I skimmed over a thread on facebook for some reason about climate change. Anyway it got me thinking about how both sides to the arguement have people, studies and evidence they claim backs their side. The problem, as I see it anyway, for the average person is that we’ve moved into an era where marketing and advertising has warped peoples ability to take at any sort of face value anything said by anyone.
For instance every new dishwashing liquid, powder, powerball, etc,... is a massive break through that will leave your glasses sparkling and have been since the dishwasher was invented. Surely there is some point where dishwashing reagents moved from being unable to completely clean glasses to an a time when they could. Meaning that at some point in the past dishwashing reagent vendors were lying about their products ability and at some point past that (possibly in the future) they were lying about improving their product. This the properties assigned to the product via advertising are not linked to the actual product.
See what has happened is that the marketing of a product isn’t actually linked to the product. Ie; it’s branding. Which appears to be giving products properties not linked to their actual real world properties. In 2003 movie The Corporation, Naomi Klein said “the corporations of the future do not produce products. They produce brand meaning. The dissemination of the idea of themselves is their act of production.”. Which appears atleast to me to mean the same thing.
Now with dishwashing reagents you can test it. Buy the product, test it out, see if it works, if it doesn’t go back to the old. However if your looking at climate change how do you test that as an average citizen? Not only that but how do you test the solutions and know they are the right ones?
The obvious answer is to have someone checking for bullshit. The only problem is that the people who’ve been entrusted to do that in the past, the media, either are incapible of it or just have no interest in it because they’ve become part of the system of branding. See Jon Stewarts crossfire interview. I mean really when was the last time you saw anything that even came close to journalism in any major newspaper or major tv station? If you say Fox news, TT or ACA or anything along those lines hang your head in utter shame.
Sadly considering that dictionary.com defines Journalism as “writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing” I can only guess that society is going to have to come up with some new institution to fill the void abandoned by major media organisations.