The Triumph of Triviality: Weapons of Mass Distraction

Both A Tiny Revolution and the FAIR blog had found the piece on Robert parry's Consortium News blog by Spanish sociologist Pablo Ouziel who describes

the consequences of how "we wake up in the morning to hear and watch the newest tragedy that has swept the world's media attention"--whether it's "the tragic crash of an airplane" or "the death of a star." Meanwhile:

Serious events and acts are taking place everyday which merit serious social debate, yet because of the fact that our societies are deeply fragmented, broken and clashing between each other, we are unable to grant ourselves the necessary pause, required for conciliation and unity.

Because of this, we are easy to control as a mass of isolated individuals, which is held together by norms and regulations, bureaucracies, military and police, and concepts such as the nation state, the church and the corporation.

If we are to stay in this model of society, I fear we will live in perpetual war until we destroy ourselves by not paying attention to the fact that something is drastically wrong.

Ouziel's digest of exactly what is wrong reads like a list of topics steadfastly avoided by corporate media in the U.S.: "We are living in societies plagued with corruption at all levels, we are constantly expanding our militarized societies surveilled by police forces and colonizing armies, which are rapidly eroding our freedoms." (See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9–10/08).)

Isolation, ironically, has ALWAYS been part of the telos of "massification," through alienation. The increased development of 'niche markets' exaggerates alienation. Alone in the crowd, we are puppets of the media who pull our strings and push our buttons while driving us, aas individuals, even further apart. This is not surprising fiven that 1) the media are owned by the CorpoRats, and the 'solidarity' of members of related groups is utterly inimical to the CorpoRat interests in authoritarianism, globalism, and increased, oppressive surveillance.