A controversial new update in Fortnite, a popular game among children, now gives players the option to "sell their soul" to a demonic figure.
To unlock certain perks and access a specific character, players must navigate to the underworld section of the map and sacrifice their health.
This triggers an eerie animation where their character appears to strike a deal with the devil-like figure.
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My particular area of training was mass communications research methods...but this stuff is part of any setting where people study, research, or build programs in mass communications, social psychology, marketing communications, advertising, "persuasion research," public relations, and much more.
There are also IC fields, both government and private, that apply/develop these methods.
Every financial sector, industry, and business has a team that tries to figure out how to get people to do whatever they want people to do, to make their quarterly/annual numbers. Same with media. With tech (not just tech media, but also video games, consumer interfaces, etc.). With Pharma. With Big Ag.
Just a little example. The TV show "Sesame Street." It was explicitly designed by a TV network researcher (Joan Ganz Cooney) and a guy from the Carnegie Corporation (Lloyd Morrisett Jr) to figure out how to use TV to "teach" children. Look up the article
The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education. A Report to Carnegie Corporation of New York
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED604064
Well, who was teaching what, and for what ends? Shouldn't learning come from families? Weren't we pouring tax dollars into schools? Were they failing? Why? Who were the kids in question?
As you read through that report, you can start to unpack the assumptions of Cooney (whose jewish dad was a banker) and Morrisett (whose dad, btw, was a rather shadowy figure at UCLA specializing in creating people with education degrees to build the Ed Biz around).
Over the years/decades what was learned from the earliest research, including Clooney's and Morissette's, was manifold. One example: a more granular sense of at what ages/developmental stages kids can learn what content and "develop media literacy skills" (i.e., be pulled into the mediated model).
For example it was realized early on that children up to age 2 aren't susceptible to mediated content. That was defined in the literature henceforth as "video deficit," with a lot of research focus going to how to grab kids as early as possible, with what means and methods, and keep their attention.
If people had any idea how extensive this mindf!ck industry is, and how much money, time, energy, etc., go into it, it would be Pitchfork Year. And now that Big Data and AI are in play, automating so much of the surveillance and analysis...well, it takes attention and effort to give one's family any experience of life outside the media BorgMatrix.
Thank you for responding, lots of good information. The kids less than 2 yo was new to me.
Yes. It's just stunning how cynically such things get parsed...then exploited. And then calling it a "deficit" in the infant--as though the NATURAL state of children is brain-melted to the godbox.
Kids under two actually believe whatever they see on TV or media is real. Their brains are not developed enough at that age to understand the difference. By age 5 their brains are 90% developed. The last 10% doesn’t complete until age 25.