Reading time: 4 minutes
Every evening, at 8 p.m., opens a strange collective ritual: millions of citizens settle in their sofa to attend the mass of information. On the screen, an impeccable presenter, locked smile and reassuring tone, unfolds the daily breviary: An indigestible mix of tragedies, futility and publicity.
The show is grotesque inconsistency.
A civil war and its processions of corpses appear live, then, without any transition, we move on to a report on a competition of dogs in Chantilly.
After the tsunami that swallowed an entire city, the giant beet of a triumphant farmer was applauded.
The viewer is shaken like in a big eight emotional: horror, forced smile, drama, lightness, all in a chain as absurd as it is mechanical.
This juxtaposition was nothing innocent.
It transforms the world into one patchwork of ephemeral scenesreducing disasters to simple consumer images.
The misfortune of others becomes a spectacle, quickly swept away by a futile anecdote, immediately covered by advertising which, in reality, is the only reason for this parade.
Wars, famines, collapses are reduced to call products intended to gather a captive audience... to sell him soda, a SUV or anti-wrinkle cream.
The result is devastating for the viewer.
First, he is immersed in a permanent emotional confusion How can we react when, within five minutes, we move from the agony of a people to a report on the leek pie "which is furious in Auvergne"?
This brutal contrast breaks the ability to feel real empathy. You laugh, you look away, you end up feeling nothing at all.
Then this media liturgy installs a form ofpsychological impotence.
Bombarded with images of chaos and futility, the viewer understands that he has no role, no take on this world that "walks on the head". Everything seems to him both monstrous and derisory, a grotesque theatre where misfortunes are treated like sketches between two pages of advertising.
This dissonance leaves him emptied, exhausted, physically affected, like an organism that would have absorbed too many toxins.
The factory of indifference
What this great daily Mass reveals is first of all the world show.
Television does not show the reality: it cuts it, mounts it, assembles to make it a consumable product.
Each drama is reduced to a few seconds of shock images, immediately neutralized by a light transition. This treatment is not intended to understand, but to capture. The viewer does not become an informed citizen, but a passive viewer.
Then this ritual produces what some sociologists call a "compassionate anesthesia". Confronted too often and too quickly with tragedies, the viewer protects himself by reducing his empathy.
The distant dramas are all emotional decorations. The suffering of others becomes a backdrop, interchangeable, destined to disappear after the weather.
This gradual banalisation of the disaster generates collective indifference: it is not that one does not care, but that one can no longer care about everything.
Finally, the 8pm works like a absurd normalizing machine. By constantly alternating the worst and the trivial, it blurs the hierarchy of gravity.
A famine becomes equivalent, in the order of the newspaper, to a contest of Miss or to a panda celebrating her birthday at the zoo.
This flattening of the world makes everything equivalent, therefore insignificant. And in this void of sense, space is perfectly clear for the most part: the advertising.
This is the bitterest sociological conclusion: The 8 p.m. Mass is not intended first to inform, but to maintain a brain time available.
The world's woes are presented not to awaken the citizen's conscience, but for feed the audience necessary for the profitability of the show.
The TV news is therefore not a window on the world: it is a supermarket window where dramas serve as baits to sell flat screens and probiotic yogurts.
A Mass Making Vacuum
Thus, behind the frozen smiles of presenters and the grotesque lightness of transitions, lies a darker truth: Every evening at 8 p.m., television organizes a liturgy of emptiness, an office where humanity contemplates itself in its own delirium.
For viewers, the price to pay is heavy: emotional confusion, loss of benchmarks, feeling powerless, growing indifference.
Some end up picking up, turning off, refusing.
Others continue, hypnotized, as one returns to Mass by habit, even when one has ceased to believe.
The 8pm does not enlighten us: it distracts us from the real, transforming it into an absurd spectacle. And every night he seals this evidence: If the planet seems crazy, it is also because we accept to contemplate the madness...as a simple entertainment.
Mass is said !
