Media: Remembering YPAHMTS

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Thanks to all the repeat programming that I don't need to hear again around the holidays, I've been spending some time digitizing old radio shows that I had recorded on tape for posterity. In many cases, it became really obvious why I decided to keep these programs. A case in point was the Soundprint episode Young People Against Heavy Metal T-Shirts (YPAHMTS).

For those who would rather read the story of YPAHMTS than listen to the radio show, refer to this article by Matthew Thompson. In it, he explains how the fake movement started, how a variety of media including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation took it seriously, and how even some of his friends helping perpetuate the ruse started to believe in it. Having pulled my own, much less compelling deception in the same era, the story didn't surprise me at all.

To me, the key passage of the whole saga was this:

All the media attention and the talkback response was a crash course in human nature. If an idea comes along that requires patience and thought, most people will skim straight over it, missing the main points, or they'll switch to something else that offers instant drama. Without the discernment and attention span to think matters through, the average punter's focus is stolen by triviality after triviality. You can go a hell of a long way by using an entertaining delivery of emotive words - regardless of the inherent content. If you can do this, you'll find it easy to manipulate and distract people - make them think it's more important that we debate tax reform in Australia than consider what it means to have our government and some of our large corporations happily splitting the profits from the near genocide of the East Timorese people with the Indonesian government.

Insert your favorite contemporary triviality and profundity into the last sentence, and that paragraph could have been written today.

If all this doesn't seem disturbing enough, note that the whole YPAHMTS saga took place more than a decade ago, before the impact of broadband media and the decimation of newspapers and even broadcast media. One might say that bloggers would uncover the ruse much more quickly today, but in the meantime--and it would take some time--I suspect the broadcast media would give it even more play, seeing how it would be an easy topic to produce and their lack of resources makes them fundamentally lazier in choosing topics.

Whether or not the exact YPAHMTS experience could take place today is really not the point. Thompson's fundamental point that vacuous stories told skillfully distract from real issues is an age-old truth, but with the general population more and more distracted by electronic devices and the media having fewer resources to try to break through with substantive, in-depth stories, it is an increasingly serious concern for which I continue to see no solutions, even hard-to-implement ones.