yellowdaisy4, 2/19/09

I found the quote we discussed in class being “the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror” to really sum up a lot of what Baudrillard was talking about. What I take Baudrillard’s quote to mean is that an event isn’t truly an event unless it is covered by the media who really make it into whatever it becomes. I feel like the media are the ones who create the terror out of an event in the way they present it to the public. For example, you might not care about this crazy new virus or an escaped murderer miles away until the media presents in the way of “you’re in extreme danger so you must keep watching us so we can tell you what’s going on and what to do.” The Arabic protest picture is a great example in showing sometimes the media doesn’t really check it’s facts and shows things in order to get that shock value and people’s attention. Instead of thinking that the protest shown is an important revolutionary idea from college students and that they were smart enough to quote the American Revolution “live free or die” and manage get attention of western media, the media probably twisted it into something violent with the threat of death because the word die was present.

Connecting to shock value, it was really interesting to think about Zizek’s quote of “was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in catastrophe movies?” I feel like a lot of us do this without even realizing it because when we are so awed by something. It’s as if it’s something fake from a movie because that is the only place we can connect it to like how in class pictures of 9/11 can remind of the alien movie “Independence Day”. In movies if you see an explosion a lot of people like to think to themselves how fake it looks or how the special effects are so obvious sometimes but when they see something like 9/11 videos or drive my a huge car accident, they can’t help but be shocked and can’t look away. It’s like when you are watching a movie you want to believe it’s real but when you see something that is actually real it’s hard to let yourself believe what you are seeing and sometimes then you wish it was fake effect in a movie.