"Unfortunately, the media has a knack for jumping onto anything that will cause panic in the public eye." -You truly captured a very imperative point with this statement. I alluded to this fact, the media's strong grasp on the people's minds, in my more recent blog posts, and am glad that someone else agrees with me.
Although this discussion can easily move into specifics, I'd like to analyze it from a more general point of view. The larger aspect that I want to get at is the overarching power of media. With the use of advertising and mere media coverage, apocalyptic discourse for example, has pervaded much common talk in all sorts and types of cultures. This phenomenon that people seem to be obsessed with has spread worldwide, into each and every one of our homes. Depending on our sources, we are usually "fed" with information about the topic through a bias point of view. For example, if the subject arises at Church, we are taught about it from the church's perspective and we learn about their stance, thus affecting our own ideas about the topic. There are a myriad of existing theories in circulation globally- Just like you said: “The "Apocalypse" as it is often called, will wipe out the entire population of the earth in some grand fashion and that will be that. There are so many ways that it could happen such as zombies, a meteor, computers taking over, aliens, global warming, nuclear weapons, biker mice from mars, etc.”
As a human race, with the capability to reason, how have we degraded such capabilities and allowed the media monsters to seduce us with their lies? Zombies? Biker Mice? None of this sounds the least bit logical. So how has media for centuries now continued to have such a strong hold over people and their ideals?
How have they found the power and created our norms, stated our values, and set expectations for almost everything? Perhaps this is too grand of a question to even begin answering but I believe that they have used a wide array of weapons and covert tactics to do so. With humanity's willingness to believe and trust in many things, the media has won their fight. With this in mind, I would like to argue that religions have been used as a platform off which the media has based their norms. For example, they can exclude certain cultures in a society due to it not being allowed or pronounced righteous by the bible (homosexuality as a prime example). In doing so, the media has brainwashed many people into thinking "is this ethical?" rather than "is this rational?"
Our quick to accept and resistance to questioning the values we as a society have set in place, has led to many problems, ones which might just lead to the...end of the world.
-Arina
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