Are we choosing our programming carefully or letting others program us?
I came across commentary on the President of the United States that made me think about my own media habits. From a Media Matters article:
“This is all quite dangerous. Trump’s worldview is heavily shaped by the hours of Fox programming he typically watches each day, and he often takes direction from the network’s hosts.”
Forgetting about the latest twitter for the moment, the phrase “Worldview heavily shaped by hours of programming” got stuck in my mind. My phone now has this screen time thing, and over the last 7 days I have spend almost 20 hours on the web, and 17 hours on youtube - or 5 hours a day of “programming”.
I like to think it is more interesting than Fox (I refuse cable TV on the grounds that I don’t like it most of the time) I am not deliberate about it, and yet clearly have been benefitted by being part of the all knowing internet (Tom Scott, or learning about calculus on Khan Academy, or watching ADVchina) or sometimes depressed (Motorcycle crash youtube videos (no link - it’s morbid and only interesting if you ride) or following the Brexit debacle, (The Brexit blog) which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with the EU, and everything to do with the last nails in the coffin of British empire and exceptionalism with a dose of money interests trying to prevent the spread of EU money laundering rules and worker protection regulation).
But is not a deliberate set of choices. Schools are very good about this question - but what for us adults? How are we programming ourselves? Because make no mistake if we don’t take control, someone else will.
