"Mass media monopolies control people by their control of information." - John F Kennedy
Maybe it is because I just did an entire essay on facebook, and myspace, and how huge corporations are looking into buying the information off of those sites for researching their market that this first line of Mark Dery's Culture Jamming popped out like a fish out of water. The Internet is a very scary thing to think about. Just the fact that you can Google a persons name and have old articles written about them come up, or pages that they have created themselves, if not websites that just mentioned them. The mass amount of information out there now a days is ridiculously intimidating.
I remember about two years ago my brother was pulled over for drinking and driving and the police report was on the Internet. I was researching drunk drivers for one of my school assignments, because on top of my brother being caught, a few months prior one of our best friends died in an accident. Anyways, I was researching the topic and not only did the report of my dead friend come up, but my brothers report came up as well. Right there, clear as day, for everyone to read. I was slightly embarrassed.
After running into that I googled my own name, and my boyfriends name at the time. He ran a small record company named Oi Man Records and so there were indie bands that had done interviews with small London local magazines and his name had been brought up several times. When I googled my name, I was extremely disappointed to see that a woman named Lisa Goulet runs her own Real Estate project, and appppppaaaaraaannntly that is way more important than anything I have done. I specified my search and old articles of my band came up, as well as my facebook page, my old myspace page, and an old online journal I had started to keep- but fell away from for the classic pen and paper.
"We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' " (Dery 1)
This quote I believe touches on more than the Internet. As people become more technologically advanced the amount of information and the means to acquire it expands also. We have the Internet, Television, Newspapers, Magazines, Novels, Friends, Schools and Teachers, Radios etc. All spieling out loads of information daily. Journalists flock to giant scenes, and terrifying murders - and for the most part in celebrities lives- the paparazzi is the reason for car accidents and life changing drama.
"The objective was not simply to tame the press but to transform it into an unwitting mouthpiece of the government. " (Dery 1)
"More recent is the notion that the public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms -- wraith like images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of Neal Gabler:
Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century."
"And Marshall Blonsky:
We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video...There is never any longer an event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The direction of events and of people is to be reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of television. Today the referent disappears. In circulation are images. Only images."
These quotes I believe mean more now than ever before. I can say that with confidence as I sit and watch The Hills with some of my closest girlfriends. 'Reality' television has taken over our television sets and bombarded our minds. People have become obsessed with it, possibly because it is real life drama. A friend of mine was chosen to be on Canada's Next Top Model (Cori MacKinnon) and this past week-end I got to speak with her about it. She told me as excited as she was to be on television (what with all the glory that came along with it being from such a small town) she felt that they had taken certain parts of her character and only accentuated them revealing a false depiction of her. She felt as though she was 'media raped', and that the producers of the show wildly misinterpreted a lot of the things she had said, cutting out parts of conversations to make it look like whatever it is they thought would sell. I felt absolutely disgusted. This just goes to show, you really never know what it is you are watching, the 'truth' could just be a cut and paste of the producers point of view.
"The image is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum" (Dery 1)
"The receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation. One medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another medium...The universe of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception." (Dery 1)
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