Persuasion And The Media
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
There’s always a frame around the things we hear, whether it be intentional or unintentional. Take the media, for example. There are only five or six mega corporations that disseminate information to us about what is going on in the world, and really, if you watch much TV, you’ll see that they’re really not giving out much real news at all. There’s a bottom line to consider and jeopardizing the corporation’s profitability is not an option.
We are a nation of television addicts. According to A.C. Neilsen Co (those are the ratings people), the average American watches more than four hours of television per day. That’s twenty-eight hours a week. Two months out of each year. By the time you’re 65, that’s nine full years of television.
The same thing happens when we watch television as when we hear a story-our critical minds shut down and we absorb the information with very little resistance. We become passive. We allow the message to sink in and carry us away. The media sucks us in, it alters our consciousness and that’s one of the reasons that it’s so absolutely powerful. Another reason is it uses so many of our senses, it engages us fully.
The news doesn’t really bother to inform us anymore, opting instead to entertain. Is it possible that this is happening on purpose? Lao-Tzu observed that, “People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.” Has this also been observed by those currently in power?
In the grocery store recently I was in line next to a father and daughter. The daughter was probably around seventeen or eighteen, not a kid most definitely. And she was reading a gossip magazine talking about all the celebrities, what they were wearing, when their new perfume was coming out, who was dating whom, etc. She seemed to know an awful lot about all of them. And at one point her father said, ‘Who’s the Secretary of State?’ I suppressed a chuckle. The girl responded with a blank stare.
Even stranger than the girl not knowing the answer was that she was completely unashamed at the fact that she didn’t know. What does this illustrate? The media diverts our attention from what is truly important. We now know all there is to know about who’s in rehab and sharks off the coast of Florida or whatever couple is divorcing keeping us in a dumbed-down, altered state so that we don’t object very loudly.
At the same time that infotainment keeps us numb and uninformed, politics uses the concept of ‘terror’ to keep us complacent. With a slight of hand, they pass the Patriot Act chiseling away at our civil liberties, but the populace accepts it without much struggle because it’s keeping us “safe” from “terror”.
What are some ways diversionary tactics can be used to help us in business? And, maybe more importantly, how can we use our critical persuasion skills to protect ourselves when others are trying to persuade us?
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