Daisy, Baudrillard

Fear is a word we often discuss in CMC courses because it is an ever-present issue within our society. Fear is instilled into us and it is how we function. Jean Baudrillard’s article The Spirit of Terrorism discusses the idea that we are living in a society where the media has created and motivated the idea of terrorism, which is a way of evoking fear within us. The main vehicle for this terrorism presented by the media is through images. Baudrillard brings into perspective the problem that many times images are the only way we can know about an event. The texts (the images) that are presented to us, how do we know they are real? As citizens we trust that the media presents truthful images. As the images of terrorism are spread from news station to news station, magazine to magazine, the issue is magnified. As the article mentions, these images are fiction, but these photographs often outshine the reality of the event.
The author Baudrillard, uses the example of 9/11 as an event that was made real by the images. I liked the quote, “the real is superadded to the image like a bonus of terror” (229). The “real” is secondary to the image, but the “real” came first. This idea is so eye opening to me, it is almost hard to wrap my head around it. But as a society we don’t believe it until we see it, and most of the time the only way we see it is through the media. I know when I went to NYC after 9/11 happened, the site was entirely cleaned up, and without the images in the media I not have been able to comprehend the event.
We live in a society where will believe anything we see on television, and we are willing to believe it without seeing it in person. Baudrillard makes it apparent that this issue of what we believe to be real is a serious problem. The media has controlled out lives into thinking that they have the “real” information. But what they are reporting has been passed through so many levels of modfication and editing that the “real” aspects are lost. What remains though is what the media wants us to know, and many times that deals with fear. The media has coined the word terrorism to panic us anytime we hear it. Thanks to the media we are living in a “spirit of terrorism.”