In his essay titled “The Spirit of Terrorism”, Jean Baudrillard makes an interesting remark on reality. He states that, “reality is a principle, and it is this principle that is lost” (228). I believe from reading Baudrillard that he feels that the media has made reality such an ambiguous word and one that is increasingly more difficult for us to define. It seems that there is a blurred line in the media about what is actually real and what is fiction. The news presents us with stories that are often times stretched and molded to fit the way a news network wants them to. For example, in Baudrillard’s piece he discusses the terrorist attack of 9/11. While the media did portray this event seemingly accurate we will never be entirely sure because we weren’t there. Every news station had a little variation of the story and showed different images of the event. So, which one depicts reality? We may never know.
Baudrillard later makes an interesting comment saying. “there is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are apart of the event, they are apart of the terror, and they work in both directions” (229). Here, Baudrillard is making a point that the media aids in terror and that they not only report about it but essentially aid in creating it as well. It seems to me that the media just fuels the fire on terror. Every time there is some sort of act it is all over the media, every news station, every newspaper, every magazine. It gets so much press that it almost seems as if the media seeks out these types of stories to report on. This goes back to one of our first classes where we discussed fear. The media wants to report stories that they know will get a lot of attention and these types of stories are ones that instill fear in the readers, such as terrorism. I wonder what it would be like if there were only one news station and one newspaper reporting the stories, or even none at all, would everything be as hyped up? It seems almost sad at how subjected to the media we have all become and how much they run our lives.
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1 comment:
You show a good understanding of Baudrillard and I like how you relate it back to our first class. The whole class relates to the idea of what postmodernism is and so I'm glad you are still aware of this. Good job!
:)
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