Antediluvian

95% of all the media you see comes from Los Angeles.

That figure is probably a complete fabrication, but it might as well be true. It's probably fairly close. Most people don't even think about the amount of media that enters their brain everyday. We're bombarded by it, but it's become so common, that we just pass by without a second glance. A typical morning for me consists of hopping in a car to drive to the metro (listening to the radio = songs, commercials, live content; or a CD = music), walking to the metro past the signs for gas stations, CVS, etc., getting on the metro (walking past advertisements, grabbing a newspaper, listening to a recording telling me the doors are closing), exiting to Farragut (past signs, more advertisements, store fronts with placards and posters) and getting to work. I don't even have a working TV set.

The thing about media is that it's not just advertisements. That voice telling me the doors are closing on the metro - someone recorded that. It's someone's voice. An actual person somewhere with hopes and dreams and thoughts and fears. This dynamic human being stood in a recording booth and repeated "Stand back the doors are closing" until they got it just right. Now her voice is heard thousands of times a day by strangers. A copy of her is out there everyday. I wonder if she ever rides the metro.

Chuck Pahlaniuk (who you'll find I refer to a lot because he makes me think) notes a fascinating phenomenon in his book Fight Club when he mentions the laugh tracks for television shows during the 1940s and 50s. Those same laugh tracks that you hear today were recorded back then. There's been little need to update them because collective laughter all sounds the same. So, get this, when you hear an audience crack up at the latest wacky thing that the lovable sitcom star does, you're listening to the laughter of dead people.

At least a decent percentage of the people who had their laughter recorded for shows back then are now deceased, and their recorded ghost lives on.

Media has a way of flattening its subject matter. The image or sound has to serve a singular purpose. Sometimes it can serve two, but anything more than that, and the simple message of the advertisement or the mass-produced signal is lost. It becomes muddled, and large groups of people can't handle that sort of exposure. The message has to be dynamic - and that means, one message, direct, loud, clear.

Today on CNN.com there is an icon for a story on the bra turning 100. A century's worth of the invention. The icon above the story is a small picture of a woman's bust in a red bra, framing her shoulders down to her xiphoid process, and nothing more. No face. No name. Just a bra.

And yet someone posed for that photo. A human being somewhere could look at that website today, point to that picture and say, "that's me". A living, breathing human being reduced to a single message, a flattened image. She's most likely a model, but she might not be. She might be a nursing student who was helping a friend build a photography portfolio, and when the image ended up on an open source market, CNN bought the rights to it for almost zero dollars and are now using it. I wonder what that woman's like. We don't often think about the people behind the images. Movie stars are not real people in our mind. They are a blank canvas for us to project our desires onto. Girls want to be swept into Brad Pitt's arms because he's attractive, and because of this, they imagine he's also a great person. Guys fantasize about being with most actresses without knowing thing one about them.

We are now becoming those celebrities. Not in the same stature, but in the same concept. For the first time ever, a girl I've never met randomly messaged me on Facebook to tell me that she dug my musical taste. She has access to what I've posted, my pictures, but I'm flat. I'm anything she wants me to be. I'm a bulletin point of a human being. My likes and dislikes are spelled out short order, my photos do little to paint a picture of my humanity, and a few short quips from strangers does nothing to explain who I am. Yet we do this every day to people - marginalize them. We read magazines, watch television, listen to the radio - never thinking about the human behind the image or the motion or the voice.

A guy putting himself through grad school for computer science smiling in a tooth paste advertisement, a young guy from Missouri who dreams of owning his own business acts as a human clothing rack for khakis in a Sears catalogue, a girl who fears that she'll end like her mother, loves horseback riding, and crossed her fingers that this will lead to something big steps up to a microphone and says, "Thank you for shopping at Walmart. This week, you'll find incredible savings on..."

I have nothing against consumer culture. In fact, I find it fascinating. It does, however, naturally rob the people involved of their humanity, turning them into a singular statement or a blank canvas. There's nothing really harmful in this - the person is still walking around being as dynamic as ever while their image floats around attracting the eye and convincing or not convincing in a split second a person to buy a particular brand of soda. There's nothing deep or tragic or joyous going on here. Just a fun exercise in humanity. The next time you see an image of someone else, wonder who they are, ask what they might be like, question their background and their hopes and dreams and desires. Remember they are real, someone with a life as interesting as yours walking around somewhere out there.

Or next time you hear a laugh track on television, remember that who you're hearing is no longer with us.