Starfish 2/19

Tuesday’s class played many different tricks with my head. The whole idea of what is real and what is fake is confusing and thought provoking. What if everything we knew wasn’t real? It’s just like in the Truman Show. Truman lived all his life believing he lived in a real town, his mother was actually his mother and that he controlled his life, not outside forces. Then one day he realizes that everything around him isn’t real. He lives among actors and sets and his life is a television show. There was no way for him to decipher what in his life was reality and what was fake. Another thing that came to my mind was man landing on the moon in 1969. This was a big day for Americans. Millions upon millions watched their televisions to see the action. There is a theory however that states that we did not actually land on the moon in 1969. Those images that were seen were all shoot in a movie studio. I personally don’t believe this theory, but our discussion on Tuesday made me think about it a little deeper. How do we know that those images portray reality? Maybe they were masking reality or masking the absence of reality. We think we know, but maybe we don’t.

Another thing that was interesting was when we were looking at photos. What I considered to be reality, some considered to be a mask of reality. Someone asked the question is there a right or wrong answer? I instantly thought of CMC 200 and the interpretive approach to research. The interpretive approach is all about finding the meaning of something and what it means for different individuals. One important aspect of this approach is the recognition that what is real and true for me overlaps what is real and true for you, but they are not the same thing. I believe this recognition is something to take into consideration when doing excercises like looking at photgraphs in class.