Nate Dogg 10/3

I liked the lecture with Zizek and the Baudrillard discussion as well. I think they both share a lot in common, specifically with Zizek's thoughts on 9/11 and Baudrillards excerpts regarding "the masking of nature". Looking at what television watching citizens observed on 9/11, it's puzzling as to why we never saw any blood or gruesome images. The prevention of showing these images only serves to cover up what happened, to shy away from the truth due to how graphic the images were. I think that this is where a modern day terrorism becomes so successful in it's goal, where its destruction and impact are so large that we aren't even able to see the whole picture. They understand the rules that television stations abide by and exploit that weakness, knowling that the sole image on television for weeks and weeks would be the image of their destructive work.
It circumstances like these, it becomes evident that television stations presume the national audience to be extremely afraid of death and dying. I believe that they are correct in their assumptions. The obsession with 9/11 and the struggle to understand why those events took place will always carry with it the idea that we are afraid of death, because of what was or was not shown on television after the bombing happened. That entire day, specifically the way it was handled by big media, speaks to the power the television set and the internet have over the masses. I think that journalistic ethics are going to play a large part in the transformation of traditional news and media coverage to a video/twitter style news coverage, and it’s going to be very soon that we are face to face with decisions regarding censorship. I think that living in a digital world, with digital news and digital opinions, keeping nature unmasked will only become far more difficult.