> I don't remember the exact numbers, but the average American watches 4-8
> hours of TV a day, and something like 98% of U.S. households (including
> around 90% of poor households) have TVs. It's the way most people get their
> news. It's a major way fashion and popular culture are disseminated.
And all that news, fashion, and infotainment is chockful of contradictions, antagonisms, conflicts and resistances. Just a fantastic laboratory for dialecticians wanting to sharpen up their concepts for the class struggle -- one good example here is the PC videogame industry. Just as the workstation is being blindsided by the lowcost PC, so too is the US gaming industry (mostly software driven) being blindsided by East Asian electromultis, Sony is packing its next Playstation with 200-MHz chips, Matsushita is entering the gaming market via Panasonic, etc. The ideological response by the US software professionals has been, interestingly enough, a kind of technolibertarianism: thus the violence and chaos of Doom, Quake etc., where solitary players made mincemeat out of hordes of aliens. The contradiction is, these games are mostly about dodging, ducking, and sports-related targeting, the violence is very superficial. The average hockey game has more real violence than a Quake 2 session. The latest twist is, games are becoming scripted by vast teams of specialized producers, instead of lone geniuses, like id Software's John Romero (who has since left id, and no, that's not a typo, the "id" is in lowercase). Valve's superb "HalfLife" is a good example here: just brilliant game design, but also a clever story, which totally inverts the usual evil aliens theme. You begin to understand, late in the game, that the "alien invasion" isn't quite what it seems...
And then there's the great intro sequence, where you're in the laboratory, doing an experiment. The machinery powers up, and one of the scientists says via the intercom, "Um... it's probably nothing, but I'm picking up a slight discrepancy... but, well, no, it's well within acceptable limits." Kind of like Greenspan discussing the stock market: you know, at that moment, that all hell is about to break loose. What follows is the storm and fury of the global marketplace, unleashed.
-- Dennis