ok, i can't watch television anymore. i had been hanging on to national geographic and the like, but i've recently determined that it's all crap. not even the educational stuff is really educational anymore. the narration is dumbed down and dramatized, and if they need to re-enact something, it's enitrely too obviously done to attract attention for commercials.

and then there's everything else on tv. at least on the major networks, it's a scary mesh of propoganda and programming. haha. okay, don't go that far erika, take a step back. let's just say i feel insulted by everything. the audiences on "live" shows. the commercials. the products. the way things are advertised. the shows themselves. granted, there are some worthwhile shows out there, untainted by that crap, but the commercials are still revolting.

the daily show is on now. that's okay.

but dear god everything else.

i think the next step in my campaign, after my now infamous "burn your clocks!" diction, will be to "burn your televisions!" that one will be harder to get people to agree with.

[in case you missed out on my burn your clocks bit, let me briefly explain it:

one thing, above all, dictates our lives: time. human divisions of time. completely turns your body against its nature, makes it ignore its own biological clock for the sake of following a schedule someone other than the body's owner has determined is important. before industrialism, clocks werent good for much other than telling monks when to pray; no one used them. and then: organized labour. block scheduling. assembly lines. consumerism explodes. education becomes driven to achieve the goal of getting a job in the western capitalistic dog eat dog world. ultimately: credit cards, debt, a soulless society more concerned with buying the latest trend and keeping up with the dates & times assigned to them despite what their bodies are capable of. the result: stress, add, heart attacks, anxiety problems, skyrocketing depression. the solution? burn your clocks.

that's the short version anyway.]

i guess i've come to rely on the internet so much for my news, for my world view, that i'd forgotten what exactly tv was like. as it turns out, it sucks.

maybe i'm crazy, i don't know, but it really does seem like propoganda to me. of course not all of it is intentional propoganda, but it still counts. it's still an incentive to continue buying into modern culture. perhaps the people who created these shows, ads, products don't think that they're doing that, but ultimately they're all owned by the same people somewhere along the line, and they know what they're doing.

i really hate the advertisements though.

sorry, i'm not really in any mood to try and explain this to anyone but myself.

i'll tell you one thing though: i'm so glad yahoo just switched back over to its old format. i don't know if it's going to stay that way, or even if you know what i'm talking about, but their new set up annoyed me. trying entirely too hard to be trendy and all mac-like... and what was dead center on the page? their featured news story, which was generally something celebrity related, or something equally unimportant, and right next to that, a bright, colourful, flasy advertisement. all the useful components of the website were marginalized: the search bar discreetly stuck in up top, your account information buttons slide in towards the bottom of the window on the right hand side, the news buried underneath their featured crap, and the yahoo tools, discreetly listed, along the left hand column.

it was insulting. i hope it stays gone.

i guess that's what happens when disney owns yahoo! perhaps they're trying to move it away from being a search engine/internet tool master and make it into that and a myspace kinda thing. maybe myspace is the wrong classification. i'm not sure exactly what to call it, but they were starting to feature user crap more often. example: the stupid question & answer feature thing. i don't know if someone is actually writing a column on these stupid questions, because i refused to dumb myself down like that, but the fact that it existed, while maybe useful in some eyes, really seemed to me like just another way to "connect" with people.

and that kevin sites reporter feature they have? that really annoys me. it tries to appear as a good thing, like by following these conflicts in the world and writing about the stories behind them they'll be able to incite people to help out and change things, but if you actually read anything it's all fairly one sided, and slanted toward an american point of view. of course that's allowed, i mean, it is an american production, but don't claim to be otherwise. don't try and pass yourself off as respectable in an attempt to attract more business to your website by attracting the war news crowd. the people who want to read about places in other corners of the world and how they're in bad shape, and how the only good parts are that american businesses are investing in them, or something.

fuck that.

this is why i read independent news sources, and foreign news. any news has the capacity to be slanted toward a certain point of view. any fact can be... it's when news stops being factual and starts being cultural that you have a problem. or, y'know, government controlled. that's problematic too.

but anyway, back to my original point: television sucks. state controlled media sucks. racism sucks. sexism sucks. homophobia sucks. xenophobia sucks. arrogance sucks. capitalism sucks.

the list goes on. i don't think i want cable anymore. they don't need my money.

now, to convince kevin.

erika