- wateroverfire
- Jul 3, 2010
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Came to say amazing thread.
So here is a question I have had for a while. It is an open question, and involves digging into D&D posters personal stories, which they don't seem to like to share. I went to tell my own story, and see how it compares with others'.
What age did you start consuming "alternative media", realizing there were different media perspectives, or getting a critical view of the media? Did critical perspectives of the media develop over a long time, or was there an epiphany that the "mainstream media" might not be totally accurate?
My own story is: I started reading the newspaper, I think for the comics section, when I was 7 or so. By the time I was 9, I would read the newspaper closely, kind of out of the obsessive desire to follow certain columns and features, rather than having a lot of comprehension of the stories. Around the same time, I would often read the alternative newsweekly, the "Willamette Week", which was a pretty standard alt-weekly newspaper that covered arts and current events. (Pretty much every city had one of those in the 1980s/1990s, right? It was pretty standard stuff, but for a 10 year old used to reading the sports section of the Oregonian, it probably seemed slightly weird. I remember around the same time, (or a few years later, I remember reading about Somalia in it, which would have been in 1992, when I was 13) my father having issues of Z Magazine, which was a more clearly politically leftist thing, and which of course was a gigantic difference from what I read in the Oregonian. So at the time, even though I still only had a hazy idea of what was going on in the world around me, I had some idea that there were alternate viewpoints. Placing them wasn't easy, but I knew the difference.
Around the same time, probably around the age of 13, I remember reading some type of alternative magazine that my mother bought in an alternative bookstore, or maybe something for free, like low production values, maybe photocopied. I remember reading the back and it had a vocabulary list, and one of them was "Public Education = A Welfare System for Liberal Arts Majors". Sick burn, that! It also had a cartoon showing an inquisitive young person asking his father questions, but the father was brainwashed by the television to only care about sports, and was repeating "Go Blazers". I think the magazine or newsletter was written from a Libertarian standpoint. I don't know why I fixed this in my memory, besides it might have been my first experience that not only was there alternative media, but that some of it had its own agenda that I didn't agree with.
A few years later, I was 15-17, living in Portland, Oregon. This was the mid-1990s, and for technical reasons (computers made desktop publishing easuer), as well as cultural reasons (the grunge years, openness to LGBT and different subcultures, etc), there was a flood of alternative media. I remember one newspaper, PDXS, which was launched to compete with the Willamette Week, mostly attacking it for being too mainstream. And of course, in the mid-1990s, and being a teenager, I always wanted to prove how against the mainstream I was, but then I noticed before too long that it started having more improbable stuff in it, like conspiracy theories about the Clintons. Whether that was for ideological reasons, or because they wanted to build up their fringe credibility, I don't know. But I do remember being wary of it.
So basically, by the time I was 18, I had been introduced to different forms and viewpoints in the media, and had already realized that some of those viewpoints were also suspect. I still read them, even if only out of boredom (lots of free newspapers available for long bus rides in Portland), and I kind of mentally compartmentalized what I was reading, and what its purpose was.
I hope that wasn't too much detail, but I think it is a good question: when and how did you start to realize there was multiple perspectives, and to evaluate them for trustworthiness? For me, it really did build up basically since I was a kid, with no single "ah-ha" moment.
Are you still in Santiago? This would be great bar talk.
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Mar 13, 2019 16:12
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May 10, 2024 20:35
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- wateroverfire
- Jul 3, 2010
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Yes, I am. Will be for at least a while longer.
Today, I walked from Melipilla to El Paico.
Which, if we were in the United States, Melipilla would have its own newspaper, and for that matter, El Paico might too, although the El Paico newspaper would be a legacy product that mostly printed coupons and reprints of obvious news items and little essays by the publisher, who inherited the newspaper from his father.
That is a hell of a walk, dude. Do you still have PMs?
A cluster analysis of the effects of ownership concentration on Chilean media, which is something I never expected to be studied but in fact was.
wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Mar 14, 2019
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Mar 14, 2019 13:21
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Mar 13, 2019 16:12
