YOUR REALITY IS BEING PACKAGED

You know what packaging is.

When you want to buy a single pen and you go down the pen aisle in the office supply store and you are face with this huge wall of ... stuff. So colorful, so beladen with stickers and titles that you barely know at what you are looking. You take one down to see if it's a pen at all let alone the kind of pen you want you the package is huge in your hand, a big piece of cardboard surrounding a bulking blister of plastic in which the pen resides, looking small and fragile and very much like some deprived prisoner in the high tech prison of some future dystopia

Damnit, all you want is a pen. So you purchase the thing and take it home and you really want to write something with that pen but now you have to free the prisoner. It ain't gonna be easy pardner. You have to rip that cardboard to get at the blister then fight your way through all that plastic

You will need a knife. And a chainsaw. And a plasma torch

Damnit, all you want is a pen

That, my friends, is packaging

And that is how most of our electronic media is now being presented to us: Packaged. Heavily packaged. So much plastic and cardboard and stickers and titles, it's difficult to see exactly what is being packaged in the first place

Be it that missing airliner of the death of finance minister Jim Flarety, our reality is being packaged. And quickly. Flarety died the day before this post was written and already this morning the fact of the man's passing is wrapped in several layers of packaging: Music, graphics, still, motion graphics, voice over clips ... Oh, were you people looking for a pen? Here, look here, look at all our shiny packaging, your pen is here!

This is how it works: Once upon a time you could go to the media store and there weren't that many shelves; a shelf for paper, a shelf for radio, a shelf for TV. And on those shelves, there weren't that many products. The paper shelves were usually full, lots to choose from there. But for radio and TV, not near as much. No need for a ton of packaging, take your time, browse

Much different today of course. Lots and lots of shelves, the paper section is diminishing but the electronics area, well aren't we a boom business. Lots of need for loud, huge packaging to capture our attention. And not just to bring us to a single electronic station, but each story itself is being packaged as most new media allows us to focus in on a single item

Gosh, however will we get our message to people? Will we work hard, due our due dillegence, dig and investigate and disill and try to get to the meat of the story .. or shall we just invest more time in packaging than we do on reporting. Yeh, let's do that, we don't care how good the product is, we just need to get it viewed

I don't have a lot of time for packaging. And what these purveyors of media porn don't seem to understand is, all this choice that makes them so frantic to get my attention, means I can choose not to even touch their packaging. I see that big blister of package, think about how much time it would take me to get to the product and I just move on to the next shelf

And of course,  you are browsing right now. This post is a product. The product is my observation and my opinion. It's no more credible or relevant than any other but I want you to look at it nonetheless. So it's been packaged, in the form of this blog

I know,

All you wanted was a damn pen