Month: July 2023

The News Is The News

~ MKW Publishing ~ 2 Comments

It’s taken a strange turn, the world of information and ‘news’. Reminding me of Casualty, the TV series. Which I used to enjoy as a kid, the drama, the tension, the NHS being presented as heroes. Good bit of programming, in more ways than one. But it was a good watch, for a time. I started to go off it when a change to the set up happened, and it took me a while to notice. It slowly stopped being about the person the accident was going to happen to, or had happened to and shifted away from the ‘victims’, to focus on the staff. The affairs, the dramas, the back-stabbing etc. It became a weird soap opera, rather than a medical drama. And although I spent time watching soap operas too in my youth, the constant, crappy and hectic drama of fictious people eventually made me wonder why I wasted time watching it. So stopped. As you get older, you start to see a lot more of that hectic drama in real life and people, so no need for a fictional version to run alongside that. But by switching the set-up to be about the staff rather than the patients lost me, it was no longer interesting.

Anchorman 2 – the film. I liked both of them, funny and quite ridiculous but the sequel was interesting. Showing how on a basic level, when you can’t get the scoop, or find any real news to report, you either make it up – or you be the news. The news becoming the news. And we were on the brink of it, after we went for multiple 24-hour news channels, more newspapers than you really need, constant drivel and information intermingled and filtered through to the masses. And filtered it is, even the instantaneous internet world is edited and filtered, checked and restricted. So, there is still an overall editor calling the shots and deciding what is fit for public consumption. Or not in some cases, but they go with it anyway. No longer on the brink though, corporations have fully crossed over into being part of it rather than just reporting it. Weirdly though, not because they don’t have real news to report, of that there is plenty, but it doesn’t quite fit the narrative that corporate forces want people to follow.

And as we know, once you become the observed, you are no longer the observer, and you can’t be both. So, the influence that newspapers, TV stations and faces that represent them is dwindling and being redefined with everything else. Those faces no longer command respect, as we know they are just the mouthpieces of the media machine, and are the stupid ones for maybe not seeing it before, thinking they were just there to ‘let us know’ what’s going on. Hardly ever giving thought to the why, just blindly watching news and reading papers, seeing headlines and ‘paying attention’ as they call it. Being aware of the world around you, or something like that. But knowing now, it was an awareness steeped in falsities and of what someone else wanted me to know or be aware of.

For years we have had invasions of privacy though on their part, investigations into people, well known and otherwise, for exposes, scoops and front-page news. However, it seems to have taken a strange turn in the latest round of the news being the news. And when it’s their own, or them being used for news fodder, suddenly it becomes a topic to discuss about rights and privacy. And it is a problem and strange part of society that we have, that people feel the need to tear people down, gossip about others, spread rumours, or just plain old humiliate someone – by way of a publication no less. Why are we like that as a species? Taking delight in others misfortune and wanting to see people fail, hoping instead you make it? And then what? Have everyone wishing you had failed instead of being happy for you? It’s an odd thing, and I get a smile on my face when I see someone else do good, or have a happy moment, so when trying to imagine what it must be like to see the same thing and feel hate or have a mean feeling towards it, is a difference I can’t get on board with.

Yet it’s one that has been cultivated. You’ve Been Framed comes to mind here, and I laughed like many others for the silly misfortune that befell people, slapstick, I guess. The presenter of that show had another that I wasn’t so comfortable with, Beadles About. It was good, but painful, and I really felt for the people being wound up and tricked. And really, I found it hard to reconcile that we would cause people untold stress and worry, just for ‘entertainment’. All laughing at the end when they revealed it was all a joke, but there being a strange tension of ‘but what if they had died? What if they had flipped out and hurt someone?’ I didn’t enjoy watching it in the end, as it was screwing with what I believed were real people, their lives and their emotions. That wasn’t entertainment for me personally, and carried over into other programming. Once you can see it’s a set-up, or people are being used beyond what they think they are there for, it becomes painful to watch. Just like the news. So, no longer there for reporting what is going on, they are there to enact a painful script and are being used for purpose, thinking they are there for something else possibly, or are complicit, either way it’s a struggle to watch and listen anymore. And just like I mentioned in my article Early News, why is it really necessary that we are pummelled with information, updates and stats from chosen countries all over the world on a daily basis anyway? So, again and as with much these days, it comes back to what purpose does it serve and why…

(c) K Wicks

Digging for Gold, or Freedom?

