The media today has power far beyond our common understanding of the spirit of the times. This power and influence the media wields is by means of Technique. Whether we are talking about the printing press, radio, television, internet or emerging technologies, the media's interests have always been profit and the shaping of men's attitudes. These profits drove the development and the facilitated for the proliferation of nascent technologies. By craftily manipulating this technique of orchestrating and redirecting men's attitudes and behaviors, these  new technologies were presented as the furtherance of democracy and modernizing of the way men communicated with their world and the enhancement of their appreciation of these new gadgets. Jacques Elull wryly observed: "Technique, as the universal and autonomous technical fact, is revealed as the technological society itself in which man is but a single tightly integrated and articulated component. It is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety is mere appearance". Ellul says that 'technique has become indifferent to all traditional human ends and values by becoming an end-in-itself'. It seems like technique rules and controls and shapes men's attitudes and behavior.

It's easy to see that we are living in precipitous times. The media today is in the hands of the Corporate few suited for the shareholders and advertisers. It is known by many that humans possess the ability to alter their destiny than they did before, thus it's the duty of the democrat to regulate this technique and power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and egalitarian. Jacques Ellul states: "Only the naive can really believe that the world-wide movement towards centralism  results from the machinations of evil statesmen. The intellectual discipline of economics itself becomes technicized. Politics in turn becomes an arena for contention among rival techniques. The technician sees the nation quite differently from the political man: to the technician, the nation more than another sphere in which to apply the instruments he has developed. To him, the state is not the expression of the will of the people, nor a divine creation nor a creature of class conflict. It is an enterprise providing services that must be made to function efficiently. He judges states in terms of their capacity to utilize technique effectively, not in terms of their relative justice. Political doctrine revolves around what is useful rather than what is good. Purposes drop out of sight and efficiency becomes the central . As the political form best suited to the massive and unprincipled use of technique, dictatorships gains in power. And this in turn narrows the range of choice for the democracies: either they too use some version of effective technique- centralized control and propaganda- or they will fall behind. Public opinion provides no control because it too is largely orientated toward "performance" and technique is regarded as the prime instrument of performance, whether in the economy or in politics, in arts  or in sports."

Manipulation of Mass Consciousness 

As Ellul notes in the excerpt above,technique or technicized environment, be it the state or spheres of communication/media operations, has no regard for the 'will of the people' nor justice. It is only interested in efficiency and effectiveness, to the detriment of public opinion, which becomes left out of the equation by both the politicians and the technician. either the people fall within the matrix of 'propaganda' or 'centralized control' as set forth by both the technician and politicians, or the will be left behind and they will fall behind. This affects the public view of culture and its role with regards to the state and the technician. The purpose of uniting all different races and culture, at times is sacrificed for those inflammatory and rabidly passionate ideas of divide and conquer. The public,viewer or cyber-user, in this case, becomes left out out if they attempt multiculturalism or unity of races, or harmony amongst the races.

The history of how the media monopoly has become concentrated into the hands of the few, one needs to understand the geo-politics of information. Through slavery and colonialism, the people who decided what's news, were the very people who had the power to disseminate and control what is news. Douglas Rushkoff  encapsulates this perspectives in this way: "We live in an age when the value of data, images, and ideologies has surpassed that of material acquisitions and physical territories. Gone are the days when a person's social stature could be measured by the distance he had to walk to see smoke from his neighbors camp. We've finally reached the limits of our continental land masses; we've viewed the earth from space over national broadcast television. The illusion of boundless territorial frontiers has been destroyed forever. There's simply no room, nothing left to colonize". Technique has narrowed the gap between underdevelopment(backwardness) and modernization. Efficiency has replaced the gradual and slow change and evolution of technology and its application and consumption by the public. The public has been effectively pacified by automation having been fine-tuned to technique and efficiency, making man not understand what the rule of technique is doing to him and to his world, leaving man beset by anxiety and feelings of insecurity.

