jl0630 - Baudrillard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUjE2DMH5Q

My CMC 100 video was loosely based around what Baudrillard’s, The Spirit of Terrorism, touched on about how “deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints” (230). A segment of my video project was about our present generation’s ideas about dating and relationships. What it boiled down to is that since the deregulation of the media in the early 1900’s, the new and liberal media started to produce a plethora of ‘radicalized’ images that men and women begin to internalize as reality. In our video project we used the deregulation of media and the abundance of sexually explicit advertisements to help support the notion that the traditional views of courtship have been turned upside down to what we now refer to as ‘the hookup.’ This idea of the hookup, Baudrillard argues, would be nothing without the media. The media has exerted the ideology about women being sexual objects into mainstream society, and thus, our present generation is being fed these ideas about men’s roles and the way women should look, act, and feel. The media has thus ‘exerted its hold’ over this new ideology and thus the deregulation in the media has wound up in a maximum of constraints because there is nothing we can do about it but let it run like a wild fire. If we were to do something about it such as re-regulating television, advertisements and other modes of media, Baudrillard suggest that the product would look both defensive and disorderly and would never work out.
The liberalism of the media not only opened doors for a new ideology, but such images are further ‘refuelled’ by promiscuous television, videos, and even recently – promiscuous novels targeted to the youth such as the Gossip Girl series. One last quote from Baudrillard that I think sums up this argument is, “the spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us.” In other words, the explicit images that we consume and secretly love have only impacted the proliferation of promiscuous imagery and ideology and is thus, for now at least, an endless cycle.