Earworms, Clichés, and Manufactured Consent

Earworms, Clichés, and Manufactured Consent

or

What Would You Like on Your Nothingburger?
(inspired by a friend on Twitter)

 

I think earworms and clichés play a bigger role in society than we realize. I think anyone who takes to any form of popularized media knows this, and I think many of these entities use earworms and clichés deliberately.

This post is inspired by a friend's Tweet where they complained about news stations using the phrase "nothingburger" too much.

It has been documented thoroughly that there are gross and subtle ways by which all manner of media - published, broadcast, electronic, social - manufacture our consent. My little personal prickly and itchy feeling, my irritation that I've harbored in a primitive form for a long time and that has caused me to change my television viewing habits and opinions drastically from how I felt as a child, is that the mechanisms like earworms that implant ideas so strongly in our heads, like tunes we can't stop our brains from playing over and over, influence our own behaviors and mental processes beyond the mere annoyance that they, and excessively repeated expressions, cause.

People who understand our brains and behaviors, both individually and societally, have among their number those who are able to monetize and weaponize that knowledge. And people who strike down Fairness and Neutrality measures in publishing or broadcasting do so, I fear, hand in hand with such experts.

Hence my view emerged that in some ways, phenomena like pop music, viral phenomena, and sports events - generating millions of spectators and even participants - can be trial balloons, or to use another metaphor, can make us a test market just to verify the right kind of control to exert the right kind of power over us.

What's "the right kind of power"? Well, I'm sure you can come up with examples in your own mind of how the human race has been manipulated. You can come up with your own example of corrupt media, and of how we've all had the wool pulled over our eyes.

But when you come up with your own examples, bear in mind that you are part of that test market. You have experienced some of those trial balloons. You, and I, are the PRODUCT, as folks were telling us 'way back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It's enough to make you far more picky about pop culture consumption. I know that that's been the case for me - with some exceptions, of course. (See: Star Wars, Facebook, Twin Peaks.)

Those exceptions are how they can keep a foot in my door. Because it's hard to tell from a cliché, an earworm, or a viral phenomenon just whose creators are more "bad guys" than others: Who's trying to influence us in insidious ways, and manufacture our consent to make the world something other than what we might more sensibly, more reasonably, work to get?

Walking away from all of it is arguably foolish. Perhaps skepticism about most of it might seem to be overreaction as well. But we voted a monster into office - that's a cliche I myself notice now - and I think cliché and earworm are symptoms of how we accommodated such a manipulation into our lives and behaviors, to allow such a manufacture of our consent to have happened.