A world of digital ghosts: The vast power of the internet on which we all rely

Thank you to Truth Reporter for submitting this article. 

Recently I wrote on the possibility of the digital dark age, a circumstance where we place too much reliance on internet based storage which subsequently shuts down or goes offline. This article I hope put into perspective the vast power of the internet on which we all rely.

There’s another side to this argument and at the turn of the year when we take a little time to look back at where we’ve come from it comes into sharp focus.

The first Christmas I can remember clearly was 1975, The number one record that year over Christmas was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, the song was everywhere. Love it or hate it, it was written in bold letters across your awareness. Popular culture always endures but recently I saw some recordings from the same year of some less well known artists on YouTube from the BBC’s ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’. Not only did I not remember the band but after researching on the internet it turns out most of them were dead.

Those 45 year old recordings look like they could have been made yesterday, the band gave their all in the performance and pretty good they were too despite missing out on worldwide fame. Christmas TV revealed more of the same, unable to escape ubiquitous background TV when visiting friends the Carry on films roll by, the stars now long gone.

The digital ghosts continue to haunt us, Freddie Mercury still looks young and fit in the Bohemian Rhapsody video, he’s gone now and the small child who grew tired of the same song being on TV all the time is now middle aged. I’m convinced networks like BBC4 are playing this content because they are trying to convince people of my age that the ‘old’ Britain is still somehow there like it was in the 70’s when in fact we know it is being deconstructed at an ever increasing pace. The place I grew up in has been erased, replaced now only with a digital ghost of what once was.
Oddly, shows from the 70’s now seem often to be preceded by a health warning that the programme contains ‘elements of culture prevalent at the time of production’ or some similar message. It’s amazing that people need to be warned that they might encounter attitudes they find disturbing.

What we’re being fed with now is a toxic soup of mainstream TV content. It’s either spirit crushing game shows or woke, agenda driven PC drama trying to modify our thoughts and feelings. Add to that the dancing ghosts of the dead who we are constantly warned may have thought or said things we shouldn’t think or say now.
Never before has the power of TV and the media to control thought been used so overtly and so brutally, no wonder people are abandoning it en-masse. We are living though the greatest battle for ideological freedom in history where the battleground is your consciousness and your perception.

Postmodernists coined a term called ‘hyperreality’. This phenomenon develops from the fact that the human mind can easily be tricked into feeling genuine emotions in response to fiction. Horror films are a prime example of this. The fear you feel is real, the film you are watching is not true and it’s not happening to you but you experience the fear all the same.
Another technique very similar to this is broadly known as ‘false jeopardy’. You’ll find this in the plethora of shows which I collectively call ‘people doing their job’. This is the banal reality drivel about road sweepers, drain cleaners, truckers, and shop assistants – inevitably before each commercial break some kind of fake cliff hanger will have been woven into the commentary – ‘will big Jim be able to clear up the puddle of sick before someone falls over – see the nail biting action after the break’. The truth is that all this ‘danger’ is just everyday life being whipped up into frenzy to make you care about it enough to sit through the adverts to find out what happens.

These lessons have not gone unnoticed by the propagandists, they have become experts at weaving their narratives into the content we consume. Probably the best example of this is Dr Who, which in its first years was good old fashioned sci-fi. Now they use this programme as a vehicle for whatever woke politics is flavour of the month.
Every day the system is trying to access your emotions to sell you things, convince you to do things or make you believe things. Never for one moment think this is without purpose or function. Critique what you watch, take a moment to think what the broadcaster is trying to imply and what the implications are of accepting these narratives are.
Wishing the UNN readership all the very best for 2020 which promises to be a very interesting year.