“But when you meet/A friendly horse/Would you communicate by mo-o-o-o-orse. . .”

Ok. So how many of you have watched this video at least five times?  Ten?  Or for the trolling fanatics, the looped 10-hour version?  For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about (where’ve you been?), I’m talking about a campy music video called “The Fox” that went viral over the internet about four months ago.  

The creators are a pair of brothers from Norway who made as a joke to promote their new variety show.  As of today, the video has garnered over 370 million hits on YouTube.  That’s more than the entire population of U.S. and then some, and all of them have watched this 4-minute video at least once, yours truly included.  Can you see the problem with this?  We spend so much time browsing YouTube videos, Facebook, or Tumblr that we don’t spend nearly half that amount watching the news or other educational media. 

Before you stop reading, I just want to say this isn’t a rant about how our generation is oh so consumed by the media that we might start WWIII . . . by simply not participating in anything.  No, I am one of you; I love The Fox video, and I am as guilty as any for not being updated on what’s going on in the world.  Who cares about the protests in Ukraine when you can watch Justin Bieber take a sobriety test?  We naturally avoid the things that bore us; we just want to have fun and play pee-ka-boo.  Afterall, our own amusement is of utmost importance and that everyone else, the media included, should scramble for our attention.  And scramble, they did.  The media wants our viewership, and they will do anything to grab hold of our eyes.

What this creates for us is a never-ending need to be entertained.  As I learned in my Journalism class, the media does not satisfy needs; it creates them.  We develop addictions to TV shows, movies, or games because we become engrossed in the storylines and invested in the characters.  When I asked a friend of mine about the role of the media in her life, she said it is a means of “escapism”, a way to be transported to a different reality where you can temporarily forget all your worries.  It’s simply a very expensive, long-term form of sedation, and as Neil Postman famously said in Amusing Ourselves to Death, our addiction for entertainment takes away our ability for rational discourse.  And such rational discourse is a prerequisite for reforms and social change in our community and the government.  However, when we become too preoccupied with entertainment media to care about what’s happening in the news, our silence on important policies will be taken advantage by whoever is in charge.

We know from going to school that not all the information are easily digestible; in fact, most are barely edible.  The information that are truly valuable to us in the long run will rarely play the jester; it isn’t stuffed with money by big media corporations to do so.  These are the things that make up the bane of our existence as a student; just the mentioning of research articles, textbook readings, equations, or in-depth analysis would make even the strong-hearted student tremble with fear.  But think about all the knowledge that you’re glad that you have, things that helped you better understand the world, such as how the properties of sunlight and water interact to make the sky blue.  Was it necessarily interesting to learn?  The value of anything worth knowing lies within itself, and we need to get past our revulsion with the mundane in order to attain it.

Since the advent of the internet, knowledge is no longer in the hands of the educated elite; we can Google anything and find answers within seconds.  We have a choice in the content that we consume.  As a college student, it might be difficult to even find time to look at the newspaper or read the headlines, and after a busy day, you just want some pure entertainment, and that’s understandable.  But imagine living your ideal life and working at your dream job five or ten years from now.  Now think about whether the media you’re choosing to explore contributes to the skills and knowledge that your ideal self would have.  The next time that the limbic part of your brain wants the immediate satisfaction of consuming provocative media, remember the words of Socrates: “To find yourself, think for yourself.”