Truth

What is Real?

What is propaganda? What is fake? What is real? What is a lie? What is the truth? Can you really rely on media to give you the answer?

What makes you twitch, what gets you mad, what makes you ask the burning questions? Is it the news, that Coca Cola advertisement, that man holding up the sign “Honk if you love Jesus”? This world is full of fake news, but how do you separate the real from the fictitious? Fact is fact, a lie is a lie, when it comes to propaganda they are one in the same.

When someone produces a media based message, and sends it out to the world, withholding specific details and information, it is a strategy. It is something that these people do, not naming any names…politicians *cough, and they do it so that we are basically hypnotized to believe that all the facts are included. Our minds are trained to believe that if the information has become a symbol to the public, it must be fact. The hardest thing to grasp about corporately funded news is that they imply to trick us. They set out to find new words and terms that sly away from fact and bring us to the only other alternative, belief.

How do you know what I’m saying is true? You don’t. But you better believe it.

Example:

THE STORY:

An email circular claimed that President Bush had the lowest IQ in presidential history, so the typing fingers of every journalist not currently employed by Fox began twitching with anticipation.The story claimed the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton conducted a four-month study of President Bush's IQ levels and concluded he ranked at a solid 91 due to his lack of grasp over the English language, limited use of vocabulary and lack of scholarly achievements, unless you count being able to say the alphabet backwards after doing five straight keg stands.

The Truth:

Proving that The Guardian newspaper and Doonesbury cartoonist, Gary Trudeau treat email forwards with the same level of skepticism as your mom, both picked up the story and ran with it. Had they bothered to check the source of the email, they would have traced it back to the reputable news source LinkyDink.com, and the original press release, which claimed that Dr. Lovenstein "lives in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania running an Internet business called College Degrees for Sale.”

Works Cited

"7 Clearly Fake News Stories That Fooled The Mainstream Media | Cracked.com." Cracked.com ? America's Only Humor & Video Site Since 1958. Web. 07 Oct. 2009. .

Media Literacy

Literally Literacy

The dictionary’s definition of the concept of media literacy is as follows: “Media literacy is the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms.”

That is correct for the most part, but it is so much more than that. To expand on the idea of media literacy is to dive into the media world itself, because how we interpret the media can literally change how it is written. For example if a billboard has millions of people reaching for the phone to contact a company they know their slogan has been a wild success, if little or no feedback derives, they are aware it was a failure. This failure had to do with the media literacy put out by the media itself. Media literacy is the ability to analyze and interpret the meanings of the media world around us, and each one of us has media literacy in our minds, but we all do it differently. In the book “Understanding Comics, the invisible man” by Scott McCloud, he explains to us the meaning of closure. Closure is how we see certain parts of everything around us. In media literacy the human race will see what it wants to see, for example if someone has always hated Rogers the phone company, anytime they see an advertisement they will immediately make their decision due to prior experience. This is another form of closure; we react and put together pieces to come up with our literal idea of the concept.

The literacy of media in my opinion is literally our closure on the media.

Have I really answered the question what is media literacy? Well, what does it mean to you?

Works Cited

Mccloud, Scott. Understanding Comics The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1994. Print.

Tallim, Jane. "What is Media Literacy?" Media Awareness Network | Réseau éducation médias. Web. 07 Oct. 2009. .

Defining

Mass Medium

The term mass media can mean so many things to a human being. Truly understanding it’s definition does not mean you understand its effects or what it does to society at large. We coexist together unaware that perhaps its not the mass of the media, perhaps it’s the medium. How we receive our information can come in so many forms; the television, radio, blogs etc. but how we receive it can take on another form; hearing, seeing and so on, and the term mass media means to me that there is a large source of information being delivered to me every hour of everyday.

We are all apart of a medium, we all deliver information and we all pass it on oblivious that we are making an impact. If you watch a television commercial and then brag to your friend about the latest styles at Hollister, you yourself have become a factor of mass media. The way you see the world differs from how the media sees you, it targets you and tries to engage you in its content. Whether or not the media is ready, you’re coming for it.

