The strange
homogenization of Americans
In the past, family and teachers were the most influential ingredients in children's lives. Today that has changed. The influence of mass culture seems to be the most dominant influence on children and on adults. The major dispenser of mass culture is mass media.
By the age of 18, the average teenager has spent 11,000 hours in classroom and 22,000 hours before a TV. That same person has done approximately 13,000 school lessons and watched more than 75,000 commercials. By age 35, that same person has had fewer than 20,000 school lessons but watched 45,000 hours of TV and seen nearly two million commercials
This attentiveness to mass media has had tremendous impact on how Americans think and view the world. Because Americans are so inundated with media images, they are powerfully manipulated by media, and often allured into strange behavioral patterns.
The Razor Scooter is a small example of the powerful effect mass media have on us. A simple toy for children--an object we once constructed ourselves as children--was advertised to the extent it took on a dimension and life of its own. And because we are in a period of heightened prosperity, many spoil their children with an overabundance of everything. The Razor Scooter, was bought by many Americans because children request what they see on TV. But another element came into the mix: those scooters were supposed hip, cool, the scooters that Bill Gates children would have. Therefore, everyone's children had to have one to demonstrate that all things are well financially in their lives.
And when there are no children, we spoil ourselves with overabundance, rationalizing it by such claptrap as, "I'm worth it." Of course, the media we have so slavishly given ourselves to too have programmed that into us.
Fortunately or unfortunately for Americans, we have been able to satisfy all of our needs so completely that we now define luxuries as needs. The response to cellular phones was on the same order as the scooters: cell phones were marketed as tools to make one happy, connected, important, educated, sophisticated, etc., and Americans have almost gone after them with wild abandonment.
Now come the deadly toys only adults can play with: the SUV's. The sports utility vehicle is a truck that seemingly calls irresistibly to the suave, urbane, savvy, and the in crowd. It is a truck designed to be used on farms and rough terrain. Yet most who buy these vehicles, dressing them up with sporty wheels and affectations, will never see a back road, a farm, or a mountain.
These are urban cowboys who are cowboys because they have been conditioned by our all-powerful media to be individualistic, but always the same. And a cowboy needs a horse and a gun. These trucks are their horses--the bigger the horses, the bigger their guns. And need I say anything about the sexual connotation of all of this? These Sports utility vehicles travel through city streets doing more damage to the ozone and environment than one cares to imagine, and they get less miles to a gallon than they should, as our cowboys scoot from place to place in the city!
This imitative behavior is understandable in a youth's learning process, but Americans have vaunted themselves as free spirited, independent thinkers, individualistic, etc. Yet what seems to have happened is we have been homogenized and conditioned to react in the same way. And we do not realize we are behaving in a predictable and programmed manner.
Our need, as Maslow identified it, to be actualized has been contorted so that actualization is really little more than imitation. And when many of us can't imitate, we feel a sense of low self esteem. But our imitation is always the inexpensive, crude one--conspicuous consumption.
Whatever is advertised as an item the beautiful, successful people have, another American must get. And always we accept the media's definition of beautiful and successful people. It was refreshing to read Mataire's report on an African Miss Malaika Contest where beauty is defined differently than the Western standard that is so gaudily vaunted everywhere.
It is not odd that our heroes and beautiful (?) people are of questionable social significance--movie stars, athletes, etc. Because many have access to money, and few clues of what to do with it, they buy things and parade themselves in their consumption of things. And the media picks up their trail, announces their trail, and we make it our trail.
Although Americans are now more educated, we cannot seemingly think critically enough to perceive our strangeness. It is strange when parents buy their children's toys for their own benefit and social status; it is strange when adults claim normality as they play with their children's toys more voraciously than their children; it is strange when we value cell phones as best friends and protectors; it is strange when a person walks along the street holding a dead phone simply in pretense, or when he/she announces the most private matter in the most public places; and it is strange when we buy an object we cannot afford and cannot use to make an anonymous onlooker think things are well with us; it is strange to spend enormous sums of money buying items that are counter-intuitive and outright harmful. But this is the way of America, and too many African Americans have bought into the strangeness of America.
What ever happened to that individualistic
Americanism? Have we not become mass media imitators of pop culture? Have
we not lost an important part of ourselves? Was it not our ability to
think independently that distinguished us as Americans? Surely, the individualism
of Black Americans allowed us to keep our heads when all around us were
losing theirs. But now, have we too become strangely homogenized? This
strangeness is not good! []
Gibbs staff and FA Jones