If we, as spectator-consumers (a.k.a. “ordinary citizens”), react to our ultimately alienating and demeaning position without understanding it, we’re likely to only exacerbate it, by unwittingly reinforcing its underlying premises. This can be especially true of our efforts to prove that we “matter.”

Simmering somewhere beneath the surface, there seems to be an element in all of us that resonates to the exhortation of the mad anchorman in the movie Network to just stick out heads out our windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” When we’re fed up, our first impulse these days is to “make ourselves heard.”

Or perhaps more accurately, noticed.

We’ll put considerable effort into creating a ruckus of one kind or another—starting at the rather polite end with letters and petitions; then going up the scale into rallies, protests, even riots;  and in the most unbalanced and extreme cases, apparently even terrorism—to gain the attention of the media, get on the collective agenda, and thereby demonstrate that we matter.

The problem is, when we attempt to demonstrate our significance by our ability to appear on the evening news, we effectively concede that when we’re not in front of cameras, we’re not significant. That presumption is, in the final analysis, close to the core of our contemporary sense of diminishment.