Opinion/Editorial
THE END OF THE THIRD ACT
Life is about more than conditioning, which is a function of gaining life experience, whether through study, learning or living that experience. Conditioning is more a function of the transmission of information in order to effect behavioral reaction and change of an audience. Today, the communications complex of such a vastly significant nature and amount has led to conditioning of the public, particularly the American public, to have an expectation that nothing reaches any kind of resolution until the very end of the third act of anything. Sports are all set up these days to have the final result occur in a short (but often very extended period of time) part of the last part of any event. The same is true for the end of movies, television shows. This bleeds right over into what we are all led to believe is the reporting of occurrences about the reality we are living in. News ‘stories’ are reported in same way, in almost all ways in every medium of presentation. The end of the story is really the nuts, bolts and meat of those stories, not lengthy time of play or the delivery about the foundations of the story.
That the ends of almost all stories published today, whether online, whether sports-related, Hollywood-generated, or even television news is fabricated to be just exactly that way is missed by most of the public. In sports, for example, time outs were never designed primarily (in any sport) to be there simply to stop the clock. There were other purposes, many of them founded in safety. The news on television wasn’t always, or almost ever, delivered filled with ‘teasers’ about stories that have to be tuned in on to find out about in the end. Life itself, as we live in on every level is becoming the same way. People are fired on Friday afternoons, for example, not because they might create an uncomfortable mess if fired during the week, but because that’s how things have developed in a culture that’s dead set on exercising action only at the very last second. A game in sports isn’t even evaluated as a good game unless it comes down to being decided in the very last seconds.
How does an entire culture begin to accommodate this kind of applied behavior being directed continuously upon it through every venue of owned communications? The result of this kind of ‘critical’ delivery of all information (think ‘breaking stories’ all the time on news shows) and the emotion that’s deliberately being built into the final seconds of everything. Just the tone of these information transmissions builds a tension that is almost overpowering. As the news story, the sports announcing or the movie/television show gets closer to the end, the tone of the speakers rises and becomes almost awful in delivering what begins to appear to be almost life or death news, yet the story itself may be something as unimportant or mundane as the closing reports about a concluding sports game.
The nation, for example, and much of the world, has been instructed to give huge attention to people who throw, hit or kick leather balls to one another, or away from one another. Most of the players are uneducated (in truth) and paid multi-millions of dollars a year…and represent little or nothing of the cares or even geographic regional populations of the public they supposedly play for. People end up living their lives in elation or depression, depending upon the final seconds of some contest that should be meaningless in their lives. Rationality is not a big part of any of this. That this sort of criticality and ‘end of the third act’ kind of delivery to the public has been created deliberately, so a few other members of the public and make many millions of dollars seems beside the point, except when it comes to the news.
The news was always special, and its delivery protected under layers of ethical concern and action. Not anymore. The news is today delivered by almost every mass medium just like sports stories, whether that medium is through Fox, CNN, MSNBC, or even the BBC. Is there any wonder that alcohol sells in quantities never seen before, that fentanyl has risen as the calming drug of our times, along with marijuana so legally powerful that it’s almost become mind-numbing? The culture is trying to stand down from the hype, the over-the-top stories about everything and having to wait for the last second action and the reporting of it as the third act about everything is specially planned, formed and then awfully delivered.