Works Cited

John, Berger. Ways of Seeing Based on the BBC Television Series. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 1990. Print.

Advertisement

Can You Hear Me Now?

The cell phone, such an invention has many uses; its first original function included helping you connect to the people you need to talk to, whenever, wherever. It's the advertisements that haunt us everyday that influence us to pick up our phone, and pay our dues, also known as monthly bills.

Can you hear me now? This trademark slogan is heard by millions of people around the world, and it does not occur to most of those people that the cell phone has taken over our lives. This advertisement has been on television approximately 100 times a day for the past three years, and Verizon Wireless has invested more than $50 billion since the company was formed to increase the coverage and capacity of its national network and to add new services. Verizon Wireless is currently serving 87.7 million customers, and with every advertisement their numbers increase.

Neil Postman once said, "Technology giveth and technology taketh away." Meaning that even though the cell phone has become an essential necessity for most of us, for every advantage it has, there are added disadvantages. But to most, it's all worth the cost in the end, and Verizon has one thing to say about that: "Good."

Works Cited

McAdam, Lowell. "Verizon Wireless Best Network in America." Welcome To Verizon Wireless. Web. 06 Oct. 2009. .

Postman, Neil. "Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change." Departamento de Matem. Web. 06 Oct. 2009. .

Blogging

Blog Like You Mean It

It feels refreshing, it feels like I am being heard. To write a blog is simple, to write one for purpose is a completely different story. I believe that blogging reflects our unconscious, and what I mean by that is we speak our minds, without really knowing we're revealing much at all. It's a scary thought to most, but for me, it's refreshing.

The public judges people by their appearance, an audience judges blogs by their words. In those words you can describe yourself, someone else, a situation or event, but none the less you are putting your opinion on a billboard that anyone can click the link to. Such importance can show your strengths or your faults, and in writing you show yourself. What makes a good writer? What makes a good blogger? Myths are found in literature everyday, blogs are not about tricking people, but using the power of language to prove a point, to raise a discussion or a question."Even objects will become speech if they mean something"(Barthes 1).

Chuck Klosterman is familiar with the concept of questioning. In his book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" he goes into intimate details of what makes us think, what makes us ask the hard stuff. Not once have I ever been afraid to say what I feel, but many times I have been afraid of what people think of my feelings. Klosterman is one of those people who isn't afraid to speak his mind. "Because when push comes to shove, we really don't want to have sex with our friends...unless they're sexy." (Klosterman 6). Blogs are an expression of ideas and mind games, the ideas are what provoke people to continue reading, and the games provoke them to ask why. I am now officially a public figure that is contributing to the public, and it feels good.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "Mythologies." Turk's head review. Web. 07 Oct. 2009. .

Klosterman, Chuck. Sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs a low culture manifesto. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.

Ecology of Media

Brainwashed

What in the world is that noise? That constant buzzing in our heads that never seems to cease, it is not our brains trying to think up our next blog, or our computer starting up. It is the buzz of the media world that is taking over every inch of space and thought in our lives.

The television has become a universal magnet to people all over the world. If someone does not own a television, it is rarely by choice. The thoughts and perceptive ideas of Marshall McLuhan give us an inside look into what the media is doing to us, or what some people may think, for us. I found myself trying to understand the concept of media becoming an entity of its own, and began contemplating whether it is something that is crucial to our society at large. Whether or not man can come to terms with the fact that technology is no longer a mythical future, it is our now, our present, was something that McLuhan had high hopes for. Cable and satellite television have taken over our world, and McLuhan also stated that the television developed the political sphere.

"TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world. For one thing, it's creating a totally new type of national leader, a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politician."

It is everywhere, it is our dependence, and that is what I am personally scared of most. The fact that we rely on the television to help inform us of what is going on in the world around us, and in turn basically developing the easy way out. I agree with McLuhan that we have substantially lost course of our senses, hearing, seeing and touch.

"We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth."

Television is what engages us in the real world and allows us to participate in our global environment, but the outlet to this source...is it so bad?

Or are we just brainwashed?

Works Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." Folk.uio.no. Web. 06 Oct. 2009. .