Today's mail brought a flyer from a brokerage house (they still think we have money!) inducing us to attend a "seminar" that will teach us how to invest wisely. It lists "The Five (5) Impactful Mistakes Made in 2008." I was struck by the second "impactful" statement: "How the media (Negatively) influenced Decisions in '08." So they've finally awakened to

the most powerful infuser of ideas and attitudes we have: television.

I wonder how many people think about living in television. I suppose that, even now that so much has been written about TV's influence on our lifestyle, many people still view the institution as an "entertainment medium." And, of course, on the most obvious level, it is. We watch whatever the latest fad is, and are titilated or horrified or fascinated or bored -- all normal reactions to entertainment. Once the show is finished, we forget about it and look for and at the next thrill.

On a slightly deeper, yet semi-conscious, level, we are aware of products. After all, THE major value in our society is consumption. toothpaste, pianos, coffee, hybrid cars....And we "know" that the ads display these products and encourage us to buy.

And some of us realize that the ads are selling a world, not a product. Drive a car and experience the thrill of racing. Eat a hamburger and become a BIGMaC. Shop for jeans and enter the tight-fitting jeans world, sexy, mod, cool, right. There is always a set of values tied to the purchase of the product.

But there are meta-values, values that are always present, no matter the specific product and its world. Speed, for instance, and motion are necessary to effective programming on TV. How often does a "talking head" sell products? It's not by accident that candidates for the Presidency every four years meet each other in a series of "debates." The format is confrontational. That's part of the "hard wired" aspect of the medium. Candidates would never win races if they appeared boring on the tube. The speed factor has a corollary: rapid alternation of attention, another meta-value. Simultaneity, rather than linearity, is part of this meta-world. Everthing is going on at the same time: skiing down a slope, thrilling music, voice-over talking about the advantages of SkiSky skis over others, closeups of smiling, hardened faces of the skiiers, followed quickly by a jump to the warmth-and-wine pleasure of the ski lodge that evening, throngs of adventure-seeking joy makers singing around the roaring log fire. Don't you wish you were there, wearing those same clothes, skiing those same slopes, living that same world? Being there, the simultaneous, tumultuous world with neither past nor future, that's tv.

So tv promotes a world. It is peopled by the adventure set, where entertainment is doing things, building structures, creating environments. But it is a synthetic world, a virtual world for most of us. We sit and watch while we are told that the active life is the good life. So that we are persuaded that, if we can't build bridges, write poetry, slam a homerun in the big leagues, we can at least buy the products of that world. If we buy a Dell, we can "log onto the Internet" for all the thrills that entails. If we can buy an SUV, we can careen down trails of roadways with no other cars in sight. The meta-values penetrate the products. So that there is a self-selection going on: only those products which can profit from the meta-values are those which are marketed. Speed, motion, rapid alteration of attention, simultaneity -- this is what TV makes us live, virtually.

All of this is vast: millions of TV sets, hundreds of millions of viewers, tens of thousands of products, billions of dollars, hundreds of thounsands of employees...

What a classroom! Only prob is: the bottom line is money, nothing else.