ReGeneration Page #3

is a much colder environment

compared to the natural one.

You are more than welcome,

when you're done, to quietly listen

to your mp3 player.

If I, or the people around you,

have to hear what your

favorite song is, I take it.

Ok? If I see your cell phone,

same thing.

That means that all weekend

you'd have to go without it,

which I understand is just like probably

removing your right leg

or both legs for some of you guys.

I've seen tears, people crying,

"You can't do this to me!"

Yes, I can.

The research shows that

you can't really multi-task.

What it is,

is it's time-splicing so their attention

is switching from one thing to the next.

And the research is showing that

the brain is actually changing

in young children

to allow them to do that.

So what we've got is

this big ADD generation.

And you come into a classroom

where you want to take a poem

or a piece of literature and

you want to dig into it for a half hour,

forty-five minutes, and really get into

the depth of it

they don't have the patience for that.

They just don't have the patience

for that deep thought and analysis,

and that bothers me because

you need those skills.

But if you grow up in an

electronic environment,

then you may have a kind

of an empathy deficit of some kind.

You won't be able to make rich,

intense human contacts.

You won't be able to love

somebody totally,

you won't be able to feel deep,

deep sorrow when somebody dies.

And we need empathy

to prevent wars in Iraq.

I am outraged that

this generation of kids

was not more concerned and

outraged at that war.

I don't understand why

they didn't react like we did.

I mean, when we were in Vietnam,

I was expelled from school

for walking out in protest

when Nixon invaded Cambodia.

The kids today, it's just like,

"Oh yeah, the war in Iraq."

I sat here in my classroom on that

television and we watched 9/11 happen.

Teacher ran down and said,

"Turn on your TV,

something horrible is happening."

I turned on the television:

we watched that airplane.

We watched that airplane

crash into the tower

and kid in the back is going, "Cool!"

I said, "This isn't a movie, you guys.

This is real.

This just really happened.

You know, that's not a special effect."

The current generation of kids

are literally saturated with media,

with some kind

of mass media communication.

You know, sometimes ten,

twelve hours a day.

And when you're surrounded

by an environment in that way,

you have to be shaped by it.

That's how culture works.

Culture shapes identity, culture

shapes how we understand the world.

Nielsen Media Research shows

that the average man,

woman and child watch as much

as four hours of television a day.

This does not include

time spent on the Internet

or playing video games.

So with this much time spent

sitting in front of a screen,

what exactly are we staring at?

What is shaping us?

A soldier calling home to check in

with the world at large,

to be connected as to what's happening,

would most likely get a response

of something to do with Lindsay Lohan

is back in rehab,

or Paris Hilton went back to jail.

That's the news of the day.

Do you know anything else

that's going on right now?

That's important?

- Yeah.

- No.

First in news at 8:03,

Paris Hilton out of jail this morning.

Was she given special treatment?

Who cares? Reporters wanted

to know how did she look so good.

The media are aggressively dumb.

They pander.

Of course, we pander.

We're dumb, I'll admit it.

Welcome back,

we know you're jonesing for it

today's Britney Spears' disaster update.

Media and Propaganda Conference;

University of Windsor, Canada.

Mass media are mostly for diversion.

Take a look at the tabloids.

They may have a quarter of a page

on their national affairs.

But that's what the mass media are,

they are to divert the public,

get them out of their hair.

That's pretty explicit.

It's explicit among public intellectuals,

media leaders and others.

Now, the public just... they're called,

'Ignorant, meddlesome outsiders.

We've got to get rid of them so we,

the responsible men,

can do things properly.'

Political apathy is a rational

choice in many ways

for most people because that's the fare

that's fell up to most of us.

Think more about Anna Nicole Smith

than about 655,000 Iraqis who

have been killed in the war.

When the city of New Orleans drowned,

the corporate media in that case did the

right thing. They raced to New Orleans.

Now, the Bush administration

did respond quickly on one issue

they said,

"You are not to film the bodies."

See, a side effect

of the Bush administration

not responding to the catastrophe

in New Orleans

is that when the network

reporters went down,

they shocked our country,

they galvanized the nation.

Could you imagine if, for just one week,

we had seen those images

on the ground in Iraq?

We saw the babies dead, we saw

the women with their legs blown off,

the cluster bombs from Iraq to Lebanon.

We saw the soldiers dead and dying.

There was a poll done in the United States

just recently that asked Americans,

"How many Iraqis

do you think have died?"

They said somewhere under ten thousand.

Well, the British Medical Journal

The Lancet published

a Johns Hopkins University study that

says more than 655,000 Iraqis have died.

And a more recent study says

more than a million Iraqis have died.

But in the United States,

most people don't think that.

And it's not because people are stupid.

people are good media consumers.

They take in, they absorb what

they watch and read.

Could you imagine if, for one week,

we saw those real images on the ground?

The dead and dying on all sides?

Americans are a compassionate people.

They would say, "No.

War is not the answer

to conflict in the 21st century."

How do you see,

just being a media personality

do you see the media affecting

the youth culture at all?

Particularly news media?

I mean, we do our best

to affect youth culture

because that's where the ad dollars are.

TV shows, news programs,

variety programs,

soap operas were created to sell soap.

That's what they were created for.

But it doesn't surprise me

when people criticize,

you know, CNN, Fox News,

the celebrity shows...

It's like people really don't understand

what TV and media is for.

It's to sell you things. You'd be lucky

if you get some entertainment out of it.

Bit by bit, I found out how

the Vietnam war started

and that probably was the beginning

of my politicization of my life.

And then after that, of course,

travelling around the world

and then finding out about

how most of the world lives.

Then I immigrated to Canada

and I actually wanted to be a filmmaker,

I wanted to make documentary films

and show people

some of the stuff that

I'd seen all over the place.

So, I started a film-making commune,

right here in this house actually.

And we've been making all kinds

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