It is amazing how media to gain eyeballs could go to any lengths and never consider the average readers intellect. The average reader reads only the headlines. But this number is very huge, I mean the average reader. The remaining bunch, the more curious ones pick up topics based on their level of curiosity and their level of need to gain knowledge or information. All three categories, as is the whole human race fall into the muck of perception before any article is read.
For example if I am reading Sartre on a plane and someone who has heard of Sartre thinks that I am intellectual, first up, then haranguing their head over whether I am first time reader...then they see my face and they go oh! nope should be intellectual. The other guy who does not know Sartre is thinking goddamn it even now we have people wasting their time reading such monstrosities, even the photograph on the cover is no good. But we all perceive. And we all insist on that perception to be right. You know what I am talking if you have sat in a crowded place and watched people with your friends. I mean I remember us betting on who is gonna go which way and to what restaurant and who is gonna kiss when or hold hands. You may thinking Voyeurs!!! For the sake of being nice, lets say observers....Anyway, when we get it right we love it, there is a feeling of having arrived. Even if it is nothing...
Now going back to the article, There was an article in today newspapers that they found a lot of water about 50 kilometers close to the Pakistan border in the desert of Thar, Rajasthan, India. Everybody is excited, for heavens sake, it is desert..so hell! ought to be excited....The article reads that people are digging for water and that at about 500 odd feet they find water. And it is not just a little bit of water, but gushing, strong, large quantity of water. The article headline states " Saraswati River Comes up in Thar".
The complete article then goes on to elaborate on how many people are finding water and how good it is and how scientific evidence suggests granite's of yore having water kept in them for centuries may have popped out..etc etc etc..and also that all people have denied that this has anything to do with the mystical river of Saraswati and that is a legend and still stays as one and that there is no river underneath all this buoyant talk.
If this above is the case then the question arises, why that headline in the first place. I understand you are media and you need eyeballs but.. the general population, the average Joe is set to get a few tongues wagging on this extraordinary discovery of his. There may be purists who may have read the article due to curiosity but with the perception of Saraswati someplace in his mind and after completing the article they may have cynically expressed their delight to their friends about their new found discovery because the hangover of why he read the article in the first place stays.....
Wooh! not to pinpoint that all things are bad and awful, the art of grabbing eyeballs is fantastic, but the art of marketing something wrong is going to go down in an awfully wrong manner. And the paying population remember is getting more and more ignorant even with the bombardment and proliferation of information and at the end somewhere when I am not even part of the stories someone is going to say "what the fuck happened"
Take care!!!
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