“Freedom to vote, smoke, dress down, act up, disagree, organize, bear arms, ride helmetless – America is about nothing if not individual freedoms. But there’s one freedom very few people are fighting for because hardly anyone realizes it’s being denied. This is a new kind of freedom, and it may well be the most important one of them all:
Freedom in the mental realm… ”
Adbusters 38 is a manifesto for the creation of ‘mental environmentalism’. Selected features:
- Birth of a Movement:
The environmental movement gelled in the summer of 1989 as a flurry of shocking news items appeared day after day: seals dying mysteriously in the North Sea; acid rain devastating the mythical Black Forest; hypodermic needles washing up on New York beaches; people suffering from a fatigue syndrome that no doctor was able to diagnose.
Now we have evidence of a mental environment no less in crisis: 20 million North Americans diagnosed with clinical depression; another 20 million suffering anxiety disorders; antidepressants now a $10-billion-a-year business; commercial messages everywhere the eye can rest – from the banana in the supermarket to the booster-rockets of the space shuttle, to product placement in the movie you’re watching to escape it all. The number of megacorporate gatekeepers of most of the world’s information stands at six – and falling.
In 1989, we realized that our natural environment was dying. That was pretty good incentive to march.
Today, we are realizing that our mental environment is dying too and we’re getting ready to march again with a new vision: the vision of a wave of antitrust suits against the media megacorps, a new science of mental ecology, a new way of managing the production of meaning in our society.
Synchronize your watches, folks. And remember this day.
- American Psycho:
After two and a half years, researchers Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson of the University of Iowa had a blockbuster study in hand. It pointed, decisively, to troubling conclusions about a social problem at the core of an ongoing national debate. The findings appeared as the lead article in American Psychologist, the flagship of their field. Colleagues were applauding. And then came the mainstream media reaction.
“A lot of silence,” says Bushman flatly.
Here, in a nutshell, is the story the media missed. Bushman and Anderson carried out an exhaustive review – a “meta-analysis” – of every existing study of the link between media violence and real-life violence. The result: Research has indicated a clear connection since at least the 1970s, and the body of evidence has been growing ever since.
- Has David Byrne sold out to Microsoft? His fans discuss it.
- Listening to Homer: why the Seinfeldesque is turning Kafkaesque.
- Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism:
- Neil Postman:
“The big issue we need to face is information glut. We are in a situation where there is so much information available from so many different sources – not just television – that we have a problem.
Schools are still acting as if they need to provide people with information, which the schools were pretty good at when there was information scarcity. When you have information overload, then the schools have something entirely different to do…”
- Len Masterman: “The author of Teaching The Media says corporations belong in school – on our terms, never theirs.”
Jerry Mander: “Twenty-three years after the publication of his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, [one of the most important, still unsurpassed cultural critiques ever written, IMHO –FmH] Mander still sees TV as the primary threat to a healthy mental environment – though a competitor is fast on its heels.”
Robert McChesney, research professor at UIUC:I’ve always argued that people who want to change the world had better get serious about changing media and communications, and not think it’s a dependent variable that will work itself out once you’ve changed everything else. What we’ve seen is that the rapidly evolving global movement for democracy – and against neoliberalism and hyper-commercialism – is making media reform an integral part, woven right into the heart of the movement. The dominance of the corporate media system has made this almost unavoidable.
The major ideological defence of the corporate media is that the Internet is changing the system, making it much more competitive and responsive, and that therefore previous concerns about corporate control or commercialism are now completely irrelevant. If you don’t like what you’re getting, then go to one of the other 80 billion websites, or start your own. Everyone should just shut up and shop.
It’s a lot easier to start a website than to organize people to get a sufficient force to change the system. The sad and inescapable truth is we have to do both. If we concede that all the laws and regulations and subsidies can go to these corporate giants, but we’re going to have our groovy websites, then barring a phenomenal upsurge in political activity we will guarantee our marginality.
The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable that the Internet is not going to radically change and improve our media system. If you read the business press, like Fortune magazine (owned by AOL Time Warner), they acknowledge that the Internet is basically run by corporations and it’s just tightening up their control of the commercial media…
Cees Hamelink professor of communications at the University of Amsterdam:“The growing importance of media, at least in my analysis, is strongly related to advertising. Some people tend to believe we are moving towards an information society or communications society. I think we are really moving to what I like to call a ‘global billboard society.’ ”
Theodore Roszak, founder of ecopsychology:“How often in history did people wake up in the morning and have someone tell them what they needed in life? All through the day advertising is trying to convince you of what you require in order to manage. Of course that’s been going on since advertising began. But just within my lifetime the technique of getting between people and the ordinary aspects of life – from eating to sleeping to working to sex to diet – has compounded enormously…”
Jay Rosen, author of What Are Journalists For? and a professor of journalism at New York University, discussing journalists’ accountability in media reform.
Sheri Herndon, one of the organizers of the 65 Independent Media Centers.
George Gerbner, founder and president of the Cultural Environment Movement:“Are we too late? I have no definition for what is ‘late’ or ‘too late.’ Nor do I have definite criteria for what is ‘success.’ We must do what we can do. You light a candle under a pot of water. For a seemingly long time ‘nothing happens.’ At one point it begins to boil — a qualitative transformation. (It took only some six degrees rise in the average temperature to melt down the Ice Age.) So, you just keep up the pressure and hope the change occurs in your lifetime. But, if not, no energy ever disappears, no effort is ever wasted.”
- Neil Postman:
- 2-Minute Media Revolution:
“For nine years now, Adbusters has tried to get its famous TV “subvertisements” aired by the NBC, CBS and ABC networks. Every year, they refuse. We need to make a hairline crack in that media monopoly. How long will it take? Let’s start with two minutes.
The “Two-Minute Media Revolution” is a campaign to demand that two minutes out of every broadcast hour be made available for advocacy messages that could come from anyone, on any topic. We’ve launched cyberpetitions to the US Federal Communications Commission and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.”
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