All together now.

I’m guessing you know who Gavin and Stacy and Dr Who are but don’t know what a blutkit is. Am I right? OK I just made blutkit up so it’s a bit unfair but you’re still very likely to know the other three. Now go back two hundred years and each individual would know only their neighbours, the local big nob and who the King or Queen was. And ten miles away it would be totally different. We had a cultural zeitgeist from our gene pool but zero social zeitgeist. With the advent of mass media and communication we now have a strong social zeitgeist, which roughly translated mean we all know who Smithy is. This means that a growing amount of our cognition is the same. This is “what’s occurrin’” as we say. We watch the same dramas, sitcoms, the same personalities, the same politicians, the same adverts; we listen to the same jokes, the same music and the same sound bites. My brain is becoming filled with the exact same information your brain is becoming filled with, along with millions of others. Where mass media was media for masses of individuals we have become ‘the mass’ that the media has created and bound together in its reflection. Our buying decisions, emotional responses, opinions, though appearing to be individual, are increasingly governed by our individual conjecture about the same experience. We will on mass, but individually, decide to buy iPods and Wii’s, Girls Aloud concert tickets, hate Ashley Cole and love, well Gavin and Stacy. Everyone on X Factor will model themselves on someone else, new music and films will be modelled on some existing hit, and everyone from Siam to Timbuktu will want to be America’s next top model. Recent neurological research has found ‘mimic neurons’ that fire when we observe someone else doing or being touched that are associated with response neurons that fire when those thing happen to us. The same neurons that fire when we run also fire when we see someone run. So the brain has an inbuilt automatic capacity to mimic. Thus when we all watch the same mass media we will all mimic the same thing. We will joyfully repeating the same catch phrases, adopt the same mannerisms, the same facial expressions as well as the same preconceptions and ideas. And those that don’t will be perceived as odd. We are becoming variations on a stereotype. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s a worry.