Food for Thought...A Truckload to Be Exact

Media Revelations

1. The first media revelations that I have discovered deals with the financial world’s control over our government. In the film, “The Obama Deception” Alex Jones makes it known that Wall Street big wigs are controlling President Obama and his cabinet. Before watching this movie I never had given a thought to direct control by some larger group. Alex Jones constantly references the Bilderberg group as a higher power that is Obama’s “puppet masters”. The “Globalist Agenda” is what comes first and Jones shows this by stating the fact that the economic recession is all part of restoring order to the Bilderberg’s plans. With this whole situation I feel like I am part of the environment that Anderson creates in “Feed.” Near the end of the book the main character tries to help his friend understand the situation but he barely knows all the facts. “That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her partial stories. The small parts of these stories I could find. I told her what I knew. That the Global Alliance had issued more warning about the possibility of total war if their demands aren’t met” (page 296). If I were to try and explain Alex Jones’ theories to a friend I feel that I would sound like the main character from feed, telling partial ideas that I understood mildly.

Posted November 2006

Also had to add this Alex Jones Video...very interesting stuff!!!!


2. The second media revelation I had deals with the Web 2.0 world. People that are using these social networks are becoming less interactive with the real world. These networking sites allow people to provide small bits of information without having to spend a large amount of time or effort describing daily events. In an article by Clive Thompson, “A Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” he brings up many good points about Web 2.0. Thompson brings up the idea of ambient awareness. “Ambient awareness is very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Living in a world of ambient awareness is good because individuals can express themselves on a daily basis and think about life a lot more than they would if they couldn’t blog about their feelings. The problem becomes the potential lies and manipulation that ensues, since most people understand the effect of web 2.0, they can use it to their advantage.” Being able to control your image gives you the power to make yourself look better without actually having to better yourself. It is much like the Peek a Boo world that Neil Postman talks about. “Its like a crossword puzzle, you only need to know a little, about a lot.” This is a dangerous tool to play with because if an employer learns that you aren’t what you say you are on your Facebook page, and then you might lose your chance at a job or a position in that career field.

Posted January 2009

3. The next revelation I had during this semester dealt with how a person in power can persuade people to think a particular way. The Obama inauguration was a great example of this. During his speech he used multiple tools to win viewers and voters over. Specific tactics like group dynamics, warm fuzzies, and nationalism helped him gain the trust and confidence of the American people. Neil Postman states in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that we wrongly seek truth through the media. And the way that the Inauguration was televised made the American viewers believe in everything they saw.

Posted January 2009

4. My fourth revelation deals with how the media represents the social world and the idea of hegemony. Hegemony is an ongoing contested process of reality construction, elites versus the masses. This idea is not only brought up in the book “Media Society” but it is also seen in the films we have watched over the semester. Toxic Sludge being one of the films that shows how we are part of a constructed reality that Public Relations creates so that important issues like war can be easily accepted using many different tactics. One way that the PR has sold the war is by creating images that draw certain emotional responses out of citizens. Like the images of the girl explaining how babies were being thrown out of incubators. This sort of horrific display can win over a crowd of confused Americans very quickly. And the idea of hegemony is well documented in our country as the rich elite tend to control most of our country’s power.

Posted August 2007

5.My fifth media revelation is the hidden slavery and guest worker programs that continue to happen right under our noses. Its crazy to think about but guest worker programs are a tough reality that need to be dealt with. Through Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the H-2 program brought about 121,000 guest workers into the US in 2005, with approximately two thirds of those in the H-2B section. “H-2A program provides legal protections from foreign farm workers- such as a guarantee of at least three quarters of the total employment hours promised, free housing, transportation compensation, medical benefits, and legal representation. In the process of attaining a H-2 guest worker visa, workers typically fall victim to bait-and-switch schemes that force them to borrow huge sums of money at high interest rates in order to land short term, low wage jobs” (pg 52 Censored Stories). These scary facts show just how real the struggle to attain American citizenship is. We talk about media controlling us, in this situation people are actually controlling and taking advantage of others by means of deception, it is all very similar.

