First posted: 03 october 2009
Some people, like me, are addicted to videogames, there are some who use common drugs (trying to smoke even tea bags or ideating a system to create a sort of opium with the poor poppy seeds taken from the edge of a polluted road), some people are addicted to being stressed and there’re some who prefer massification. To tell you the truth, what, in my opinion, worries me most is the last group that I define: “men without qualities”.
Without the passive and destabilizing use of television, these people cannot survive, they can’t concentrate during the study, they can’t even fall asleep (probably because they need to be lulled by the soothing voice of Bruno Vespa - an italian anchorman of a tv talk show dedicated to politics, with politicians discussing and debating about various topics and subjects) and they aren’t able to find a solution if, by chance, their precious survival set is broken.
It’s not important what sort of programs they usually watch, it’s the action itself, thaat is being in front of a television, that makes them feel good, relax, entertaining them gently and giving them the possibility to freeze their brain, that passively absorbs material devoid of substance, or the possibility to talk with their friends, socialize, and then they chat about useless topics, wasting their time (for example, you could hear them saying “Who’s who? Is that person doing the right thing? Is that famous person behaving well in his/her personal life?” and things like that, mostly gossip stuff). It isn’t the single act of a person (who, perhaps, after working all day long, is tired and needs to freeze thoughts, desiring to free is mind and having fun) that I blame, but the reiterating routine and the looking for an action of incapable de-individualized people where the only desire is to immerge themselves in the confused and meaningless “helzapoppin” of the tv smoky fog everyday
I have the chance to observe groups of young people beyond my imaginary glass case where I place them: they live in a psychiatric hospital while I’m the researcher who takes notes, or, maybe, I’m a patient who secretly drinks a bit of “Milk corrected with mescaline (Milk plus)”, and the team of doctors try to bring me back to reality, unbearable for me (and I’m sure they would try to force me to accept the state of things, but they would miserably fail).
I need major themes, profound topics, depth, i am a seeker of intellectual efforts, but only books, and very few elected persons, lately, are able to share them with me: it’s a pain thinking that most people is trapped, blocked, frozen in a stall position where they cuddle themselves without consciousness.
In this situation, television becomes a paradigm of what I don’t want to approach, that is the android man, totally mechanic and cybernetic, compared to the true self, a human being fond of learning through art, books, travelling, etc.
Pasolini (and I’m sorry to talk about him because, too many people are deliberately manipulating his theories adapting them to their viewpoints and their frame of mind) realized what this medium was able to cause if used like a marketing “tool”. He wrote about television like a mean that, if badly oriented, generates the implosion and degradation of the tradition of our own idiom: today even journalists, in Italy, don’t know their language well.
The most disappointing thing is, however, reading an university essay and finding that: there is no consistency, the verb tenses change in every phrase or they’re omitted, there is no punctuation (maybe they think to be a new junior “Joyces”), there isn’t any knowledge of the syntax, and the spelling is to be deciphered or decrypted. We can blame teachers but this is a “disease deeply persistent and deadly” in the italian society: all people are suffering for it but they don’t do anything to remove it because they’re not interested in improving their own intellectual/cultural foundations, but they prefer to survive getting used to television programs.
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