"Who and what are the media? First of all, it's anyone who carries a camera. Beyond that, it is the press, television, movies, radio, and now the Internet. These are merely mediums of communication. People carry on as if television sets were entities of evil or as if reporters and producers of programming were members of some sinister conspiracy, but why blame them? Our real problem is that these communication tools are used for certain economic purposes. TV is the worst offender. It isolates people and turns them into passive consumers...." -- Larry Harvey

He then cites examples, statistics, suggesting how "Bonding Social Capital" is being lost in America today. In the United States, the average house has 2.4 TV sets which are on an average of 7 hours a day; not necessarily to watch, often to listen "If only to listen to the laugh track on a sitcom, so as not to feel alone,"

The best minds, he asserts, have applied the science of marketing and the media of mass culture to produce "Artificial states of experience," that produce "Artificial States of being; and the only thing that is sacred is being." We watch Projected Images of others being and doing, which isolate us from our innermost needs, because we are not involved personally being, doing and becoming connected to other people around us. We substitute the attainment of material objects for the experience of being. "And so, we kill ourselves" says Harvey.

Zpub

"We lead lives that are deadeningly passive. Everyone is sorted out in a seperate stall, like cattle in a feed-lot. Every time anything like real culture is produced by a creative community it's expropriated and flogged in the media and turned into a cliche - it used to be six years, now it's six months it's getting down to six weeks." -- Larry Harvey

"I play a game with my son. I turn off the sound of commercials on TV, and then we guess what is being sold. The results are oftentimes astonishing. Images of security and happiness, pride and potency, community and love glide smoothly across the screen. Very typically it's only at the end that you discover that these imagined mental states are attached to a brand of cheese, automobile or an oil company. The commodification of our culture, a final phase of late 20th century capitalism, has only gradually become apparent. Beneath each roof in every house, there exist people held in isolation from the world at large. Like those famous prisoners in Plato's cave, these internees are given only spectral shadows to experience. They stare steadily at entertaining images and by degrees mistake them for palpable things and real experience. They endure this vicarious state from day to day, from year to year, now throughout entire lifetimes, in a state of isolation from the sunlit world and from one another.

Modern demographics have also affected the subtlety of this image making. A lifestyle, with its panoply of status coded goods, is a commodified version of what we used to call a way of life. Marketers have learned to sort us into separate stalls like cattle in a feed lot. Using focus groups, it's endlessly possible to invent new and appealing lifestyles which give us the illusion we are making lifestyle statements and are members of imaginary peer groups. That these fashions require no participation in the life of a community is not the concern of the merchant.

We have become a nation of posers. It's not a life that's lived or shared, but an imitation of life, a kind of commercial for self. It's as if we ourselves are now TVs and broadcast images. America is now wealthier than at any other time in its history, yet all around us and within us a feeling of lurking anomie persists. The spread of materialistic values has contributed to a moral coarsening and a growing cynicism in our country. Within a manipulative world all motives seem venal, all efforts illusory. But at a deeper level, it is the commodification of imagination itself, the moral passivity, the social isolation, the angst that is generated by living in a solipsistic world of fraudulent satisfactions that is producing the greatest evil. Critics call for better values. Yet to even entertain a moral value one must first be someone in a world beyond one's self. The vital here and there of spiritual experience is disappearing from our world. The world, in some nauseating fashion, no longer appears to belong to itself." -- Larry Harvey