The rough outline?
There was an original focus on the initial contact of South America and acculturation, but it eventually evolved into a focus on oil pollution in Ecuador.
The final draft expressed that new media - in this case the internet and video usage - isn't helping to bring different groups together to share an ideology, but is facilitating the bickering between groups and making it easier to get at each other's throats. It seems that with video, an ethos appeal is most effective, as shown in the ChevronToxico and Chevron arguments. And with this evolution of the emotional movement, the audience eventually shuts down from an overflow of feeling. It's not that people aren't affected, but that people are affected so many times a day, no one can really feel more for one thing than another. Audiences simply adapt to a higher emotional tolerance, making emotional appeals essentially useless.
Thomas De Zengotita and his thoughts in Mediated and Jeremy Rifkin and his thoughts in The Empathic Civilization are the essential motivators for thought and the development of the "Knock Your Head Off Idea."
The final draft of my KYHOI explains:
Drilling in the Oriente region of Ecuador resulted in 18.6 billion gallons of wastewater running into the Amazon, devastating the environment and human population. The indigenous groups moved to sue for damages, and with no evidence for a single culprit, ChevronTexico was blamed because of their inadequate technology.
In order for drilling to take place, indigenous groups, like the Huaorani, were globalized. Texaco and Shell worked with missionary Rachel Saint to make contact. Those missionaries wanted to believe that they could aspire to a multicultural culture that celebrates difference and, at the same time, provides everyone with medicine, literacy, good roads, sewage treatment, universities, representative government, religious liberty, free speech - on and on. But, the reality is that if all that were realized, then there wouldn’t be much left of multiculturalism beyond a really big selection of interestingly spiced foods, intriguingly designed clothes and accessories, distinctively rhythmic music, and lots and lots of holidays. Differences that don’t make that much difference.
The Huaorani received national funding in order to fight the encroachment of disease and acculturation. 13 nongovernmental organizations and 15 other groups were involved in their fight.
But because they were educated enough to defend themselves and find a path to justice through their lawsuit of Chevron, the indigenous groups have been identified as not being wholly indigenous, and therefore unable to represent their population.
Jeremy Rifkin argues that humans discriminate through blood ties, religious ties, and nationalistic ties, and that new media will bring together the world as one. But if these groups aren’t allowed to keep an identity, how is new media helping them? How do we define identity when it’s getting harder and harder to find anything that might qualify as exotic, because anywhere it has been encountered it has also been subjected to the mechanisms of mediation too numerous to itemize. The effect of this new media is that newscasters are implicitly nagging us to understand some place or event, to respond, to have an opinion, to care. But what the cumulative experience has actually mobilized, in the majority, is that characteristic ironic distance that aging activists mistook for apathy. But it wasn’t apathy as much as it was psychological numbness, a general defense against representational intrusions of all kinds - especially painful ones.
So when we see the images of disease, of Indians wearing Western clothes, of oil stained soil and polluted water, instead of being more empathic, we simply shut down.
-Brysk, Alison. "Turning Weakness into Stength." Latin American Perspectives 23 (1996): 38-57.
-Conklin, Beth A.. "Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs." American Ethnologist 24 (1997): 711-737.
-Crude. Film. Directed by Joe Berlinger. Los Angeles: First Run Features, 2009.
-Hecht, Susanna B., and Alexander Cockburn. The fate of the forest: developers, destroyers, and defenders of the Amazon. London: Verso, 1989.
-Nimni, Ephraim Joseph. Marxism and nationalism: the misleading European heritage.. London: Pluto Press, 1987.
-Prins, Harald. "A Handful of Ashes: Reflections on Tristes Tropiques." Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America (2001): 94-99
-Rifkin, Jeremy. The empathic civilization: the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. -Shapiro, Judith. "From Tupã to the Land without Evil: The Christianization of Tupi-Guarani Cosmology." American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 126-139. -Trinkets and Beads. VHS. Directed by Christopher Walker. Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 1996. -Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: how the media shapes your world and the way you live in it. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005.
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