In the documentary “Barbershop Punk” (available on Netflix), Ian Mackaye, a punk musician best known from bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, says that “television news, movies, tv shows” are “all coming from a perspective, a bias.” The gist of the doc is that corporations and service providers are controlling what the public can share, see and read on the internet–and that’s not okay.
Media can overlook, exploit, or undermine facts. The majority of media is derived from one conglomerate bias, one perspective. The facts become a fiction, a fabrication of the inarguable, concrete evidence of what is happening off screen, on the street. For example, we can read about carnage in the middle east, but it won’t be on TV. The American media has filters. Filters not only dictate what we see but shape what we want to see. The medium–TV shows, news stations, movies–is the biased message.
Hypernormalism is a term that refers to the radical acceptance of fabrication due to the limited availability of any truth or reality outside of it. The public, in a sense, makes its own narrative based on the skewed information provided by “the powerful,” or those parties who monopolize the market and make executive decisions based on what best serves them.
HyperNormalisation is documentary by Adam Curtis and is supposedly available to watch on Youtube, but it won’t play. Another site says the full documentary is available to watch here, although as of this moment [edit: it’s been 1 hr], it’s taking forever to load–a sign, “Barbershop Punk” might suggest, that the content is being blocked. Ironically, the places it was available, YouTube and BBC, no longer show it due to BBC copyright.
“We can’t always acquire right for every program…sometimes due to cost involved in acquiring licenses from third parties, or maybe for other legal or contractual reasons.”
We the public do not know what those other legal or contractual reasons are. After over an hour of loading and re-loading, I still cannot watch Hypernormalisation. Lucky for me, the trailer, and docs like Barbershop Punk, are just enough to keep me suspicious.
{edit: it’s now available to watch on Youtube. Cheers!}
Is The Message 