The spirit of the times in the media today has long been put on re-set when the television children of the sixties were exposed to techniques of psychology, conditioning, sociology and marketing. When these 50s kids grew up with programming developed and produced by themselves products of media of the day. This included techniques of 'thought control, pattern recognition and neuro-linguistic programming' and used them to create television that changes the way we view reality and thus reality itself'.(Rushkoff). This feat was achieved through smart packaging. Rushkoff summarily posits thus: "The messages in our media come to us packaged as Trojan horses. They enter our homes in one form, but behave in a very different way than we expect once they are inside. This is no to much a conspiracy against the viewing public as it is a method for getting the mainstream media to unwittingly promote countercultural agendas that an actually empower the individuals who are exposed to them. The people who run network  television or popular magazines, for example, are understandably unwilling to run stories or images that directly criticize the operating principles of the society that its sponsors are seeking to maintain. Clever young media strategists with new, usually threatening ideas need to invent new unthreatening forms that are capable of safely housing these dangerous concepts until they have been successfully delivered to the American public as part of our daily diet of mainstream media. The more harmless or inane the forum, the more unsuspecting the audience".(Italics mine). In this manner, then, the free flow of ideas is controlled and language distorted as to how we deal, address and understand our reality and politics.

The viewing public has been lulled into a false sense of entertainment, information and data sphere trough technique and effective efficiency. We have been hardwired together through devices like cable television, telephone systems, personal computer; we have been rendered as remote conduits of Twitters, cell phones and other new and emerging technologies. The media and all its concomitants have become the extensions of ourselves as the nervous system extends itself throughout our torsos. Rushkoff observes: "If we are to understand the data sphere as an extension of a planetary ecosystem or even just the breeding ground for new ideas in our culture, then we must come to terms with the fact that media events provoking real social change are more than simple Trojan horses. The are media viruses. This term is not used as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses.."(Italics mine). Our present consciousness has been designed and controlled by technique embedded in present-day emerging  technologies.

Interrogating Technique

The spirit of our times in terms of present day media is packaged in several myths and half-truths zines. The common lie being that we are giving the people what they want- the lie and myth that these new technologies will set us free. Yes, people are given what they want at an affordable prices but being enslaved to the media programs and products. This is an era of technological dependency wherein all has been made to view everything with a herd mentality. The First Amendment, the freedom of speech and democracy has been extended to and covers the corporate and commercial activity exclusively. McChesney says that "when commercialism penetrates everything, and when noncommercial public public life diminishes or merges with commercialism, the capacity to distinguish between the two is compromised". With The corporate media  and their think-tank ideologues aggressively advertising they became the leading definers of memes and behavior  of this new age media.

In the age of Obama, we see now, more ominously than ever, radio, television, internet, television being used by some racist organizations to wreck all public good offered by the new president, in the wake of America's economic debacle, solutions towards reviving the melt down, met with vicious, vitriolic and rabid racism. The Convergence of these nascent Technologies,  has been used and coalesced negatively against the Heath Care Proposal that has been bandied around by the Present Obama administration. Insurance companies and pharmaceuticals all jumped into the fray and and are using every available issue to create discordancy and civil disorder, in the form of Town-Hall  gatherings. During the Presidential Primaries we saw the revamping of all media apparatus, phone banks, Shortwave radio and right wig web sites proliferate rapidly. Now of late, mid to late 2009, we saw the media used to create a Tea Party counterculture, hosted by right wing radio, television and internet groupies up to the motley crew of bussed in hecklers and sign holders(Most signs racist and unbecoming of civil order and society), racism boiled over. Some on TV land and internet Blogs pointed out this is due to the fact that Obama is President and also African American; we are seeing gun-toting gunslingers, Deathers, Birthers, and the whole bit display vociferous race baiting and hate. This was achieved through emerging and converging and old technologies about in the Media ecology by corporate media moguls and their minions, by dictating discourse and dominant ideas, leaving an unhappy population dominated by technique.

Today's Media Zeitgeist, memes and zines compound the present day race and social relations. Genesis P-Orridge and other meta media activists feel that they can break the tyrannous linage that constructed the media sphere. Genesis succinctly states: "Studying, exploring, and exposing the gaps in our postmodern, highly edited media reality, virus formulators learn that the deepest, darkest power of the media is its ability to break through the perceptions of linear time. What I'm really saying is that the enemy resides in the concept of heritage and inheritance. The medium it uses to maintain its life is the culture. It's patently obvious that time is not linear. This is the imposition of an impractical and inappropriate construct. Things are really in chaos. But the policing of this inept construct damages and cripples us psychically, emotionally, intellectually and even physically". Understanding the media, human communications will help plant the seeds of civility and social growth. Although we have been relegated to the back in terms of political discourse and production, we have the ability to deconstruct the news media that has been formulated and packaged for us by the  professionals. With the spirit of the times, we can revamp and change media zeitgeist. and this can only happen on personal level, family structures, neighborhood collectives, universally for culture and nations and within the spheres of human civilizations. We can take a few teachable moments from the election of Obama into Power by interrogating how technology worked how  the media was controlled and dictated to by the masses.