The Media is the Massage

(With apologies to Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is The Massage”)

[Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies — from clothing to the wheel to the book, and beyond — are the messages themselves, not the content of the medium. In essence, The Medium is the Massage is a graphical and creative representation of his “medium is the message” thesis seen in Understanding Media.]

We tend to believe what the media tells us, yet it is controlled by multinationals, just as the government is. Thus it is neither objective nor honest.

The media tells us what to think; how to look and what to do

Because of the media attractive slim people are considered intelligent and the good guys and unattractive people villains

This is dangerous as psychopaths are usually attractive people

It also has us believing money is all that matters and if something is expensive it is good—this may have been so when there was skill  in craftsmanship 

I sometimes put the idiot box on in the morning –morning television is obviously sponsored by the meat industry

I switch off every time I am told how good pork is.

They strangely enough don’t tell us how horrific factory farming and the abattoirs are for these intelligent animals

One morning there was an interview with some one from Australian Wild Life explaining that feral cats are destroying our wild life. 

Humans definitely destroy more wildlife than feral cats.

Mining and real estate companies destroy trees and heritage bushland, thereby destroying the homes and food sources of our native animals and birds.

And then there’s road kill!

Recently a now ex friend asked me to drive him to Hindmarsh Island to dump a possum that was annoying his dog.

(His car was off the road)

I refused saying that I wasn’t moving an indigenous creature out of its territory.

He turned really nasty and got someone else to take him!

Possums being territorial will kill a possum that doesn’t belong. Even if this were not so the poor possum had no way of finding its way home over water.

People thoughtlessly destroying insects; mice; arachnoid; snails and even snakes (which they are not supposed to kill, but do) are destroying the ecology by killing so called pests.

The biggest problem is that there are too many humans on the planet.

Why we don’t have zero population control, I don’t know.

I was in the original GreenPeace in the 1970s (we were labelled “a dangerous radical group”) and the damage caused by the human plague was apparent then.

Attitudes to animals and minority groups have changed for the better in my life time. Hopefully humans will change before they destroy this beautiful planet.