The video runs about 3 and 1/1 minutes and is well worth the watch ..
posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent CCNWON
The Television
December 14th, 2007
The idol who we sit and worship every day in our living rooms is in fact a dastardly manipulative double agent. TV, the boob tube, television, telly, the babysitter, (or whatever you want to call it) is more than just a portal into daily news and entertainment. TV is Big Brother.
The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV per day. I could rant about how this is terrible, but I am actually more concerned that He knows exactly what I am watching at any moment and how much time I spend watching Him. It may seem irrational to single out TV because the internet is full of tracking software, cookies, spyware, etc. all created just to observe my net surfing behavior, however television is almost universally watched by all Americans and very centralized. (Besides I’ll save the net for another post.)
Your Viewing Habits
The Nielson ratings have been around since the early 1940s to look at television viewers watching habits. Nielson Media Research gathers demographic information about households and then records the viewing habits of the household by using a set top box or asking the viewer to keep a diary of programs watched.
The viewing habits of any one person can reveal an enormous amount of information about that person. Information like a person’s hobbies, likes and dislikes, income, age, sex, race, lifestyle, habits, and more. On the internet almost all companies, large or small, track the behavior of their visitors to some extent to help them understand and better tailor their website to exactly what people want. If the internet is a good indicator to just how much this information matters (which it is), then it should be one of the most important factors when it comes to television programing. To no surprise the Nielson ratings are the single most important piece of information to determine show popularity, rates for advertisers, and yearly schedules.
Addiction Positive Reinforcement from Television
Television is addictive causes a phenomena known as positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is when a specific behavior is rewarded, thus a behavior is “positively reinforced” and a person is more likely to repeat the behavior. In other words after telling a dog to “sit” and the dog sitting, you would give the dog a treat (reinforcer) to encourage the same response later. The next time you tell the dog to “sit” the dog will be more likely to sit because you had previously “positively reinforced” this behavior.
The entertainment from television acts just as the dog treat does, as a reinforcer. Entertainment is a reward. The reward of entertainment encourages you to watch more television. So television watching is both the desired behavior and the reinforcer. It encourages itself.
Before the television there were also behaviors that were self encouraging. Behaviors like having a conversation with someone else would fit this criteria. If you sat down to have an engaging conversation with someone you would be entertained by the conversation and also rewarded to continue having the conversation. However this behavior cannot be continued indefinitely. Conversation depends on the willingness of both people to continue communicating and it requires a good amount of effort from both people to think and communicate ideas. Hypothetically if we could guarantee that one person could continue conversing endlessly it would still become mentally tiring for the other person to continually conjure up new ideas. The effort required for this behavior is essentially what limits it’s abuse.
Television requires a very minimal amount of effort to undertake its viewing. All that is necessary is that a person turns on the device and keeps their eyes open to watch. With so little effort required to perform this behavior, the positive reinforcement of the entertainment becomes especially effective. On top of that sofas, couches, and recliners have been designed to maximize comfort and heighten the positive reinforcement while watching the TV. The remote control was also designed with laziness in mind; at the touch of a button one can modify the level of entertainment according to one’s desires and what’s currently on TV. Newer additions like Tivo have further progressed the potential laziness because a person can even decide when to watch a program.
Technology has continued to make television more addictive positively reinforcing as well. We’ve seen the advance from a small black and white screen to the enormous high definition screens with surround sound, vibrant colors, and even some movies in 3-d. These improvements have only make television harder and harder to get away from, and it is no wonder we spend 4 hours a day in front of this machine.
Maximizing Entertainment by Using Emotions
While the hardware of television was improving, the networks were busy studying viewers’ watching behaviors using both in-house methods and the Nielson ratings. They looked at which shows received the most viewers and what characteristics about these shows made them appealing. What the networks determined is that to maximize the addictiveness of TV, emotionally arousing material needed to be shown at regular intervals and the orienting reflex needed to be regularly triggered. These two phenomena can be seen on almost every show. Camera angles are switched, zooms, and edits happen about once every 10-15 seconds and force a person orient themselves over and over to understand the program. This orienting reflex forces a person to pay attention. Triggering the emotions also has a similar timing pattern. The laugh track of a sitcom, the length of a commercial, the time between questions on a game show, the time between stories on the news, and the time between plays in a sports game are all examples of this emotional pattern in action. Even the time between violent acts on many dramas, and the time between sexual acts in pr0n has this type of timing. The two timing effects are so pronounced that it is likely a major contributor to the rise of ADHD in society.
