n Jean Baudrillards article.” The Spirit of Terrorism” Baudrilled explains that the media has not defined reality in a way for us to understand, it is unclear and indefinable. There seems to be a confusion of what is real and what is fiction. The news presents us with what we want them to tell us. American Media is different from the media of the rest of the world. What I mean is that, Americans show what America wants to see. For example, two years ago in CMC100 we talked about 9/11 and how all of the news stations we talking about the same thing, yet each one had different ways of telling us what happened and all had a different way of telling us. Obviously there can only be one REAL story. But how are we supposed to know which story is real?
Baudrillard goes on to explain that, “The media are part of the event, they are part of the terror.”(22) Here is is trying to make the point that the media has ability to control our thoughts, and that media contributes to our false realities. What I mean is for example, if our society were to look at a picture of a bunch of Arabic people standing around with signs in their hands. More then likely 90% of our society probably would be thinking horrible things about all of these people in the picture, just because of all the bad stereotypes our society has made about them. Even if there was no explanation about the picture we still make these assumptions about aerobics based off of what we have “heard” on the news or within the media. The media has become a part of the terror by controlling are thoughts falsely.
I’m not sure if I am way off topic with my last explanation but that particular situation was exactly what I kept thinking of when I was reading Baudrillard and how media runs our lives and our believe patterns to the point where we don’t question if they are right or wrong, we just assume they are right, and let them control our thought patterns. So here is my question that I hope Rog will be able to and answer tomorrow in class… Does this mean we are living in a false world? That what we are told is real is not real? How are we supposed to depict what is real from what is not?
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1 comment:
This is a good post because you link the material to CMC 100 and you talk about some great discussion based questions. Do you think the media have such an influence over us because they can, as you say, 'control' our thoughts of that we mindlessly follow what is being said?
:)
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