In a functionally rational society, most people pass their entire lives ‘living’ through mass mediated constructions. Sunk in detached routines in their “real” lives, such mass mediated information provides the much sought after context that helps them make sense of their otherwise anomic lives. Lives are anomic because of rapid social change that describes advanced capitalism, where rapidly changing material conditions through technology never allow a lagging culture to “catch up”. The fact that ‘meaning’ and context is provided by the mass media ensures that stereotypes that it perpetuates for ulterior political motives will become the foundation of all human interaction. Such stereotypes ensure that selective observation, as logical fallacy, attains revelation-like 'religious' authority and stratifies people based upon class, race, gender, religion and nationality. Life lived within the confines of the mass-media, within a detached and alienated society also ensures that all conversations within the “real” world will involve the content of this mass media. There is nothing else to talk about because there is nothing else to life, no subjective culture or individual creativity elicits such attention or is as much 'fun' compared to mass mediated scripts, that often reduce everything to the lowest common denominator among people: food, sex and violence.

Within a structure that determines personal worth through pre-formed personality types, selected and given status based on their expediency to the elite in the economic sphere, all other personality types are denigrated. Establishing yourself as the ‘cool’ or sought after personality inevitably involves denigrating other personality types. The rapidly changing material conditions however ensure that 'ideal' personality types keep shifting as well. Therefore, regardless of the identity one adopts, it is always under threat within the workings of advanced capitalism. The only thing concrete and certain in such a world is self-fulfillment through the world of consumer products. However, the verification of identity these products offer is short lived due to both technological and status obsolescence which is ‘built-in’ so to speak to ensure continuous buying. This linking of identity with products transfigures itself into the world of human relationships as well, the majority of which, even the most intimate ones have become transitory and fleeting. Product obsolescence translates into relationship obsolescence, and a self that tragically never finds self-fulfillment in the long term.

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"The uneasiness, the malaise of our time, is due to this root fact: in our politics and our economy, in family life and religion- in practically every sphere of our existence- the certainties of the past have disintegrated or been destroyed and, at the same time no new sanctions or justifications for the new routines we live in, and must live in (out of necessity) have taken hold. So there is no acceptance and there is no rejection, no sweeping hope and no sweeping rebellion. There is no plan of life...For security's sake, he must strain to attach himself somewhere, but no community or organization seems to be his. This isolated position makes him excellent material for synthetic molding at the hands of popular culture (via the media)...As a metropolitan dweller, he is especially open to the focused onslaught of all the manufactured loyalties and distractions that are contrived and urgently pressed upon those who live in worlds they never made...." (Mills, C. Wright. 1951:16. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. NY: Oxford University Press).


Muhammed Asadi