Commodities are things produced for exchange, with a market value,
rather than for their intrinsic use or benefit.
Commodification prioritizes exchange value over use value,
meaning things are valued primarily for their potential to be sold and generate profit,
not for their inherent purpose or usefulness.
AI Overview
We’ll never know how many people have watched, mesmerized, the ‘breaking news’ detailing what had happened yesterday in Anchorage.
Otherwise put, we’ll never know how many people have watched exactly nothing.
On the other hand, there are some who know. How many people have already watched and how many continue to watch. The countless interpretations offered by the talking-heads regarding what had happened. Regarding the nothing which had been breaking the news all day yesterday…
What’s going on?
Until not so long ago – until Robert Murdoch has launched the first 24-hours news channel, Sky News, UK 1989 – ‘fresh information’ was provided to the general public mixed up with other ‘things’. TV channels used to air, some of them still do, a carefully choreographed mix of entertainment, sports, movies and news. And news…
TV watchers used to be treated as people. As individual human beings. With various tastes, indeed, but also with a common interest. A common interest in the well being of the place where they happened to live…
The common denominator uniting the audience was, even if never stated in plain language, the understanding that all of them cared for the important things. Country, values, tomorrow…society…
Not any longer.
Nowadays the audience is considered/treated as a herd of consumers.
How many times have you heard “welcome to the show” at the start of a news bulletin?
News bulletin which is meant to keep you riveted to the TV set for long enough so that you’ll be exposed to the commercial messages being ‘trafficked’ by the TV stations…
I argued in the previous post that democracy is a weeding out mechanism.
That in a functional democracy the informed citizen will, eventually, weed out inefficient politicians. Those who had allowed themselves to become ‘corrupted’. Not necessarily in the direct sense, as in taking bribes and all that. Political corruption takes many forms, all of them drastically diminishing the efficiency of government.
The informed citizen…
But what kind of information is currently available?
And, furthermore, who initiates the ordinary TV watcher in the fine art of watching the news?
Remember, in this context, that the ‘ordinary TV watcher’ is considered to be a ‘consumer’, no longer a ‘concerned citizen’.
And who are the people who know exactly how many viewers have watched yesterday’s news bulletins? And today’s interpretations of what had happened yesterday?
The ‘media watchers’, of course. Those who measure the audience for the sole purpose of extracting as much money from selling commercials as possible…
nicichiarasa 