How The Media Got Its Hooks In Me
All my life, I’ve felt myself to be an outsider to the culture that was being fashioned for us by the media. I was born in 1966 to parents who were born in 1923 and who were a generation older than the parents of most of my friends. They were not “hip,” had not been raised in a post-scarcity world, nor did they have a TV in their home for the first thirty years of their lives. My parents were “out of touch” children of the Great Depression who never really adjusted to the values being promoted by advertisers in the media.
My siblings — older than me by a decade — were highly influenced by the counter-culture, which rejected the materialism and the commercialism that flowed from the media. From my earliest memories, my ears were filled with music that never got played on the radio, my eyes had access to images and words not seen in the establishment press.
As a result of these influences, I rejected most of the television programming and the pop sensibilities that were fed to my generation as I was growing up. In most every way, I saw the mainstream media as an enemy that used pop culture to drown out far more meaningful and beautiful art, music, and literature.
And yet, the media got its hooks in me. At some point in my life, I discovered not only that I wanted a pair of Nike shoes but that some part of my psyche desperately needed…