What We Possess and What We Don't

*Part of series of writings

Let's looking back our life, what life experience could we collect? For today's standard, life experience came mostly from watching movies, TV, reading books, looking at magazines and advertisement, and browsing the net. Social media is practically everywhere right now. Everything we see, everywhere we look, there are always some neatly designed commercial billboards, beautifully packaged products, head-turning posters, and more. Unconsciously, they shaped our culture. Yes, our culture wasn't anything passed from the earlier generations: ours is shaped by media and their viral publication.

Bombarded with images of 'white is beauty', today's women shaped themselves towards the ideal, screened with advertisement of 'fat is for loser, skinny is sexy', the youth start to dieting themselves for no apparent reason (apart from 'being skinny just for the sake of skinny'). Even the self-proclaimed 'vintage' people knew the vintage culture from magazine, not a historical culture that's passed by their earlier generation.
Everyday tons and tons of visual imagery supplied to our eyes, the things that seems cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and opportunities, the dramatic story of successful person.

First, we dressed up with thick make ups and elegant outfits, then it continue and became a sort of habitual activities, the activities spread along a specific zeitgeist, forming a to-be-culture that's ready to unleashed themselves to greater institution like society. After the society had been successfully penetrated (by means of publications and socialization), the culture are established. Staying there for quite some time, before the media inject us again with another trend, another aesthetic value.

Everywhere we look: there's a new advertisement of the new Gucci products, new Apple releases, the success story of Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, the miraculous-dramatic story of rehabilitated junkie out of Oprah's talkshow. We were told to be like them, we were told to dig some deeper meanings behind those fabricated publication. We are mocked when we dress in some loin cloth when we went public, everyone laughed when we can't say a thing about Twitter. Today's media publication and company marketing shape our culture, minimize the gap between what's real and what's dreamy.

We were told to tucked in our shirt so that we can look like Katie Holmes, we are forced to buy those Zara clothes so that we may look like the people who bought them. Workers work hard to gain money and ended up spending in some Armani shoes and the new BlackBerry Bolt. Children looked up on PS3 advertisement and begged their father to buy one, teenage looked up Katy Perry's dress and hunt them in shopping mall, adults fooled by the new time-saving application in iPhone so that they can access their emails everywhere, and ended up buying them. And what happened when we can't buy those products? What happened when we failed to lived up the ideal images of 'white is beauty' or 'thin is sexy'? What happened when we didn't participate in some global warming prevention campaign? You get alienated, people looked down on you, they reject you.

The gaps are enormous, between what's real and what's not. Yet, today's corporation and media had eliminate every bound possible. Oceans and mountains, miles of roads and ricefields are eliminated, so that we here in Jakarta can looks like the people in New York, so that we can also plug a big headphone to our iPod Nano like everyone in Tokyo did. Visual imagery in every social media, well, to be honest it was a clandestine arrangement to globalize everything, socialize everything, make everything familiar and 'touchable', they even make the intangible could be grasped easily.

Here's when the invisible ideology took us in, forced us to conform with them. Yet, we never realized it, we never--consciously--knew what kind of ideology and belief they were all injected to us. We knew about the physical products, yet can't grasped the concept behind it, a concept of globalization, an idea to gather everyone under one roof. Knew something that physical products don't guarantee instant literacy, we possess a Blackberry yet we can't maximized the functions (says like, email features or voice recognition call), that's when the gap happened.

--TO BE CONTINUED--