not Rollerball

[miriam_e]

From time to time I remember the film Rollerball.   I saw it decades ago... it stars James Caan and is built upon a story by William Harrison. The idea behind it is that the world is ruled by just a few mega-corporations who divert humanity's attention with a gladiatorial sport called rollerball.

There are a number of truly scary scenes in the film, but two particularly send cold thru my veins.

• One is when Jonathon wants to find out something (a very unusual thing to do in that era) and so he visits the library -- one computer is the single repository of all historical and cultural knowledge. On the day he visits, the librarian (played by Ralph Richardson) is smitten with woe and moaning about something that Jonathon doesn't understand. It seems that there was a crash of some sort in the computer and the 17th Century was lost that morning. Jonathon shrugs it off wondering why anybody would care, and thinking this librarian is a bit weird. The librarian tries to explain that this computer held the only information on that century -- Shakespeare and all his works, for instance are now gone, as if they had never existed. Jonathon gets the info he is after and leaves the distraught librarian.
• The other scene that really bothers me is where a bunch of drunken partygoers stagger, laughing, out into a field. There are some shots of a row of large trees and the sounds of all the birds that live in them. These are intercut with the drunken revellers who are have a handweapon of some kind. One of the women in the group unsteadily takes aim at the tree. She fires, and the tree with all the creatures bursts into flame.

I doubt those two aspects of this horrific vision of the future will ever come to pass. People are becoming more knowledgeable and empathetic, and information is becoming more widely spread rather than centralised. However two major themes of the story do worry me: the concentration of all power into the hands of a few mega-corporations, and diversion of the people with gladiatorial sports.

I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories. I tend to think that nasty people are necessarily not very smart and are unable to cooperate properly, so most 'conspiracies' can be explained through ineptitude.

Australians are continually portrayed in the media as a sport-obsessed people and our TV screens, newspapers, and radios are filled with sport. Why is this? It is fairly well known that more Australians visit art galleries and museums each week than sporting events. We have one of the highest levels of general literacy in the world -- scientific literacy in particular. If anything we are a book-reading, documentary-watching nation.

Why, instead, are we portrayed as sporting yobbos? And why is so much effort sunk into convincing us of this?

Sport is big business for a number of reasons. It costs little money or effort to put sports on TV and radio. The advertising returns are very good (have you ever seen how many advertisements they manage to squeeze into a sportscast?). And local networks who have to comply with rules to broadcast a certain fraction of Australian content can get away with topping it up with sport. I often wonder also if they cynically feel that people who watch sports are the perfect advertising fodder anyway -- they like what they are told to.

Like I said, I don't believe this is a conspiracy. I think it is mostly laziness on the part of the radio, TV, and newspaper executives. They get a return from putting little in. If they spared more effort they would boost local science, art, and culture, gaining vastly more in the longer run... but they basically couldn't be bothered; short term profits are much easier. The advertisers who fund such idiocy are themselves victims, being duped into thinking they are reaching a large part of society, but are in fact, largely wasting their money. Politicians are the closest to being conspirators in this. But even they are simply clueless fools when they play a machiavellian sport card, like the racist card, to curry favor... I don't think they truly understand that it has the reverse effect on a large part of society.

The worst part is that the bulk of society is being convinced by all the rah-rah sports fanfare, that they stand alone in a minority. The media Orouboros devouring its own tale has effects far beyond its own shallow preoccupations, but in the process is gradually making itself irrelevant.

Thank heavens for the internet!