I’ve been spending more time than usual playing media junkie. For the most part, I’ve been drawn to cable news pundit shows and talk radio, a field scattered with ideas and opinions from all over America. What I’m finding so far - not all that exciting. The more I look, the less I see.
There’s a ton of conservative hosts with talking points, obvious agendas, and a pack of lies and half-truths to stir up the base with. There’s a few liberal hosts with similar tactics, and the rest seem ineffectual. There’s not much in the middle. It seems like everyone is so concerned with their party line and talking points that real opinion and commentary has mostly faded away. Discussion and honest debate over the state of our world and the things and people in it has been replaced by political drones bent on furthering one agenda or another, and it’s all happening at the expense of real discourse.
So the question is: How do we grow culturally when our public dialog has been reduced to packaged marketing materials?
Simple. Kill the marketing materials, throw away the packaged media, and engage real people. That’s what we’re out to do, really.
We could interview economists, but that wouldn’t give us the level of reality that interviewing an underemployed contractor, technician, or nurse would. We could interview health care experts, but we find chatting with a doctor who can’t make heads or tails of insurance claims more enlightening. We could talk to politicians, but talking to voters about why they make their political choices is more fascinating.
Through everything we do at Highly Kaffeinated, the theme is to share and discuss the real world with real people, not the fantasy land presented by cable news talking heads and the modern media. That makes us a little different - raw, less polished and produced, more open. We’re not broadcasters, we’re real people with real lives, concerns, and interests who have found an audience of like minds by sharing along the way.
We look at the news and the world it emanates from through the filter of our own lives, sharing that perspective, opening new doors to discussion, and inviting our listeners to join in. We rant, rave, and rage over the the stupid, brilliant, or unspeakable things we see every day, encouraging our listeners to get engaged in the world around them and help take part in creating the future.
We are Highly Kaffeinated. We are too wired to be silent and too weird to be boring, and we’re not going to sit here quietly any more.
-Kaffeinated
26 December, 2009
