Friday, November 17, 2006

What's The Big Deal About PS3?

The media has been consumed for days about the release of Sony's PlayStation 3. There have been stories about gamers lined up by the thousands outside of stores, and in Connecticut a man was shot outside a Wal-Mart while waiting for the video game machine. The whole spectacle makes me shake my head in wonder, and I'm not the only one. I receive an e-mail meditation from Lutheran Pastor Kerry Nelson in Texas every morning and he questioned the craziness too:
All I know is that people were lined up at midnight last night at Best Buys all over town waiting for the release of a new game system. And I make a judgment about that - some are parents who want their kids to have the very newest and very best and Christmas is just around the corner, and some are young adults who spend way too many hours playing video games, and all of this is a commentary on our priorities and our lives.

At a time when 35,000,000 people in the United States live below the poverty line, when we have soldiers risking their lives on a daily basis in a war that people continue to question, we have lines of people waiting all night to buy video games. Something is just not right with that picture. [...]

Back in the days of the Roman empire, they had the great idea of keeping the masses quiet and controllable by making sure that they have plenty of two things - bread and circuses. Feed 'em and distract 'em and they will stay out of the way.

Feed their bodies and numb their minds. Has anything changed?

Draw your own conclusion.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's changed is we stopped feeding them. Only they're not hungry anymore, now we are just going to call it being in food insecurity.

It is a sad statement on our consumer society though.

Lew Scannon said...

Sony whips up demand while not manufacturing to meet the demand they created, causing all kinds of problems that generate hours of free publicity. Corporate America is evil.

Graeme said...

I agree with Lew. Evil. There were people camping out in front of Best Buy here to get that silly machine

Anonymous said...

Madison Avenue's wantmakers are talented lot - to a fault. I remember when Windows 95 first came out. There was such hoopla built up for it that a woman who didn't even have a computer bought it. All she knew is she just had to have it.

Kathy said...

Libby, I saw that news about the government changing how they define hunger. I wanted to blog about it but I've been swamped with work and blogger issues. Grrr...

Lew, I agree about the corporate evil too. It's all about the money, all the time, and all for those at the top.

Abi, I never heard about the woman and Windows 95. Unbelievable! I know children who think they need everything they see, but it's a sad commentary on our society when adults act that way too.