BiegieGo, 11/5

This week we discussed theorist Jameson and Chomsky. Even though Jameson was deep and dense he looks at things at ways we don’t really would notice in an everyday setting. One of his quotes that I am inspired by is “the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.” An example that I have been thinking about for a long time now is the movie blood diamond. Within this movie we see famous actor Leonardo Dicaprio. The movie also does a great job of making the connection of how our culture is the underside of the blood torture, death and horror of the problems in the world. Our society just choose to look the other way when things like human killing are for diamonds are taking place within our culture. We never ask ourselves when buying a diamond or two about where they are coming from. Our society has but this ideology on diamonds that they last forever and they are a symbol of true love. By saying this is implying that killing humans in Africa and other parts of the world for diamond will last forever and is also a symbol of true love. I think this is a very good example of where our contemporary society is going and what we are not doing to stop it.
The second theorist we just talked about today is Chomsky. The most important thing Chomsky discusses is the 5 essential ingredients of our propaganda model. The fact that there is even such a model is sad because this just furthers the fact that there is ideology and hierarchies in our world, but the good thing about this is that we are learning about them and not just pushing them aside like everything else in our society. Today we were put into groups and my group talking about the first ingredient which is size, wealth and concentration of media ownership. We discusses how there are a lot of different clothing stories and brands but it all comes back to just a few or even one person in complete power of it all. Some example that the group came up with were: Mac is just a small computer company, there commercials are letting PC make themselves look bad, what is gained from making all different clothing brands…MONEY, and Small amount of people controlling the media and most of the clothing companies. We can connect this with Althusser and his talks about ideologies. I think that there are so many ideologies in our world that we as a society just go along with everyone of them and everything that is avant gard is also being pulled back into the regular culture and becoming main stream.