Concentration of Media Ownership

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.

Media consolidation infographic: http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4fd9ee1e6bb3f7af5700000a/media-infographic.jpg

Narcotizing Dysfunction

Narcotizing dysfunction is a theory that as mass media inundates people on a particular issue they become apathetic to it, substituting knowledge for action. It is suggested that the vast supply of communications Americans receive may elicit only a superficial concern with the problems of society, while importance of real action is neglected, and this superficiality may cover up mass apathy. Thus, it is termed "dysfunctional" as it assumed it is not in the best interests of the people who compose modern complex society to form a social mass that is politically apathetic and inert. The term narcotizing dysfunction was coined in the article Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action, by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Robert K. Merton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcotizing_dysfunction

Hypernormalization

The term "hypernormalisation" is taken from Alexei Yurchak's 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before it collapsed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, he argues that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "fakeness" was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed "hypernormalisation".

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. The film was released on 16 October 2016 on the BBC iPlayer. In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex "real world" and built a simple "fake world" that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

The Society of the Spectacle

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.

In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that quality of life is impoverished, with such lack of authenticity, human perceptions are affected, and there's also a degradation of knowledge, with the hindering of critical thought. Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle