Cult of the Amateur- More like Cult of the Professional

Reading Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur is making me much more cynical than I have ever been.  And not just about life itself, but about my life in particular. 

  In all of my PR classes I am taught that the new social media craze is an excellent marketing tool for us.  I am starting to believe that maybe marketing is being used as a euphemism for manipulation.  The internet allows anonymity, where PR practitioners or advertisers or CEOs of companies can pose as an average Joe (or Jane) and blog about how awesome a product is- and there readers will never know they are getting paid to say that. Andrew Keen is convinced that most of the internet is people posing to be something they are not, he is right but he has got it the wrong way.  Yes, people are pretending to be doctors and college professors when they are nothing but  a pre-pubescent middle school boy, but there are also advertisers and PR professionals posing as stay at home moms who give you home remedies for illnesses(which the companies products.) 
This "Web 2.0" revolution has not only lent that spotlight to anyone with internet access, it has also allowed for false information and lies to be spread much more fluently and quickly.  As I read Cult of the Amateur I feel guilty, because this falseness of truth effects me every day.  I admit, I go to Wikipedia for many of my questions.  I usually take the information as fact, although it may not be.  While people who write traditional encyclopedias are trained experts in their fields.  It's pathetic that my most trusted source of information is written by anonymous users, whose motives to tell the truth may be skewed.  Being a PR major I am taught to manipulate information that would usually be taken as advertisement into fact.  My professors tell me that there are wrong ways to do PR and right ways to do PR.  I think the right way is to skew unpleasantness in nicer ways and the wrong way is to skew the unpleasantness in nicer ways so the public thinks we mean something completely different. When we are able to hide behind usernames why not take the easy way out?  It's a lot easier for people to like you if you lie to them - as long as they never find out your lying. 


Andrew Keen constantly refers back to The Long Tail   by Chris Anderson.  It's interesting because as I am reading Cult of the Amateur, in which keen condemns Anderson's work, I am also reading The New Rules of Markerting and PR which commends Anderson's work.  One of the main rules of this 'long tail' of PR is to participate, not propagate.  By participating in the internet the PR practitioners are supposed to throw away old rules of press releases and PSAs and move on to blogs and comments, where there identity may or may not be revealed. In The New Rules of Marketing and PR David Meerman Scott says that PR has once again become public, instead of just focusing on the media.  If by public, he means anonymous than yes- that is true.  For my PR classes we experiment with the new social medias in PR perspectives- making blogs supporting businesses, making Facebook client pages and of course playing around with Google algorithms to make sure we are the first thing the searcher finds, even if we weren't what they were looking about. We are practicing manipulation techniques.  I think I always knew that, but I am just bringing this to surface now.  There is no longer a right and just way to do PR.  And if there is- not many people are doing it anymore. 

Well if "Web 2.0" is not about originality, it is about falseness and copying.  People pretend to  be something they are not, and compromise the integrity of human nature by posing as someone they are not.  The loss of the physical being and physical interaction has made my future career so much easier. 


Maybe I need to reconsider what I want to do for the rest of my life.  I sure as hell don't think I am going to be the one to change all of this.

The Never-ending, Never-changing Story

My roommate and I never discussed the possibility of not paying for cable television this semester.  Our main focus was whether or not to order HBO for an extra $15 dollars a month.  Looking back I realize that television is such a prominent force in both of our lives that neither of us could contextualize living without it.  In fact the first two days after we moved in we were without cable and internet.  It was not until then did I realize how often I watch television, whether it is consciously or just as background noise.

In Eating a Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman quotes Ted Kaczynski, the legendary Unabomber, "Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom."  This is a very bold and true statement.  People sacrifice many things for technology, in facts our lives revolve around it.  People will spend ludicrous amount of money for the latest technology, thousands of dollars of state of the art computers and televisions, "smart"-phones, cable television with thousands of channels.  All of these seems unnecessary, especially when people begin to choose to spend their money on  these luxuries verses the necessities of life. 

Television is a life conquering force.    Everyone is exposed to it, and many of the times it shapes our ideas and experiences.  Klosterman also discusses how our internal images, how we picture things, most likely originate from television.  Television is a world wide medium that allows us to believe other peoples opinions and leaves little room for interpretation or our own opinions.  Television is one of the sole mediums that has the ability to take away our freedom and our voice.  Television is run by the elite, the images seen are created by  the minds of the elite, the information given to us is from the mouths of the elite.  The average person does not have a say in what people say or do on television.  They do not create television shows,and they do not benefit from  what television offers.

Using my own  life as an example I will admit that I am a fan of the television series True Blood.  I watch it regularly and this was the main reason my roommate and I debated ordering HBO (which we did by the way).  This show is by director Alan Ball.   Of course this show is entirely fictional, but Alan Ball definitely contributes many elements to the show that are detrimental to our thinking.  The show is violent, sexual and racist.  Abuse is consistently seen through out the show, as well as sexual violence and murder.  This show does not show that these things are wrong,  or what to do if they  happen to you, but instead tells us it's normal and everything will be fine next episode.  Television is unrealistic, many people realize that, but the ideas that they  reinforce constantly such as abuse against women, whether sexual or violent, are prevalent in our society.  This must mean that television does effect some, if not most, of it's fans. 

Knowing all  of this- knowing what it does to me and the ideas I am exposed to because of it, I still watch it.  I am smart enough to look beyond what they are saying to me and contextualize that this is not real life, that it is a television show.  Even if I did stop watching, what difference would it make?  Television will never die.  It will only grow stronger.

my hd lullaby

I can’t fall asleep without the TV on.   I am twenty years old and I cannot fall asleep unless the TV is on.   I don’t watch what is going on, I close my eyes and listen.  It’s as if I need to television to sing me a digital lullaby before I can fall asleep.   It’s pathetic.  Last night I was up until 3:30 a.m. with my eyes shut tight trying to fall asleep, but I couldn’t.  I gave in at this point and turned on the TV, lowered the volume and put the sleep timer on.  I was asleep in a matter of minutes.   It is just noise, noise that helps block out the things I am actually thinking so I can have a clear enough mind to sleep.  Television has become a safety blanket for so many people in our society.  It has become a toxic life force that pollutes everyone who participates. 

The media, television in general, is addicting.  Its main purpose has shifted from to inform, to entertain and ultimately to distract.  When we watch television we are trying to distance ourselves from the real world for a bit and indulge in this fantasy world, where you can focus on others misfortunes to distract yourself from your own. 

Television is so dominant in our culture, but what kind of effect is it having on society?  Even television that is meant to inform the public is full of frivolous information told to us by beautiful people to grab our attention.  What the media strives to take from us is more valuable than money, our attention.  Our attention is priceless, and limited, so media is in competition with itself to obtain this precious entity.

How do we choose what to waste our attention on?  Sometimes things we are genuinely interested in, but usually it is the most outrageous and shocking thing we come across.     Information has become pre-packaged into “infotainment.”    This information overload has made our society brainless and inattentiveness is a major result.  How do we make more constructive use of our time and attentions?  Skip the television, read a book, but it’s not that easy.  Television is everywhere, when I pump my gas, buy groceries, go on an airplane, my attention is redirected towards a television.  Television has invaded and majorly altered our culture.  This blog is going to talk about the many ways in which the media, but television in particular, has changed our society and how our attention has become our most valuable commodity.    Stay tuned!