Harry Throssell

It is not uncommon to see young couples walking hand in hand while each chats away separately to other distant folk via the ubiquitous, insistent mobile phone. Hardly seems romantic. On public transport passengers make calls to announce they will be home in a few minutes, perhaps a warning the spouse should get the tea on and pour the drinks. Is it kindness or controlling? It certainly reduces uncertainty, fills the spaces.

It is the rare home where there is no television, sometimes one in every room. Many are never switched off during the day, some have mammoth-sized screens virtually impossible to ignore. A large proportion of the population gaze into computer screens at work or school, then again in study or bedroom at home in the evening and weekend for information, entertainment, to communicate with others known and unknown, near or distant. It is alleged many teenagers are not seen by the family after school because they are communing with the world via Face-book or whatever in their own room until they choose to go to bed. Youngsters accessing pornography is a worry to many parents.

Inevitably what someone somewhere chooses to post on these many screens is likely to influence what is the good life, what to think, how to vote, mostly what to buy. An electronic Big Brother, the all-seeing, all-controlling leader of the scarily oppressive ‘Oceania’ in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Whereas reading requires concentration television is often permanent background like wallpaper. Those who attend traditional church services make a positive decision to do so but mostly as a once weekly ritual for an hour. The TV may be on 24 - 7.

Even old-fashioned readers of newspapers or books find it difficult to resist the pull of this new creed. Undoubtedly we know through television more about wars and catastrophes in distant places in the world, in distant parts of Australia. The Internet has opened up new opportunities not only for the spread of information alongside government and traditional media sources, but also for conversations across the world. And there are still some media controllers with a commitment to the ethics of keeping the public informed objectively rather than simply selling goods.

But it’s also true much of the panoply of seductive modern media is tailor-made for propaganda, subtly spreading often unchallenged values in the interests of certain sections of the community for financial profit or to acquire political power. It is striking, for example, that on television there are regular daily bulletins of financial news of interest to those with stocks and shares, but there are only rare bulletins on the numbers in poverty, housing stress, homeless, on hospital waiting lists.

This is the New World, the New Word, Holy Writ. The altar of modern life is the electronic gadget: computer at work, school and home, mobile phone in the spaces between, for leisure the cinema. Whoever controls the screen controls the world, for good and for ill. How better to school the masses in how to spend their time, their money, what to think, what to prefer? How Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin would have welcomed such easy control of their populations’ cerebral processes.

There is a profound process going on here. Philosophers through the ages have maintained the human needs time and space to reflect on what is happening in the world, in the locality, in his or her life, breathing space to allow unconscious and subconscious ideas to emerge into awareness. To ponder, dream, write and read poems, tales and think-pieces, to stop and smell the roses. But this meditation space is now dangerously squeezed almost to oblivion by the many forms of electronic communication insistently pummelling the brain.

No doubt in times to come babies will be born with a phone as part of the ear, a mouse at the end of the arm.

Just as important as the means of communication is the message. Most forms of modern communication are laced with advertisements, selling goods. In some cases it seems the purpose of entertainment is to attract attention to what’s for sale. Even an important social issues program like SBS Television’s Insight is interrupted to show advertisements.

Take the invention of the motor-car. Initially the petrol engine mounted on four wheels gave those who could afford it greater freedom to travel, over much greater distances in shorter time. But now our towns are throttled often to a comatose state by the number of cars, most of them absurdly carrying only one person, every day the news includes deaths from crashes, frequently involving young people, taxes go increasingly towards more and more roads and bridges. And television programs showing what fun it is to take drive at dangerous speed with the inevitable risk of death. Are we intelligent beings or not? Are we any happier than in the days when the horse was the main form of transport and we could walk anywhere?

Much of life is understood by its portrayal in screen fiction. The police never turn a hair at viewing yet another battered or wasted body, they carry out lengthy interviews and never make a note, are frequently engaged in gun battles but never get a scratch, are young, good-looking, unmarried, never go home, rarely have children, and their professional partner is of the opposite gender. Or if older are quaint. In a boost for female emancipation most senior policemen are now women. In yarns generally you usually know from the beginning which good-looking single young woman is going to finish in the arms of which good-looking single young man, whatever adventures go on in between.

In the Middle Ages, for several centuries millions of people in Europe, mainly women, were burnt to death or drowned after being ‘scientifically’ diagnosed as witches and therefore a threat to society. Then it was discovered the science was mistaken, they had brainwashed themselves. We always have to question what we think we know and what governments and other authorities want us to believe. Brainwashing is still in fashion, and easier because of the ubiquity of the modern silver screen. Modern society’s main cultural value is to become richer than your neighbour - which is why in very rich countries like Australia and USA, there are those defeated in the competition for whatever reason, the poor, who may struggle to survive. What we as a society don’t believe in is sharing.

Take the problem of obesity. Australia is reported to be the fattest nation in the world with nine million people overweight and life expectancy, which has been increasing for a hundred years, now expected to go into reverse. Australians are going to die younger. According to nutritionist Rosemary Stanton and numerous other health authorities, takeaway or fast food, which is tasty and cheap, has a high proportion of fat, salt and sugar, and therefore has to shoulder at least some blame for the fatness epidemic associated with particular diseases contributing to earlier death such as diabetes. And yet in spite of this scientific research it is almost impossible to avoid fast foods advertisements. Not surprisingly parents in Toowoomba are protesting because the local authority has approved the building of a new fast food outlet next to a school.

It says much about ultimate values when some of the richest billionaires in Australia, USA and elsewhere are in gaol for cheating, trying to acquire even more wealth, land, property, perhaps to outdo the billionaire down the road. In the SBS show How A Geek Changed The World we heard how Bill Gates gave $25 billion to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates charitable foundation. Warren Buffett has added more billions to the fund. Fortunately Bill and Melinda use the money to improve the health of many who would otherwise have miserable lives and die at an early age.

But there remains an ethical question. There are now several people with greater wealth than Gates or Buffett, so we can only hope they are planning similar ways to share it. They may not. If one person controls $50 billion, that is $50 billion not controlled by others.

Competition as a way of life has its extreme forms. Some compete by shooting or spearing tribal rivals to acquire a food source for the family. It may be to gain control of the lucrative drugs market (which of course is only lucrative because so many people, including the respectable middle class, use the stuff). Or it may be to sell increasingly powerful bombs to gain possession of the world’s oil. And half the global population is struggling to survive.

At least when the church was dominant there was, at least in most traditions, consideration for the poor. Now even in the world’s richest national economy, USA, there are very large numbers of the very poor, giving rise to crime, a large prison population, and often very poor access to health services. This because the general philosophy is to compete, not to share, and this creed is promulgated via the new church, the electronic screen.

You have to wonder if youngsters become immune to killing and wounding when they spend many hours playing wall-to-wall computer war games.

The church in its myriad forms is still there, of course, but it is tough competing with wall to wall commercial screens. There are of course outstanding servants of the community, some well known like Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, but also many humble religious people like the nuns who work to assist young women trapped into the sex trade.

Then general ethic of much public discourse, as exemplified by politicians, football coaches and others who get access to the screen, is to be tough, competitive, to see the world as struggles between enemies, never to be so ‘weak’ as to cooperate.