Provoker
Permabanned
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2008
- Messages
- 252
- MBTI Type
- INTJ
Newspapers, like fashionable shirts and sweet-smelling colognes, are carefully crafted to appeal to the sensational needs of its readers. Often, this is accomplished by constructing a paper that is presentable, uses large splashy fonts that get the reader's attention, has sensationally-luring headings, and pictures that are emotionally provocative. The content (if we can call it that) is also sensationally-rigged, riddled with catchphrases rather than careful critical analysis in plain English. This mastery of excitation, which is pursued by newspapers and critical for stimulating popular demand and consumption of its stories, is especially effective when catering to sensors who comprise 70 percent of the population. With the technological innovations afforded by the communications revolution, the shrinking of spacetime from globalization, and with sensors comprising the majority, the way in which ideas and stories are presented becomes more important than the ideas themselves, given that the newspaper is driven by the bottom line. Yet, at a more sophisticated level of society, a strata which is more cerebral and skeptical in nature, these adornments, with their appeal to passion, the senses, and emotion, become comparatively more superfluous, though by no means forgotten. What becomes increasingly important is the capacity to tickle the reader's intellect in a way that puts the newspaper ahead of its competitors who are targetting the same group. Here the sensation takes new form. The sensation may be in the way a pundit glues all the details together into a coherent whole that makes the thinker think: Aha! Still there is arousal and excitation, not in the form of an appeal to the senses and emotion, but to the intellect. But what about to the freethinker who is beyond any emotional, sensational, or intellectual seduction? Does such a god-like person exist? If so, what would be the newspapers' tools for getting this person to buy their papers?
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