Health and Diet Scottish Recipes Ferret for Ferrets


Re: [pf] Fool's gold & real gold (Green strengths)
by Betsy Barnum
26 November 2000 01:39 UTC

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Kaleopono wrote:

> The media is a powerful tool of impersonal, mass communication.  Universal
> use of this tool as a very convenient, shortcut way for professional
> managers to manipulate mass behavior is at the core of the environmental,
> economic, social and cultural disintegration and human malaise that we
> lament.  The mass media is part and parcel of the illness itself.

I taught one session of a community ed class in October about globalization--the
topics covered were how corporations got so much power, the growth of the global
economy, globalization's impact on the environment, agriculture and food, labor
issues and health care (guess which one was my topic!). The seventh session was
a chance for the students to do their own presentations and then a "nominal
group process" [?] in which the group brainstorms a list of issues and then
everyone votes for their top 5 with sticky dots (I've also heard this process
called "dot-mocracy"). ;-) We brainstormed ideas to answer the questions, "What
needs to change?" and "What can we do to start the changes?"

I tell you about this because the group (about 20 adults of various ages and
degrees of awareness--one said he came in a confirmed capitalist and left much
closer to the Green values) largely agreed on what needs to change and what to
do. And their number one idea was create alternative media. Not just use them as
news sources, but create them. An indication, I think, of the clarity with which
this group of folks see how the corporatization of mass media makes them, the
media, not just unreliable for finding out what's really going on and what it
might mean, but a deeply embedded part of the problem and a very important thing
to address.

Betsy