A Thorn in the Paw: Elephants, the Media, and the Trampling of our Culture

(This essay was commissioned for issue #2 of Kiss Machine, a Canadian journal of politics and popular culture. Each issue of Kiss Machine combines two disperate elements as its feature; issue #2 concerns "elephants and the media.")

I like to think of myself as a fairly sophisticated, skeptical fellow. I think most of us in the alternative arts view ourselves in this light, and consider it an important part of our personalities. There are so many people out there, we think to ourselves, who are so willing to swallow any crap the media wishes to shovel up, no matter how large or ridiculous it is. The world needs people like us, we tell ourselves. After all, someone needs to watch the watchmen. It's important to keep tabs on what the media is telling us, to disseminate the objective truth from their press releases and advertisements and focus groups. At its most successful, our results can be passed along to more of the public, to allow our society as a whole to make more informed, prejudice-free decisions about our spending and voting. But at the minimum, at least we as individuals come out of the process as better-informed citizens, and one more objective person is always better than one less.

But every so often the media will pull a fast one even over me, and I will hate myself for it the same way I imagine Pavlov's dogs hated themselves for salivating when they heard the ringing of a bell. You know what I mean -- a really cool commercial will come on the air, not "what they think you will think is cool" but sincerely cool; cool music, cool images, cool product, cool tag line. And by the time their thirty seconds are up, you find yourself saying in your head, "Shit, I gotta get me one of those." You find yourself in a store the next Saturday, buying one for no other reason than that the commercial made you want one. Or the website. Or the print ads. Or the interview with the artist on a talk show.

I don't like feeling manipulated like that, and I go to great pains to avoid being convinced to blindly accept any product or ideal at an unthinking face value. Yet it does happen to me, and on a regular basis as well. Why? Because the media -- the group whose job it is to make us buy these things without thinking about it -- has changed its face in the last couple of decades. It is no longer one of many members of the animal kingdom, peacefully co-existing among all the other options we have to receive information and opinions in our lives. The media, especially in my homeland of the United States, has instead become an elephant, blindly stomping its way across the continent, knocking over any obstacles in its way and squashing the high-pitched squeals of its enemies under its thick-soled limbs.

The original role of "the media" in our society -- which I'm defining in this article as news, advertising and entertainment -- was to encourage and add to the collective amount of information in which the average citizen had access. The very idea of a free-market society, in its purest form, supports this ideal -- a group of private companies, each competing on equal footing for the attention of the random citizen, its success judged primarily on whether that random citizen will or will not listen to them. On paper it is a beautiful, perfect system, one where the policies and priorities of a society are formed by the citizens themselves, through the very simple process of spending their money on specific things and casting their ballots for specific people. And for many years this is exactly how the media worked in this country.

But we have developed into a society that could've never been guessed at by the founders of our countries. The vast majority of our news organizations are now owned by the exact private companies that journalists are supposed to warn us about. The competitive process has been warped by the mass conglomeration of power in our modern times. Retail chains no longer have to provide better services, better prices or better choice than their local independent opponent, but only to hang in there and absorb the losses until it simply drives its competition out of business by sheer will. A company known for family movies can now show its family movies exclusively on the television network it owns, interspersed with commercials for its restaurants, cable channels, theme parks, DVDs and movie studios. Political action groups can quash unfavorable candidates for office simply by providing their opponent with enough cash to shout louder and longer, effectively wearing down the competition until they no longer exist.

But still, you say. These things apply to all of them, the uninformed masses out there who are willing to accept everything at face value. Wasn't our generation supposed to be the cynical ones? The ones who refused to believe anything the media told us? Well, we are that generation, and we did reject everything they told us, for many years. So the media did the only thing they could -- they hired us. Our society, for the first time since World War II, has lost an entire generation of artists, the people who sing the songs and paint the paintings and write the books that describe us, who tell us our stories back to us in a way that makes us understand ourselves better. But unlike a war, our artists weren't killed en masse or forced underground if still alive. Like a bad mafia movie, our artists were simply offered a ton of money to work for the organizations they would normally be raging against -- an "offer you can't refuse," if you will. And it has worked, in an even larger and more profound way than the media originally meant.

The secret of this success lies in the fact that the media never tried to change our generation into a different type of creature by hiring us. Indeed, in our postmodern times the media realized that the only way to sell things to us was to hire the exact cynical, skeptical, world-weary people who were rebelling against them. "Come in," they told us. "We will pay you more money than you've ever seen in your life to create anti-advertisements. Go ahead, fight against every convention you've ever hated. Tell the public not to trust us. Strip away the multiple layers of veils we have created over the years and lay the simple, naked truth on the table -- 'We're selling something, and we want you to buy it.'"

And it worked, God help us. The media, fueled by an entire generation of wary, media-savvy artists, appropriated each and every convention of rebellion we could come up with in order to sell us more things. Cosmetic companies stole the ideals of the riot grrrl movement in order to sell the very makeup the bands were telling us we didn't have to wear. We believe celebrity endorsements precisely because the celebrities say, "Don't believe celebrity endorsements." We enjoy media like this -- it is subversive, smart, viscerally exciting and mentally challenging. It rebels against every rule we grew up with regarding the media, and as a result we completely buy into it in a more profound way than the traditional rules would ever allow. We not only purchase the product, we feel we are rebelling against the system by purchasing it.

Don't get me wrong -- the people creating this media are geniuses. They are smart, original, creative and with a fine sense of history and culture. Many times they are the same exact people who create and maintain our alternative arts as well. (I'm no exception -- I work for a marketing agency during the day.) We shouldn't hate ourselves for letting the media get under our skin every so often; they are spending billions of dollars, after all, to do so, and are craftier at it than the special-ops division of any military organization.

But should we like it? Should we tolerate it? Not at all. It is still our job as informed, skeptical citizens to question everything the media tells us. This charge is even more important now that the media is presenting its information in the subtle, anti-establishment way that appeals to us. The good news is that the process of co-opting subversion in order to sell things to society has also increased the power of subversion itself. When the media changed the web so that it became a viable and profound form of advertising, they also changed it so that it became a viable and profound form of rebellion. When you create professional television ads and music videos that look like shitty homemade films, the actual shitty homemade films suddenly become as important and valid as the professional ads. The success of any cultural influence, after all, is based not only on the message but the perceived validity of the medium the message is coming from. And the more our media elephant scoops up subversive mediums and converts them into valid mouthpieces, the more these mediums can be legitimately used for subversion in the first place.

The struggle has become harder, but it's by no means impossible. As it's been since the beginning of time, the job of being an informed and intelligent citizen falls squarely on the shoulders of the individual citizens themselves. If you are not willing to question the stimulus bombarding you on a regular basis, no one can do it for you. And if you don't spread this ideal to as many people as possible, no one else will.

The media may be an elephant, and its never-ceasing trampling may seem overwhelming at times. God knows, I feel that frustration on a regular basis. But remember -- even the mightiest elephant can still get a thorn stuck in its paw. And you as the crafty mouse can not only place the thorn there in the first place, you can be rewarded for pulling it out. Use the media's tools against them. Build the concrete walls the elephant can't knock over, even if the wall is just small enough to protect your own home. When we each build our own protection, the elephant will be contained. And the media will again become the thing it was always meant to be -- an addition to our lives, a supplement. Not the king of the jungle that it currently is.

Copyright 2000, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.