The emotionally arousing nature of television is difficult for your brain to continuously watch. A persons brain must constantly suppress feelings of shock, horror, anxiety, fear, sadness, and even sexual arousal when watching TV. In normal situations, when not watching TV, a person is able to act appropriately to whatever may be causing these feelings and the response to these emotions is healthy. While watching TV, however, the response must be suppressed and the emotions are blocked by other parts of the brain. A person eventually becomes conditioned to suppress all emotions, good or bad, because responding to these emotions interferes with watching TV.
Television and Brainwaves
The cycle of arousal and subsequent suppression with TV put the mind into a state of enhanced suppression, and alpha brainwaves can be detected. When the brain shows alpha wave patterns it is typically very relaxed and passive. Resting and day dreaming are activities that can cause this alpha wave pattern, but after resting or day dreaming the brain returns to full alertness (beta-waves) afterwards. With television the brain goes into a state of lowered alertness (alpha) and stays in this state even after you have stopped watching. Televisions real danger now becomes apparent because in an alpha state you become highly impressionable.
Hypnosis is a similar state of mind where the brain goes into alpha and theta brainwave patterns. With the help of a hypnotist a person can be guided into a relaxed hypnosis and then given suggestions that influence their future decisions. When a person goes into an alpha state they become more suggestible (images, messages and sensations are more likely to influence the subconscious). And after the suggestions a person is more likely to unconsciously do what they were suggested to do. Hypnosis has been shown to be effective at things like relieving pain and increasing the effectiveness of treatments to overcome addictions and change behavior. So it is probably also good for things like advertisements and propaganda.
Television works in an almost identical manner. People watch television and are more likely to unconsciously act upon the suggestions that they are given. Buy Brand X Car. Eat at Restaurant Z. Vote for presidential candidate John Doe. Without even realizing it people will do exactly these thing with no active thought. Subjectively people feel that they have come to these “decisions” themselves, and that their thought have not been tainted. What’s worse is that with repetition these suggestions become stronger and stronger.
TV becoming Big Brother
The major TV stations have all been bought out or are owned by larger companies that are far more concerned about profits than they are with public interests. NBC is owned by G.E., CBS by Viacom, ABC by Disney, and Fox by New Corporation. Similar ownership is seen with most of the smaller cable and satellite channels as well. All of these parent companies are vastly larger than the underlying television stations. As result of these corporate structures the news and information that people have been getting is now more concerned with larger corporate interests ($$) than accurately portraying the news.
False news stories regularly appear on the nightly news, most often with advertisements being portrayed as actual news. The government has also produced VNRs (video news releases) that purport government propaganda as the news. The agency that is supposed to protect citizens from this deceit, the FCC, has only caught a small fraction of these fake stories, instead focusing their efforts on nipples and profanity. The average citizen now has no way to distinguish legitimate “news” from propaganda. What’s even more scary is that news programs are presented with the guise of authority so that they are rarely questioned and often taken as fact; this is Big Brother at His best. In other words the system is rife with the corruption of fascism.
Big Brother is TV. A statistically significant portion of the population is monitored using the Nielson Ratings, the networks create programming as addictive as possible, and they do it in a way to best manipulate the populace. The average American citizen is now so brainwashed and ingrained into this TV culture that they will base all of their opinions off of propaganda from the television.
Big Brother has done exactly what He intended to do. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. He hypnotizes you everyday and tells you how to think. He keeps us in endless wars at all times (e.g. the war on drugs, the war on terror) and has made thoughtcrime (not being a “patriot”) punishable by torture and imprisonment. He has made us believe “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” America is stuck in the year 1984.
There May Still Be Hope
Sometimes I wonder why the writers (WGA) in Hollywood actually went on strike. (I don’t deny that they deserve a larger share from internet profits, but is there more to the issue?) Is it mere coincidence that television programing would tank at the same time that Americans need to pay attention and vote for the next president? (Primaries matter far more than the general election) And it is also coincidence that the actors (SAG) and directors (DGA) are also likely to strike this coming summer, just in time for the 2008 general election? Perhaps those writers on the inside of the propaganda machine have finally discovered that they are being used to control the public in manipulative ways and that the brainwashing must stop before it is too late. If it is their true intention to disable Big Brother for the good of the public then it is an honorable intention indeed.
To stop Big Brother entirely is going to be a lot more difficult. He’s already making a comeback with “reality shows” and He’s finding His way onto the internet. It’s going to take a lot to wake America from it’s slumber and move us in the direction of liberty, peace, and freedom. Lets just hope that there are enough awake Americans to get us back on the right track.
Tags: Influence · propaganda · states of consciousness
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