We live in an atmosphere concentrated with media: we are drenched so deep that we don’t often realize how integral it has become in our lives. In my fiction, which can be speculative and sometimes nodding to “the future”, I don’t mention this much. I was wondering if, by not speaking to this (awesome/scary) fact of life, I was missing out on saying something substantial about our lives; then again, a writer with the intent to say “something substantial about our lives” is often asking for more than they can deliver to begin with. Perhaps I intentionally avoid the subject. Perhaps I want, fictionally, to portray a world where the reader can escape our media fishbowl, not content to stare into our monitors and smartphones – into any one of the many shining screens around us. *

(*This is not to say that, as someone who writes stories to be read, I am exempt from any of what I go on to describe.)

As Madge the manicurist in the Palmolive commercials used to say: “You’re soaking in it.” And we are.

My concern, as far as this post goes, is not the number of screens surrounding us, nor is it the gross subsidization of our environment by advertising (vis à vis self-interested parties). Content is king, after all. And, unlike ads and the proliferation of screens, I feel we don’t look at content very closely.

We are essentially surrounded by narratives.

Here are a few:

The good cop who steals cash from the storage locker, gets caught, but manages to persevere and win the respect of his peers once more.

The curious daughter who starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, displeases her parents, and burns bridges.

The overweight naive kid who, spurned by a life-changing incident, gets his act together and turns his life around.

Narratives are part of everything: films, public saftey ads, webisodes. Where there is media, there are narratives. Consequently, the more we surround ourselves with media, the more we are exposed to the repetition of narratives. The specifics of the narratives may alter slightly between each other, but with repetition an underlying suggestion in the message, whether accidentally implied or not, is revealed.

Going back to our three examples:

The good cop who steals cash from the storage locker, gets caught, but manages to persevere and win the respect of his peers once more.

becomes…

If you are good but do something against your beliefs, you will face justice and be outcast, however with hard work you can become a good person again.

The curious daughter who starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, displeases her parents, and burns bridges.

becomes…

Curiosity of the unknown, particularly when it flies in the face of authority, will destroy your life.

The overweight naive kid who, spurned by a life-changing incident, gets his act together and turns his life around.

becomes…

Being overweight is a character flaw. Only through salvation can your life be altered enough for you to discover the meaning of hard work.

I’m boiling down the overall narrative of each example. It may not be an intentional message, and I am not suggesting in this post there is a cabal at work to flood our lives with rules of behaviour. In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether it’s accidental or intentional: we’re soaking in it.

Boiled down, the messages seem preachy. Pretty judgmental. They are steeped with guilt and shame – there is a fatalistic picture which gets painted when you are exposed repeatedly to these messages: do good = reward, do bad = punishment, where the qualification of “good” and “bad” are written for us, so that we don’t have to do the hard work of defining that for ourselves.

My concern is whether repeated exposure to these messages, particularly when there is no-to-little variation, can imprint upon how an individual internally processes and externally interacts with the real world. I write this as a concerned citizen but also someone interested in the psychological impact of our environment. I am also firmly against censorship, firmly against anything which contravenes freedom of speech (with the exception of hate speech). My point is not of a Tipper Gore-style WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN BEING EXPOSED TO variety: I am not suggesting that we are all so osmotically sensitive that if a Motörhead song comes on the radio, everyone is going to lose their shit and society will devolve. But I think we flatter ourselves if we think we are immune from everything we surround ourselves with: messages about body size, messages about skin colour, messages about success/failure, winners/losers.

There is a strong, implied moralistic element in our media, and I believe each individual needs a healthy way to process, disseminate, and if need be jam the signal if it’s too narrow, too judgmental, or hardens problematic stereotypes. The most important thing the individual can do is to know it’s there: not the ads and TV shows themselves, but the messages that repeatedly get sent in their narratives. My wish, first and foremost, would be for awareness. Involvement would be nice too, because all the awareness in the world isn’t going to stop things from continuing to happen.

I suppose it starts with talking about it, so this is what I’m doing.