The Construction of Thought
Media is all around us, it is on our televisions, on billboards we pass by on our way to work, it is in our pockets making us countdown the seconds until we can see it, it is the very web page you are on now and it is also within ourselves as it dictates the very person we try to be everyday Media is part of everyone's life whether they choose it to be or not, it influences who we are and what decisions we make. This web page will use media to inform you about the effect it has on every individual and warn you about the dangers that come along with it.
We live in a mediated world.
Human beings are pack animals. We need social interaction to survive. These facts are the reason why the media plays such a large role in society. Media is everywhere and is always feeding us information. This means those who control the media, control the narrative. Whatever the media tells us to do/determines as the norm, we must do/follow, as to not be separated from the herd. We follow what the media says because we assume it is what everyone else is thinking and doing. This is not the case; we are thinking and doing what they want us to think and do. The Church has to move aside as the new conformity enforce has arrived.
Gender and Values
Everywhere you go you are being advertised too. More often than not, we are unaware of the imagery being portrayed to us through advertisements. It slips past our awareness and we normalize what is being presented. In many cases, the expectations for what it means to be a part of the two normalized genders are showcased just in case we forget. Advertisements treat us as if we are delusional children, constantly reminding us that we must act according to what the majority believes. In a sense, they are in control of the majority by creating the illusion that the majority is in control.
As a whole, gender is meaningless, outdated, overused; most of us still lack the higher thinking needed to decode how our sex and gender correlate. There is a big disconnect between those who have left the cave and those who laugh at the shadows on the wall. To sum up the difference between gender and sex; sex is biological, it involves your chromosomes, reproductive capabilities and your “biology” while gender is a social construct. An animal with lesser cognitive capabilities has no understanding of the idea of gender, they only define other animals by their sex. We live in a society, we have higher cognitive capabilities which enables us to create other social constructs such as currency and capitalism. The problem is in the ambiguous nature of many social constructs. We as a people lack the ability to understand such large ideas without the teachings of others, we require the majority to tell us the difference between what is right and wrong. Advertisements exploit this dependence and present to the world what they believe is the gender expectation.
Unfortunately, this system of repression has led to women being defined as the complete but necessary opposition to men. The two “primary genders” showcased within almost all advertisements demeans women to vulnerable, submissive and childlike. All the while, men are depicted as the complete opposite; rugged, dominant and in complete control of themselves and those around them. Regardless of what is being sold the gender expectations are regarded as sacrosanct. Women must have their bodies laying in strange poses to demonstrate how vulnerable they are; men are propped up like a turret, always on guard, looking for their prey. It is a complete disrespect to us all as individuals to expose us to such demeaning ideas that invade our sense of identity like viral DNA. Moving forward it is important to explore our own sense of self through an objective yet personal mindset; objective to what is being presented to us, personal to our own inner truths.
Below, you can find a collage of photos which reflect this discussion about gender, with a set of photos taken at Yorkdale. The set of photos demonstrate the codes which have surrounded us, while also discussing how media has defined success through material means.
13th
13th chronicles the rise of the prison industrial complex within the United States. It is an injustice as old as the civil war yet it is still at the heart of our modern elections.
Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things
We have been caught up in a world full of compulsory consumerism. Minimalism takes a look into the definition of success and how we can attain true happiness, living a life with purpose.
Knock Down The House
A documentary which focuses on the challenges women face when trying to integrate into a male dominated political landscape.
Pornography
Survey
A survey conducted, mainly on grade 12s, to analyze their relationship with pornography. The report goes into what pornography does to us, and how its been able to grasp our attention.
THE PROPAGANDA MODEL
The propaganda model, in its simplest form, is a concept proposed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky that the media manufactures our consent to control the flow of information from the big corporations to the general public. The two form the idea that democracy in society is staged and media works as a propaganda machine. This whole concept breaks down into five media filters with the first of them being media ownership. The mass media comes from a conglomerate of big corporations with one goal in mind: profit. Due to this, each company will choose to display information that will produce the most revenue which then places critical journalism in last place on their list of priorities. The next filter is advertising money. Advertisers fill in the monetary gap between the media and consumers as media will always cost more than consumers will ever pay. However, advertisers buy a specific product, and the product is the audience. Media sells their product of output to the consumer, but also sell you to the advertisers. The media elite is the next filter and this means that governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to play the media game and control and influence the news narrative so that those who are in power are never challenged. Flack is the next filter which is when someone strays too far away from the corporations’ consensus which then results in this source being discredited and being trashed. The last filter is the common enemy. For consent to be manufactured in a mediated world, the population must have a common enemy which produces fear to corral a public’s opinion.
The studies done and proposed by these two intellectuals are very much relatie to the society and age in which we live in. It is even possible to see this propaganda model in their case as this novel, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, is not what we see on the evening news as it speaks against the media powerhouses. Authors, journalists, and writers are continuously going through the flack filter as their perspective that speak against the big corporations are not in tune with what they choose to output to the public so the average person will never hear of their name. The informing of the public is no longer a responsibility of the media, but their number one priority is to cage our very being and fill our heads with social garbage in place of informing ourselves of the true reality that we live in. In the 21st century it is now in the hands of each and every one of us to adventure beyond the wall of nonsense that stands before us and find the realities of life that are on the other side, but the question remains: do we really want to?