Summary Of Welcome To The Attainment Freak Show By Mplan

Kaplan Summary In “Welcome to the Infotainment Freak Show”, Martin Kaplan explains how the world is under the reign of entertainment. People are glued to today’s technology because of how easy it is to give and receive news. The era is known as postmodernity, or “pomo” for short; it is an era of subjective knowledge and the truth is what society makes it. News stopped being about content and truth and gained a political and profit-based agenda. People no longer tune in to the news for truthful, critical stories, but now listen in for abstract stories that lack content and arouse our emotions. The media knows that “...our species is a sucker for novelty, sex, fear, pictures, motion, noise, scatology, fun…” (142) and hope to monetize.Society shapes the way the media is run because what they demand is what they
will pay for.
In theory, society can change the way entertainment selects and shows their content. However, that day would be a day the public demanded more insightful content. Kaplan describes the news today as “crisis porn” (143) because people love celebrity mishaps and disasters and cannot get enough of it. People love to panic and with the media in control of the tone of every situation, the media only elevates the panic and is highly capable of making every situation worse. The media initially hypes up certain stories, that could be completely meaningless, while they disregard other stories by alleviating them. People do not care about the content of what they are seeing only that it looks cool. The media has become a competition of showmanship and the prize is the public’s attention. This way of showmanship extends beyond media and applies to politics, lawyers, colleges, physicians, and so on because the public demand it and it is how they are able to make money. The public has become so sucked into the entertainment world that it is not uncommon for someone to think themselves a starring lead of
their own show. In this era of subjective knowledge, it is believed that accuracy, objectivity, and fairness are unreachable goals. To settle for an easier goal, media has turned to “balance”. Balance is the media opening up “airwaves and column inches to everyone” (140). Instead of have one truthful, unbiased narrative, the media is flooded with tons of different voices ranging from different ideas and “truths”. The media has begun to pride itself on getting these many different perspectives. Show hosts and journalism will invite a spokesperson/interviewee from a different mindset to answer wide-open questions. These people can be “experts” or ordinary people and they become injected into the debate. This is entertaining, at least it is when the debates become heated. It does not matter what is being debated or the content of their answers to the questions, people just like to watch them fight. The old paradigm was a “hierarchy of gatekeepers” (141), ranging from editors to reporters. With the internet, anyone can join the debate and everyone suddenly becomes a reporter. Kaplan does not think this to be an entirely bad idea, but one must remember that professionals, who could distribute the truth, are being dismissed. Truth, fairness, and accuracy are being lost among the mess that is today’s media. Kaplan believes the internet can be an antidote to this “brave new world of entertainment uber alles” (146) because of it’s wide range of channels in which people can gather information or perhaps the internet will to become monetized and it information just as subjective.