Satire, Analysis and Commentary on the Media and Popular Culture

	Virtual Society? The Line is Blurring Between What's Virtual Reality and What's Not
	*Theme parks are a form of virtual reality--and these include many unlabeled adult* theme parks.**
	People pay for tropical, Third World, and even wilderness-oriented virtual reality experiences.
	Contemporary business is heavily, if inadvertently, into virtual reality.
	The media deal largely in virtual reality.
	We learn from the movies as if they were real.
	Television news can profoundly disconnect us from what's actually going on around us.
	Sometimes the news media are profoundly, even dangerously, out of touch with real life.
	Our ostensible "windows on the world," the news media, mainly deliver audiences to advertisers.
	Contemporary advertising is very different from traditional forms.
	Collective Longings, Iconic Proxies & "The Feelies" Reflections on the Driving Forces in Mass Culture
	It may be as important that we enjoy identifying with pop musicians as that we enjoy listening to them.
	Even in sports, celebrity nowadays has as much to do with symbolizing as with achieving.
	In their arts and artifacts, cultures often reveal what's absent--and profoundly longed for--in people's lives.
	"Retro" product styles reflect a craving for things (and times) of substance.
	Our choices of manufactured experiences in movies reveal a great deal about our concerns in real life.
	Post-Glasnost Tips for Former East Bloc Citizens: Official News
	Post-Glasnost Tips for Former East Bloc Citizens: Ever-Present Eyes and Ears
	We've acquired an unhealthy belief that what's significant in the world equals what's in the media.
	What the media report only appears to be the sum of significant developments in our world.
	Overvaluing the "media world" can profoundly diminish those of us whose frame of reference is the real world.
	The media are a primary force behind our metamorphosis into a virtual society.
	In some areas, ordinary citizens have advantages over the media.
	We tend to overlook significant formative and causative social events if they haven't been news stories.
	Today's media generate an enveloping--and ultimately isolating--illusion of connectedness.
	Even the tiniest shred of media celebrity can help an ordinary person feel like "somebody."
	The "media world" has been transformed into a mythical realm.
	We've conjured up a set of mythical and iconic proxies to symbolically represent us.
	Today's celebrity system represents a potent form of secular mythology.
	Maybe we're "programmed" to consider people we watch more important than ourselves.
	The Media's Rivalry With Religion
	Apprehending the Cognitive Order What It Is, How It Shapes Us, and How We Might Begin Reclaiming It
	The cognitive order plays a major role in virtually any social system.
	As modern academic and scientific systems of knowledge communicate less directly with us, their influence is diminishing.
	Dissemination of knowledge to society is now performed mainly by the media.
	Media-style "authority" has more to do with popular acceptance than with proof.
	Making an idea's authority coequal to popular acceptance is an invitation down the path back to more primitive belief systems.
	Communications that engage our reason have enabled great progress, but are in the process of being eclipsed.
	We've come to doubt that anyone except anointed denizens of the media realm can know much of anything significant.
	Undervaluing non-celebrity observations cheats us all--but is consistent with other forms of contemporary communication.
	To reverse the trends that belittle us, we need to ascribe more value to our own observations.
	Today's artists have a historic opportunity to make a difference in the social order.