~ MKW Publishing ~ 3 Comments

We all know the term ‘Gold Digger’, don’t we? And we all think of the shallow, money driven harlot looking to exploit whoever she can for financial gain. Mostly, that is what I have thought anyway, and I believe others have too. But a few things recently have made me realise how many grades of it there are, and how those came to be. And I will admit, there will always be those who don’t ever want their own, they want and expect someone else to provide, so will be just a straight up, good old-fashioned digger.

But through various obstacles placed there by the powers that be, women were tied into this set up through societal expectations and restrictions. So, which came first? It would seem in my mind that it was the restrictions that led to the expectations, because women weren’t able to provide for themselves in certain ways for the longest time, so were railroaded into having to seek out a ‘provider’. Single mothers, stigma, can’t have a bank account, aren’t allowed to have the same opportunities in employment, voting and rights generally. And this is where I guess it wasn’t really as easy and straightforward as they might have wanted it. Because women weren’t content to just have to wait for a man, or be owned by their husband, or need a male signatory to do anything financial, so made a certain amount of fuss about it. Once grown up and into the adult world, it seems an odd way of trying in infantilise and belittle women, but it seems it was felt.

Keep them in place by legal means, because otherwise they would want to have similar freedoms and options, and what then? Might men have to up their game, and not rely on it being a necessity to have a partner? Because even after things got better, and women were given the same ‘freedoms’ financially, they switched it up a bit and made it so that one income wasn’t enough, so you can have freedom, but not for very long. Everybody in the family ends up working, and both people become dependent on each other. Then they have children, and that is a financial burden many now can’t face, but that’s ok, the government had an idea. Rather than make life affordable for people and families, they gave hand-outs to help you make ends meet. Instead, it just makes more dependent on the state, keeping them in the never-ending cycle of time and money, taxes and top ups.

But back to digging for gold, because the goalposts have changed there too haven’t they? Not just because there appears to be more pots to dig around in, of varying size, but because there are new ways for women to provide for themselves. Well, not new, but a new version of it. I guess the nicest way I can put it, is prostituting themselves online for money. OnlyFans and sites of that nature, I hear the name a lot these days, and kind of chuckle to myself a bit, thinking back to the days of top shelf mags and seedy looking shops with covered up windows. How the industry was always there, but a bit more lurking in the background, and also had shame and stigma attached to it funnily enough. Yet these days, it’s a strange thing to see it encouraged by ‘the media’ as empowering, and it shows women are taking control of their lives. I see something different however, and it seems more like some women taking advantage of an available way to be in control of their own income, using what I guess they see as skills and assets, and technically that is correct. It’s another way in modern society to pay your way, and as it’s not just for women, you could say there is equality there too. So, you can make you own pot of the gold these days, without having to dig someone else’s, but the tools are still the same aren’t they?

It’s the restrictions that are different, which in turn push through changes within the set up. The ripple effect but with people, families and society, felt over a couple of generations yet not entirely noticed. Subtle changes to the way people are allowed to manoeuvre through their lives, creating obstacles and hoops for everybody with your schedule set from birth to death now it would seem. Nursery, school, higher education, work, more work, your place in society set up for you and around you as you grow. And if you try and work your way round it, they change it, or now and again they let a few slip through the net and leave them to have a peaceful uninterrupted life. Everybody else is gradually trapped in the drama and contrived set-up of society, mentally at first, and then physically as they get to you. So, where we find ourselves now, in this modern fast-moving scene with everything at our fingertips, more options that we have ever had before and people scrabbling over a few pence thrown down from the upper echelons. Thinking it seems as though this is a new gold rush, technology being the facilitator making people digital money, but for what? Wanting you to want to be rich, when they hold the keys to how much you can have so you never actually will be. Or is it because so many people have now seen through the strange orchestrated moves they make to screw people over and make it harder? Who knows, I suspect they don’t care as they know we are so involved that we don’t know how to walk away. So, while it may seem that it’s just wealth and richness people are wanting when they dig for that gold, I now see it as sometimes they are just digging for freedom, away from the obstacles and restrictions that have been constructed around us from the day we were born. But like Truman in the film The Truman Show knowing something really isn’t right and yet being like the patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, because even though we know that we know, we all still kind of choose to be here…

(c) K Wicks