civil society and the mechanisms of power, privilege and social status. In this context, citizens don’t travel or live the cosmopolitan life. They are stuck in the ghettos. A minimal number of people have access to the internet, and those who do access the web in public spaces, not in the privacy of their homes. For better, or worse, TV is the fixed-political-social medium through which many people view, understand and interact with the outside world.

From another angle, what does this mean for people’s health and well-being? With regard to TV viewing, there are physiological repercussions. As Dr. Gabor Maté mentions, “The same synapses fire off in the brain while someone is watching TV as when they blow a line of cocaine.” Additionally, Dr. Maté observes, “If you were to take a child away from a television, after just a few hours of viewing, that child will respond with the same levels of irritability and stress as a drug addict who’s just had their fix taken away.” These developments, over time, will significantly alter the way human beings develop, emotionally, and psychologically. Insanely enough, humans now spend more time with screens and electronics, than they do with human beings, animals or plants – what some call the living world.

In the U.S., this process of indoctrination and propagandizing has significantly impacted society’s ability to communicate and relate with each other. For instance, as Canadian sociologist Morris Berman mentions in Dark Ages America, “By 2003 the number of Americans who attended even one public meeting on town or school affairs during the previous year was down 40percent from what it had been twenty years prior.” Furthermore, Berman observes that, “In the mid seventies, Americans entertained friends at home on average of fourteen to fifteen times per year. By 2006, the number had dropped 45 percent – while in 2003 – 73 percent of Americans stated most people couldn’t be trusted, whereas in 1964 – 77 percent of people interviewed said their fellow citizens could be trusted.”

To be sure, other factors play a role in this process of alienation: poverty, segregated housing, schools, and so forth. However, the bulk of society does not own or understand the dominant media technics, nor do they develop or implement advanced communications networks on a world-wide scale. Sure, some communities can produce print edition magazines or newsletters, but only on a very small scale. Global communications networks require vast infrastructure projects and energy grids that must be maintained and operated in order to function properly. Further, the ability to repair such systems requires highly-specialized training and knowledge. For many citizens, installing a printer is an arduous task.

These dynamics pose many challenges for those seeking to subvert the dominant media culture. Without doubt, the dominant multimedia entities are inherently undemocratic forms of technics, privately controlled and monopolized by the capitalist-class, distorting society’s perception of the world, its culture, politics and identities. To repeat a phrase Noam Chomsky often uses, citing the Knights of Labor, “Those who work in the mills should own the mills.” The same holds true when contemplating the future of media. Those who consume media, should also produce and regulate the media. More specifically, people must be aware of the multiplicity of infrastructure networks and mechanisms required to maintain the forms of media we come to expect in our daily lives: TV, radio, internet, satellite, etc.

Moreover, it would be wise for people to critically examine who owns these media entities and infrastructures, for they undoubtedly wield great power in the modern-world, with many citizens now spending more time with screens than their work, family, or friends. While it’s unreasonable to expect people to stop using these forms of media, it would be useful to examine, critique and ask: How much amusement is too much amusement?

Vincent Emanuele is a writer, activist and radio journalist who lives and works in the Rust Belt. He can be reached at [email protected]