Posted November 2007

6.My sixth revelation the realization of corporate consolidation. In the film “Rich Media Poor Democracy” it is shown how very few companies control such large parts of our world media. The synergy of power through cross promotion, cross production, and deregulation has given companies like Viacom the power to control a large part of what we view. Media has monopolized journalism in the name of “objectivity.” But instead of seeing two sides of each story we only see one fabricated side to each issue happening in the world. On page 281 of Project Censored the idea is really driven home. “ In the US there is a rift between the what is real and what is reported to us. There is no longer a media credibility gap, but rather a truth emergency.” People in the US need to look further into a topic if they want to get the truth about an issue. Personal research has become the only way that truth can be reached.

Posted October 2007

7.My seventh revelation focuses on the idea of a “Peek a Boo” world and how this term has changed over the years. When Postman first wrote his book he used the term “Peek a Boo World” to describe life at the beginning of the 19th century. With the invention of the telegraph the world suddenly became “subjected to a constant flow of information without any relative substance” (page 68 Postman). Media today follows that exact description he used. Lets take Twitter as a news medium now. Businesses and individuals use this new Web 2.0 phenomenon to keep others updated on what they are doing. The problem is that there is such little description that a viewer never really gets to understand the full story. “Again, Thompson instructs us to put up with thousands of idiotic and maddening tweets in order to "get" the full beauty and bounty of the site. Only after we burn swaths of our lives reading mindless tweets will the Twitter oracle reveal the wisdom it reserves for dedicated supplicants” (Alexander Zaitcheck page 1). The other side of the issue is privacy in a time easy information and full access online. The follow film displays how presenting yourself online may contain very little description but it also may hurt your chances to get a job.

Posted on June 2007

8.My eighth revelation focuses on advertising in the present day “becoming the atmosphere.” In the early days of advertising we were mildly subjected to ideas posted by businesses trying to boast about their product or service. In today’s “clutter” filled world we are constantly being exposed to messages. Lets use webisodes as an example. Advertising has become entertainment by using actors like Clive Owen who star in a mini-episode created by BMW to make viewers more interested in the car. Another example of how engulfed we are in advertising is shown in subliminal advertising. Marketers place advertising where the viewers wouldn’t think to see it. Product placement in television shows makes businesses millions. Putting a Pepsi can on a table in the middle of an episode of “Seinfeld” might make the viewer want to go out and buy a Pepsi. All these tools and tricks are just another example of big business controlling individuals.

Had to put a link for this video because embedding was disabled. Watch the full video to understand the experiment of subliminal marketing.

9. My ninth revelation is that messages reach us faster than they ever have before. In the book “Media and Society” Croteau brings up the fact that it wasn’t too long ago that it took days for messages to be received. Its amazing the transformation of the way we deliver media. The graph on page 10 illustrates that in the late 1700’s it would have taken 44.5 days for a message to travel from NYC to Cincinnati. 47 years later the required time had been reduced to 7 days. Just to think that 215 years ago messages took that long to travel and in today’s society news is wired instantly from Tokyo to NYC. The delivery of messages is astoundingly quick and the mass groups a single message can reach is mind-blowing. In 2000 99 percent of homes have a radio, 98 percent have a television, and 51 percent have a home computer. All these facts contribute to the idea that someday we will be able to instantly gain a message without having to do anything but think about it. Bill O’reilly talks about the potential of someday having brain chips implanted like in Feed. O’reilly believes that we will only have to think about a topic and the knowledge will be automatically relayed to our brains. The real issue with that becomes the lack of interaction and effort needed to gain knowledge. On page 208 of “Feed” this idea is shown. “Men locked into giant wheels with their arms and legs spread out with no control over their actions. The men in wheels stared blankly into space, mouths open, eyes wide looking at everything flashing by. Just looking at the world helpless, in circles, the world going by.”

Posted February 2009

10. My final revelation deals with the idea of viral marketing. Viral marketing is the way a company will relay a message to an individual that in turn relays that message to all their friends. Think about it, in this situation we all are becoming marketers. Without knowing it we are promoting products for companies that we have nothing to do with. I might buy an I-pod then go brag about it to my friends who then decide they want to experience the same audio satisfaction that I am. At the beginning of the semester we learned that the brain receives 400 billion bits of information a second and the we only consciously process 2000 bits. These numbers contribute to the realization that we really have very little control over our own lives. And with that idea I leave you with a quote from Postman, “In the second half of the 21st century we have changed from a typographical culture to a telographical one, and we are now descending into triviality” (page 8.)
The following clip shows how small business' use viral marketing.

Posted August 2008