Media injection

At one point in the reign of Slobodan Milošević, Serbia felt the first panic of a potential civil war. In order to reduce the effect of the huge opposition rally, Milošević brought his supporters to Belgrade for a counter-rally. Charki was everywhere; a new, hitherto unseen escalation was in the air. However, what I remembered most from the whole day was the stunned statement of an opposition sympathizer. All red-faced from the verbal clashes with the supporters of the regime, he cried: "These are not people, these are televisions!"

There is an interesting idea in media theory, known as "media injection" (or "hypodermic needle theory", in the academic version). The bottom line is simple: some people are believed to be influenced by the media by directly "injecting" attitudes into their heads; what to think, who to love or hate, how to read life and the people around them, how to behave... This theory sees the media as one massive (and massive) propaganda syringe. Who controls it, controls the thoughts, feelings and behavior of those who follow that media.

The injection theory was based on the Nazi propaganda machine from World War II and the fear of the power of the then new mass media, especially film. At its core, it implied a passive population, intellectually numb zombies who blindly follow and blindly believe what they are told if it comes from credible sources, usually official ones.

The "injection" theory has long since been significantly rejected in world academic practice. In developed countries with freer media, the argument goes, with less political and greater commercial control, where the national conversation is conducted on multiple competing platforms, public opinion is more divided. People are not only passive receivers of messages, but also active seekers of content. In that diversity, attitudes are formed in more complex ways.

And again...

It is difficult to escape the impression that many around us are stumbling through life and society as if stunned by that poisonous injection of the mass media. In politicized systems, the media is also politicized, entertainment is politicized, sport is also politicized and - to paraphrase the children from the book "The pen writes with the heart" when they were talking about Marko Kraljević - everything has grown to us in a politicized way.

It is enough to pass by the benches on Kalemegdan, where pensioners chirp like sparrows repeating the government's mantras, to listen to sullen or heated inciting debates at the next bar table, to visit relatives in the provinces, whose orgiastic lunches are poisoned by obstinate regime slogans and idolatrous Leader liturgies, to read political research attitudes of the population, and to understand that the media syringe, nevertheless, in such societies, is not a discarded academic concept.

There is in our air - and similar societies with which we like to hang out - a strange atmosphere of anesthesia, of mental blocking that reduces everything to just a few somnambulistically repeated phrases. The robotic, clone tonality is as palpable as it is painful, because it creates a melody of hopelessness, carelessness, conflict, suffering, anger, revenge...

Media addiction nowadays seems to have two "smells": the nationalistic, burnt, heavy smell of being baked into dogma and the mythical past, and the trivial, sugary, fairground perfume of fun and escapism.

Is there an antidote to this euthanasia media injection, to the "fix" that makes us weaker and weaker, more and more powerless to manage our own destiny and to look the world in the eye? Unfortunately, the best remedy is to take control of the needle. But this is rarely possible without major personal and social crises. What remains is the equivalent of treating the symptoms of hay fever: a cheap aerosol of social media and digital space, if we know how. It doesn't cure the cause, but at least we are less drooling. We sneeze less. Otherwise, stupor prevails.

The English writer Martin Amis has already given a warning in one of his interviews, speaking about Iraq: "... you cannot introduce democracy into a nation that has never known the concept of truth, has never had openness to the free exchange of opinions, nor freedom of the press..." In a nation on media syringe, someone's and someone else's, regardless of the color of the poison in it: red or black, screaming yellow or just deadly pink.