Shallowness is actually a winning media strategy. The truly shallow have nothing to hide because they have nothing. They voluntarily turn their life into public consumption. Most of the rest just manufacture a fake reality that seems real only because generations that grew up on television have brains that are trained to confuse natural lighting, low resolution footage and shaky cameras with sincerity.
[...] The more fake the culture is, the more of a sucker it is for fake authenticity. The explosion of reality shows is traceable to the death of reality. Everyone wants to connect to something and someone and the entertainment industry is abandoning escapism from reality for escapism to a fake reality next door. Music has reached the same range of fake reality, embracing the inauthenticity of making your life public as the ultimate form of authenticity.
Politics thrives on that same fake authenticity. Mitt Romney, a fake authentic politician of the old school, back when politicians were working with magazine covers, snapshots and a 30 second clip, couldn't compete against the truly fake Barack Obama, who in truly modern media style doesn't just fake 30 seconds or 30 minutes in front of the camera, but fakes his entire life going back decades.
[...]Those who believe in nothing are the most gullible because they will fall for anything. Those without faith are always looking to believe in something or someone. Those who have never known value or quality are always looking to pick up a product that communicates value and quality to them, even while they retain no metric for assessing either one. Instead of learning the metric, they follow the brand, they become savvy brand-spotters, rather than knowledgeable buyers. And when they brand lets them down, then the brand apologizes, the emotions are soothed, and the low information voter turns to the big screen for another messiah.
He's got words for Lance Armstrong too. Worth reading.
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Which just goes to show that Plato was right in The Republic.
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