Culture Jam

After reading this first installment of Culture Jam I find myself begrudgingly writing this blog entry. It is just one more way for me to be attached to this dreaded computer. My problem becomes that once I am on-line writing I hop around to all sorts of other sites and by the time I am done I have wasted hours. The internet is a cruel addiction, and one that I am ill equipped to fight.

With that mini rant aside I will talk about my impressions of this book. Regrettably I agree with most all that Kalle Lasn has to say about media being the equivalent to the darkside. It's scary and I feel lucky that I am only addicted to the internet and not T.V. as well. I thought about my mom, my sister, and my boyfriends entire family when I read about the turn off your T.V. week. These people in my life come to a stand still after work when they tune into primetime television.

My mother could do so much more with herself if only she could skip a couple episodes of 24. Maybe read a book, learn to knit, or just have some silence. It really drives me crazy when I go home to visit and that television is blasting. It's all just crap.

In the book he brings up the obsession and problems linked with constant white noise. I used to only be able to sleep and/or study when the radio was playing or a sleep machine was on. I always linked this to my being ADD, but maybe all this media stimulation created a learning disability in me? My mind always needs some sort of input overload to be jump started and noise was always my go to.

Lasn's observations on noise made me really consider whether or not I have ever really experienced silence. Maybe at night in the woods I have experience some form of silence? The whole thing just makes me want move somewhere off the grid.