Media: The Clean, the Commercialized and the Controlled
Lately I’ve been thinking about media, why I like the music and shows that I do, and the censorship (or lack thereof) that governments impose on it. There are countries like China, where censorship is so strict that creativity is stifled and/or stamped out. No one outside of China really watches Chinese media (that I know of), despite the country being large and developed enough to potentially produce some good stuff. (I mean, Korea’s Man From the Stars took over China for a reason. China didn’t have a show that could compete with it.) I consider consuming Chinese media for linguistic benefits, because I need to learn Mandarin in order to live here – not because it’s anything new or interesting. Then there are countries like the U.S. with no censorship, where the media is always selling you something, always feeding some primal need, creatively finding new ways to dumb down content to a single common denominator that will reach the biggest audience and generat...