Culture You Silly Thing. R-R #6

I often find myself musing over modern mythology. What we as a culture believe in, how we see ourselves, how we view our reality, or our day to day life, and even our moral compass. Cynthia L Selfe approaches most of these topics to some degree in her paper “Lest We Think The Revolution is a Revolution,” but from the stand point of media (mainly advertising.) I feel she does an amazing job of shedding light on, not only what we think of ourselves as a collective, but how we reinforce and/or shape these narratives through advertising.
One thing that caught my eye in C. Selfe's paper was a comment about our cultural memory as Americans. The statement “Cultural memory is a potent one for Americans, and these ads resonate with the values that we remember as a characterizing that golden time” seems to infer (to me) our cultural memory is imbedded deep in our minds. Not to say it is truth, or that we are built to act this way, but to say that maybe a part of our social organization reinforces our cultural narrative. The word in her quote “remember” draws my attention especially. I can not see her saying that we all remember these experiences ourselves, more that through media, we see these things as the way things are/and have been in the past. All of this makes my head swim with the ramifications, is someone guiding our social/cultural memory?
This is America. The heart of the capitalistic world, and we are (seemingly successfully) getting the rest of the world to conform to our way of life. I feel most of our population gets its identity from the media that saturates our nation, and the rest of the world is shaped by this media. We are (the mass majority) a nation of peeople unaware of a media that is only trying to wring every last dollar out of th populous it can. As well it is molding us as a nation, like clay, into the consumer platform of it's choosing. I feel that many people do not stop to look up from their fast food and their “reality TV” programing to examine their life well enough to resist the way media programs us.
This is where the word “remember” scares me in Cynthia L Selfe text. It draws me to the conclusion that we are having our memories changed. Memories that we don't even have! How deep is this corruption of thought? C. Selfe slowly drags out many of our cultural narratives for us to reexamine, but I feel that she does not point at the implications of these pressures fully. Her point was to shed some light on our conceptions of technology, in beneficial social change, but I feel that her point was to unmask a larger idea. The idea that our identity is being shaped by our media. Shaped, for the most part, without our majority of our populations notice.
With us pushing our American way of life on other nations, how will the way we (as a world) identify with ourselves change. Will we be told who we are more, or will people tell themselves? Myself being one that tries to see what is meant by our media not what is said I can see how difficult it will be for many to start to examine their world view, but I am hopeful. Culture has always shaped our world view, but the amount of access we have had to that culture was different. Now with television and the internet everywhere we are at its access more. One can only hope the technologies that are at our access as often can be of benefit to us.
Only when we take value in shaping our growth will we truly grow. Our technology may give us an opportunity to “culture” that value. I am not a sentimental fool, and I do not hold faith in many things, but in this I do.