The Computer.... the Ultimate Little Black Box

America is replete with personifications of living in the "little black box."  Everyday, everywhere we look we are reminded that we as a nation are not free at all, but we are living in the artificial boundaries surveyed, cast, and enforced by someone else.  In George Orwell's novel l984 "Big Brother" sets those boundaries.  In a plethora of science fiction movies a similar faction does the same.  It is a common theme, man against the machine, "Rage Against the Machine."  Media has not helped the cause of man in the last three years.  Almost every depiction they render wreaks of the black box.  In more concise terms living in the black box is a dilution of life.  Instead of dealing intimately with the humanities, the black box inconclusively extrapolates human responses in an insensitive, uncaring, and uninformed way.  It attempts to negate the quintessential purpose of the arts, to expose and communicate with the human's innermost thoughts and feelings.  Why would anyone want to do this?  Idle speculation could say it is because ignorance breeds bliss, bliss created from monetary products.  Without art, humanity, and mother nature man is at the mercy of machine.  We become dependent like a suckling child on the nipple that is big business providing us Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  As with many truths, enlightenment is but a fraction of an inch away.  All it takes is the courage to acknowledge what is happening.  The "black box" is represented clearly in many ways in American life.  The black box of the television camera began as just the opposite, a tool of enlightenment and communication.  It was not until recently that the media faction decided it was more important than humanity itself.  In television production that is when the camera took on a hypothetical life of its own, casting judgements and opinions that mean nothing.  Without a brain and a heart a camera can have no viable opinion.  Filmmakers of yesteryear knew this, and that is why film making and television were high art forms.  Moral and ethical responsibility were taken for how the American public perceived what the camera filmed.  Then it was the director and the producer that brought the human message of the screen writer to fruition.  Now in the frantic pace of life the camera, like an untrained dog, trots, paces, pants, and barks like the unintelligent being he is.  It says nothing.  The computer is no different doing only what its owner instructs it to do within the means of the software creator.  It has no opinion of its own.  Pop music unfortunately has molded to this life in the black box reducing all the possibilities of human expression in music to one diluted, static, selfish form.  It seems all most musicians can do today is stand there and strum on that infernal guitar.  They are being instructed by the box, holding the box, within the box of pop music.  Life in the box feels stilted.  It is rectangular, awkward, and stammers like a drunk.  It is not stealth, lucid, wise, and playful.  It is high on methamphetamine stumbling along in a drunken non-reality attempting to live within the boundaries that are being set for us on a daily basis.  Art has always attempted to break this mold.  It embraces feeling, opinion, dissension, fury, passion, thought, love, despair and everything Big Brother tries to take from us as humans.  We were not meant to live in a box, nor were the animals.  When taunted violent things happen, such as a tiger escaping its cage at a San Diego zoo and maiming and killing it tormentors.  It will be just a matter of time before Americans realize, have had enough, and somehow put a stop to our social and political oppression.