The pleasure of uncommitted sharing in someone else's joy and misery produces a state of euphoria that lasts as long as one is on line. No sooner do we turn our backs to the media than our awareness of local duties and diversions reemerges unaltered to detail. Just after having donated your savings to the victims of some Bangladeshi flood disaster, you may well blow your top over the neighbors' leaking washing machine. The global consciousness created in the media never leaves its medial surroundings. Awareness of the surrounding world occupies its own, separate level within the collective unconscious.
Archetypes generated by the news somehow never find their way into the civilized mindset.
Compassion for African victims of starvation is easily coupled with indifference concerning one's countrymen. Predictions of how the media would cause a shift in social attitudes have proved more than prophetic. Media teach us not to aim our actions at our immediate surroundings, but rather to subject them to the information at hand. The media's educational scheme aims only to initiate users in the rules of immateriality and show them an individual approach to global virtual reality. The contemporary potlatch of the game show proves how viewers may be abundantly rewarded for their concentrated participation - a pastime to instruct us in the casual attitude necessary to market one's own personality.