"Don't believe me because you see me as your teacher.
Don't believe me because others do.
And don't believe anything because you've read it in a book, either.
Don't put your faith in reports, or tradition, or hearsay, or the authority of religious leaders or texts.
Don't rely on mere logic, or inference, or appearances, or speculation.
Know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong. And when you do, then give them up. And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them." Buddha
Challenge and question what you see and hear. Don't accept blindly. Come to your own understanding of the world and how it works.
Why don't I want you to believe me? All media, including courses at school, have an agenda. Creators of media may want you to perceive reality the same way that they do, or they may want you to do their bidding, or buy their products or ideas. It's all about selling; selling an idea, a product, a political party, a view of reality or a perception of God. As author/film maker Michael Moore phrases it: "Assume that everything that comes out of the mouths of those in authority is a lie, and then make them prove to you that it isn't."
My agenda for this class is that I want you to THINK. I want you to think critically and laterally. You and I am a product that is sold and manipulated by advertisers and media owners. In the world of advertising and public relations, they speak of "delivering eyeballs", of "sound bytes", "photo ops" and "maxing face time".
There are many ways that advertisers get you to purchase their products, but central to their philosophy is the notion of encouraging you to feel dissatisfied with who you are and what you look like. A satisfied, confident person is unlikely to be a major consumer. During the Olympics in Beijing, advertisers spent billions to convince us that life would be better if we only purchased their product.
The Olympics are the perfect spectacle to reinforce the image of youthful, hard bodies.
“University of Toronto anthropologist Marcel Danesi writes about a “Forever Young Syndrome” in which pop culture, “saturated with images of youth,” eliminates the “wise elder from the social radar screen” and creates a society of perpetual adolescents—kids who grow up physically but remain rooted in the values of self-gratification that permeate youth.” (Hal Niedzviecki, Globe and Mail, June 5, ‘04)
To sell a product, all the advertiser has to do is create the market by convincing people that they are not okay with who they are.
- Persuade pre-teens that they should look older and older people that they should look younger
- Rounder people should look thinner
- Brunettes should become blonde
- Shorter people should look taller
- Small-breasted women should have augmentation and larger-breasted women should have reductions; and so it goes.
What advertisers know is that most of us suffer from a syndrome that is sometimes called ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ and what author Alain de Botton calls “status anxiety”. Advertisers feed and encourage that anxiety. “Its premise is biblically simple: We spend a lot of our lives agonizing about how we’re doing, and how others are doing better. Whether it’s a Regina high school teacher poisoning himself on a nightly basis by watching Entertainment Tonight ( an activity designed to cement the notion that life’s sparkle is passing you by) or an author’s inability to go into a bookstore without her pulse escalating to dangerous levels (where are my books, why are his there instead?), fussing about how other people are doing can ruin your life. (Globe and Mail, David Gilmour writing about Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton, June 5, 2004)
"Let's remember what our job is--What is the job of a television station? To entertain? Nope.
To inform? Nope. It's to deliver an audience to its advertisers"
(Michael Silbergleid, Editor, Television Broadcast Magazine, Spring, 1996 )
“Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client.”
William S. Burroughs, naked Lunch, 1959
Once we realize that we are delivered as product to corporations and political parties, then we can begin becoming conscious of the techniques of manipulation and "manufactured consent".
If you look at the writings in the 1920s of Edward Bernays, who became the guru of the public relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, they believed that when you can control the public mind, you can control attitudes and opinions. Lippmann said, "We can manufacture consent by the means of propaganda." Bernays said, "The more intelligent members of the community can drive the population into whatever they want" by what he called "engineering of consent."
As M.I.T. linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky said in an interview with PBS's Bill Moyers "I think people have the capacities to see through the deceit in which they are ensnared, but they've got to make the effort."
Yes we'll be watching television and reading newspapers and viewing videos. But we'll be examining them critically. We'll be deconstructing how they control our emotions and persuade us to buy a product or shape our perceptions. (In short, telling us how to think.) We will not be watching them for entertainment. We will be stopping and starting movies, going backwards and forwards, turning off the sound, searching for meaning, product placement, camera angles and director's segues. Come here prepared to deconstruct and analyze, question and challenge. I want to encourage critical thinkers, not couch potatoes.
Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan repeatedly insisted that we should stop asking "Is this a good thing or bad thing?" and start asking, "What's going on here?" Or phrased another way by McLuhan: "What haven't you noticed lately?" These two questions encapsulate my intentions for this course.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
John Kenneth Galbraith
My expectations for you are high. I expect you to work hard. By the end of the course, my hope is that you will begin to trust in your abilities to discern fact from fiction, information from misinformation and truth from spin. I want to encourage you to believe, on your own terms, that you have insight, creativity and power to influence this world for the better.
"I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening. Because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favour of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I'm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it, is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons."
Marshal McLuhan, 1966
This course is predicated on the understanding that we are the first generation to construct our reality based on electronic images of reality. Movies and television sitcoms promote the fantasy that all of life’s problems can be solved by simple narrative solutions. Alfred Hitchcock said that movies were just life with all the boring bits removed. Increasingly, we look for simple solutions to life’s complex problems.
“In 1962 (historian Daniel Boorstin) published The Image: or, What Happened to the American Dream, in which he argued that modern man was able to enjoy so much through newspapers, televisions, films, photography, art and sound recordings that he had come to prefer the image to the reality. Moreover, Boorstin suggested, man’s appetite for pseudo-knowledge had increased; but since readers could only be persuaded to read if the information was excitingly presented, the picture they received of the world had less and less to do with reality. Thus modern methods of communication were creating illusions instead of spreading knowledge. We are, he wrote ‘the most illusioned people on earth.’ (National Post, March 2, 2004)
Author Neil Postman echoed this sentiment in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death when he said that Americans were the least informed and best entertained people on the planet. One of the illusions Boorstin talked about is that complex problems can be solved through simple solutions. Postman writes of the effects of this simplification of life in commercial advertising:
“The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry. This is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would appear so to anyone hearing or reading it. (italics mine) But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes time and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of the point being made. That is why most commercials use the literary device of the pseudo-parable as a means of doing their work…Which is to say further, it is about how one ought to live one’s life. (italics mine) Moreover, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that short and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems.” (P. 130)
Prior to the introduction of the electronic mass media, we constructed our reality based on Nature. There is now an electronic filter between us and the rest of Nature. What we believe to be real and what we observe (with limited knowledge and experience) are very different.
What is real and direct is being replaced by scripted and virtual and we are confusing the two.
So-called “reality shows” are carefully constructed theatre that through entertainment may reinforce certain guiding principles of Western individualism and free enterprise.
In Voting Democracy off the Island, author Francine Prose articulates some of these guiding principles that she sees in the show Survivor: “…flinty individualism, the vision of a zero-sum society in which no one can win unless someone else loses, the conviction that altruism and compassion are signs of folly and weakness, the exaltation of solitary striving above the illusory benefits of cooperative mutual aid, the belief that certain circumstances justify secrecy and deception, the invocation of a reviled common enemy to solidify group loyalty…” (Harper’s Magazine, March 2004)
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? That will be for you to determine, but we must ask as McLuhan said, “What’s going on here?”
In this course we will examine and deconstruct these filters that separate us from direct experience, these media images that we are bombarded by on a daily basis. We’ll question how we de-market our society? How do we de-swoosh cool? With three thousand marketing messages bombarding us each day ("Business Week", Sept 23, 1991, P. 66), how do we construct a market-free reality? How do we detect bias in the newspaper? How do determine our own truth?
In 1967, Marshal McLuhan declared, "the future of the future is in the past." McLuhan loved to play with words. He said: " If you are really curious about the future, just study the present... What we ordinarily see in any present is really what appears in the rearview mirror. What we ordinarily think of as present is really past." McLuhan recognized that most people live in the rearview mirror--moving ahead in time, but actually living in the past.
"People never want to live in the present," he said. "People live in the rearview mirror because it's safer...They've been there before, they feel comfortable." (from On McLuhan, P.33)
In answer to the question "What is enlightenment?" philosopher and theologian Immanuel Kant said this in 1784:
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude ! (dare to know)
Have courage to use your own understanding!"
Media Lit 12
Foundational Thoughts
“Lets just plop them in front of the TV. I was raised in front of the
TV and I turned out TV” Homer Simpson
“How can such a small installation bring so much happiness?” [illegal cable]