Television - Any Flat Screen, Really

Fellow Consumers.

The idea of televisions watching you has been in the vanguard from the inception of their invention.

No commercial television was broadcast, ever, without some kind of market survey having been previously executed.

We were watched then.

It all may seem a bit big brother-ish, 1984, Brave New World sort of thing.

No souls being captured here, though.

Or did Lenin imagine that cameras captured souls, similar to concerns of the Mennonites and other religious orders.

Really, this concern over digital spying is a question of religion.

Many people believe their lives are improved by owning a device that delivers entertainment media to their eyeballs and brains.

That belief is marked by the attitude, perhaps, “well, it is just what you do”.

Or marked by the simple “shock and awe” of the dazzling screen.

Religion has never been a one-way street.

If you allow yourself to believe, you give up your soul to the institution.

What you want and what you desire in life, what you imagine to be true, is all pre-defined by the administrative structure of the organization.

Of course, they watch you and keep tabs on you.

In our modern world, this process is called marketing.

Marketing is one of those funny words from the lexicon of our modern day priests, the economists.

Spying and marketing are synonymous, no?

The day the first human went into a store to purchase a product, was the day the economists figured out they could sell us all a bill of goods.  Of course, there were not a lot of economists around in the early days of capitalism and the subsequent rise of communism.  But the economists folk quickly figured out that there was a golden opportunity to administer power.  So came a new language of religion, with fancy words like markets, consumers, gross national product, and even jobs.

Anyway, since it is a free country, you are allowed to allow yourself to be spied upon.

And buy whatever is sold to you.

No harm there.

If you don’t want to be spied upon, then you have to turn the device off and put it on the street for some lucky recycler to pick up and put it to good use.

If you choose the latter, you then would have to have the courage to pay attention to and be responsible toward the immediate world around you.

Fancy actually taking notice of the world we live in…..  and you get to keep your soul in the bargain.

 

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