Opium of the Masses

All of a sudden, and after only minutes, I forgot what exactly I was watching on YouTube for a while, I was really stunned, how could I forgot what "content" was I watching after such an infinitesimally short period of time of "consuming" it? is my memory that bad? are these symptoms of Alzheimer in a young age? Then I remembered a book I read about that I thought might have some answers, and boy I was glad that memory of the book popped-up in my mind, the book is titled Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman, and just a read of the Wiki page of it cleared (and relieved) and answered a lot of questions. The whole premise of the book is "that important intellectual arguments, news, politics, religion..etc are diluted favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment", in other words "Form excludes Content". Neil Postman takes the television news as his prime concern, but that could easily be applied to the YouTube endless "Content Creators", even to a worse degree than what Postman analyzed and diagnosed with Television. So, there was not much content to remember there, if any, that's why information does not stick, it is not hard-fought for by going through the painful process of learning, and actively being involved and interacting with it, it was a mere entertaining video, passively consumed, that you forget once you move away form the screen.

After a while, and because of the addictive nature of Social Media, I was scrolling through some articles on WeChat's Subscribed Sites, and although I am actually on the articles section, WeChat pushed me some of its videos, I guess it was an attempt to get a chunk of the popular short-video market that TikTok has started. One of these videos got my attention, the thumbnail was of big protest somewhere in the world, and it was from a semi-official well-known Chinese news website, it got my attention because it is rare of an official Chinese media outlet to show videos of protests of any kind anywhere. So, I resisted but LO and Behold, I clicked, and it was a video of an endless sea of people in Buenos Aires celebrating Argentina's win of the World Cup two days ago. And I was stunned again, The Entertainment Sport industry was so successful in amassing all of these people to celebrate something that no one of them is getting anything out of, and even though Argentina is now crisis-ridden, people seem to have forgotten and just went celebrating to the streets, or maybe that is one of the reasons that they are celebrating in the first place? to blow some steam off, and forget the bitter reality. I remembered a video of Noam Chomsky talking about it in a radical yet somehow sadly true way. The Entertainment Industry seems to be the Opium of the masses.