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900 pages, Hardcover
First published January 8, 1998
[...] while choice is attractive, too much choice can paralyze us into inaction. When we feel overwhelmed, we rely more and more on automatic routines, and leads us into a deeper and deeper rut of doing the same things over and over.
The reason faulty beliefs are such a dangerous trap is because they are self-reinforcing.
The mass media construct audiences so they can rent those audiences out to advertisers. In constructing those audiences, the media focus on particular niches where they can provide content that serves a need not already being met. They attract particular kinds of people into those audiences then condition them for repeat exposures.
Successful websites, whether they deal with information, entertainment, music, video, or the printed word, all try to do the same thing. They offer you apps that you can download and use for free on your mobile devices. They want to condition you to continually use their services so it becomes a habit that you cannot live without.
It is likely that there are many adults who are not as highly developed cognitively, emotionally, or morally as many children.
We are the consumers, and our resources include not only our money but, even more importantly, our time and attention.
[...] the singing ability of Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber, although good, cannot alone account for their huge popularity; that is, these recording artists have some inexplicable ability to attract large audiences that cannot be explained solely by the artistic quality of their singing ability.
Advertising gets people to look beyond the product features to consider product images as well as psychological advantages of using the product.
This strategy of increasing revenue streams can also be seen in all the merger and acquisition activity across all media industries. When a media company becomes a conglomerate, controlling the distribution of messages in many media channels, it can easily market a single message across many channels and thus quickly create multiple revenue streams for that one message.
"[...] it is less costly emotionally to watch characters in a movie try to meet each other, establish relationships, break up, and learn from their mistakes than it is to go through all of that in real life to learn the same thing. Audiences therefore have a strong, continuing motivation to seek out messages in the media. They search for messages that have two general characteristics. First, those messages must appear real. [...] Second, those messages must present a little more than their every day reality. [...] people want media messages that are not so real that they are the same as their everyday lives. But neither do they want media messages that are so far removed from their experiences and needs that the messages have no immediate relevance. So people want messages that are one step removed from real life; they want messages that show what is easily possible and make it seem probable and even actual.
We all live in two worlds; the real world and the media world. Attaining higher levels of media literacy does not mean avoiding the media world. Instead it means being able to tell the two worlds apart as the two merge together under pressures from new message formats and newer technologies that seem to make the boundary lines between the two worlds very fuzzy.
Most of us feel that the real world is too limited; that is, we cannot get all the experiences and information we want in the real world. [...] We are continually entering the media world to get experiences and information we cannot get very well in our real lives. We enter the media world to expand our real-world experience and help us understand the real world better. But those experiences we have in the media world are different than if we had experienced them directly in the real world. We often forget this as we bring media-world experiences back into our real world.