Elmo, 11/5

Something really interesting that we learned about in class this week was Jameson’s concept of “high tech paranoia”. Thinking about how far technology has come is baffling to me; it seems that technology can do almost anything imaginable these days. However, this is somewhat scary; it seems that at this rate computers and other technology will become smarter than the people inventing them. Movies such as “Terminator” depict situations where technology appears to be taking over, thus creating this so called “paranoia”. People think that situations such as these are imminent because of the fast paced changes technology has been making.

Another theory I found to be enlightening was Chomsky’s “essential ingredients of our propaganda”. The five “ingredients” are, size, wealth, and concentration of media ownership, advertising as a primary income source, reliance of media on institution information sources, flack, and anti-communism as a control mechanism. Thinking about all these steps really helped me to better understand the mass media industry. All of these ingredients explain what the mass media industry does and why. It was very helpful to look at all these aspects in order to better understand Chomsky’s conspiracy driven ideas about media.

Chomsky refers to the mass media industry as the biggest ideological state apparatus. He says that the media tells us how to do everything in our society; it essentially creates our entire culture. I still think that it’s really crazy that while we all know this, we still don’t do anything about it. We just let the media dictate to us what to do and how to act. However, the media does have billions of dollars backing it and spends just as much in order to have this control and pull over society. We all have these conforming ideas and agree about what the media tells us. Until becoming a CMC major I never really questioned this, but now I find myself constantly picking at the media and questioning the things they are telling us.