Two Lives Changed

Grant Tabler
Kate Schneider
MDST 1070 Photography and Digital Imaging 

October 22, 2009                  

Two Lives Changed

Photography is a very powerful and persuasive medium. Photographs have the ability to show an idea, and to change our perspectives. War photographs are often the most vivid examples of this. When someone is looking to change a person’s mind about an issue like war, photography is often the answer. War photojournalists changed public perceptions of the wars, especially Vietnam. The image I am going to talk about was taken by war photographer, Eddie Adams. Eddie Adams was a photojournalist who covered 13 wars. He also took many pictures of celebrities and political figures, pictures that were published worldwide in various publications. (Pyle) However arguably his most famous picture is one he took in Vietnam February 1^st, 1968. In Vietnam, Adams had a specific goal in mind. “He was after the perfect, meaningful photograph expressing the frustrations, the bravery, the suffering of the war - all expressed in one image.” (Faas) Though he did not realize it the day he took this famous “Saigon Execution” (Faas) photo, that picture would represent the changing of two lives forever.

News for the Sarcastic

When I think of news, there is a very distinct picture that comes to mind. It will vary from person to person but the consensus has to be a stereotypical one. The idea is that of an anchor sitting at a desk, reading the day's events. This may appear as Edward R. Murrow, or Peter Mansbridge, or George Bryson, but usually the news anchor is how one pictures news.

Obviously a lot of people do not consume their news through news shows. Although, it's much harder to put a face on an internet site. As such our mind’s eye view of news is often the anchor. People also begin establish a rather willing trust with their news anchors. However, not all anchors are equally reliable, or equally entertaining.

It's in this last point that satirical news takes control in popularity. although the Daily show with John Stewart, and the Colbert Report aren't entirely satirical news, they aren't entirely entertainment based either.

You see, these shows often become the shows that today’s youth go to for the daily happenings. These humour slanted, near parody, news shows happen to output sufficiently relevant information. Additionally with the entertainment value, it allows young people the ability to learn something about the news. People are beginning to turn to a satirical news source for their news before going to an official source.

This however, is by no means a bad thing. People should be trying to learn something about the world around them, even at the risk of misinterpreting sarcasm. If a medium like Steven Colbert can lead people to question what is really going on, then it forces that person to begin to question the information they attain elsewhere.

Sometimes there is a lot of truth in an ironic comment, and sometimes there's a lot of news to be had from a satirical source.

Media Literacy

I like to think of myself as a very media literate person. Mostly because I think of myself as a very technologically literate person. Although I don't really do much critical examination of the media, I try, whenever possible, to stay informed. The sources of my information I suppose may be a bit flawed.

I've only recently started reading the paper. Up until now, at the age of 18, I have gone my whole life without ever reading more than the front page of the paper. That is not to say that I'm ignorant. From the internet to working at Rogers TV I was quite well informed. This really has to say something about this digital age we live in, because I know that I am not the minority in my means of media consumption.

I'm pretty sure that most of my generation doesn't often sit around leisurely reading the paper on park benches. Recently I've even gotten some odd stares while standing around reading the paper waiting for class to begin.

I think it's because This generation doesn't really see an advantage to news content. The ideology is that, if I'm not going to gain some earth shattering piece of information that I'd otherwise totally miss then why should I take the time to read it?

I think this is a really interesting ideal. If this generation adopts this ideology then we'll be the kind of people who are informed only by the fastest, easiest, medium of distribution. Additionally I'd suppose we'd begin sorting everything by informational relevance, and adopting accessibility over reliability.

Is our generation of technologically immersed people spiralling frantically towards media illiteracy? Is our supreme amount of consumption and total lack of analysis laying the groundwork for people who are more often informed by facebook and wikipedia then from actual news outlets?

Perhaps I'm less media literate then I thought, but if so, I’m not the only one.

Jason Bourne Lives

Recently, while leafing through the paper, I was struck by an all too familiar sight. It was an ad for a clothing store. Though this time instead of shrugging it off and flipping to the next page, I stopped to really look at it. The reason being, this ad exemplified a point that John Berger made about art, that has been repeated for hundreds of years.

This ad was a simple one, two models, presumably in their own respective pictures. One was male and the other female, they were displaying clothing that was on sale, moreover they were displaying how the consumer could look should they go buy the clothes. What made this ad worth noting was the expressions of the models.

The male was a tough-guy / badass. He was nearly glaring at the camera, this guy looked like Jason Bourne if Bourne were just a little more revenge driven. This guy had a look in his eyes like he just robbed a bank, and was about to take you hostage, whether you liked it or not.

The female on the other hand, was nearly his opposite. She, although beautiful, was submissive and looking off the side of the picture. She, unlike her partner on the juxtaposed picture, looked more like someone who was about to be taken hostage, and perhaps required saving.

This is a perfect example of how John Berger explained men and women's portrayal in art.

"A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you." (Berger, 45)
"[A] woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her." (Berger, 46)

Now this sounds like a description of modern day advertisements. However, Berger wrote this in 1972 about a trend in art that has been going on for hundreds of years, back when representations of these people were being portrayed in oil paintings.

Though when I first read this it sounded more like feminist propaganda, more and more I seem to see this trend being exemplified. And if super models and teenage eating disorders have taught us anything, it's that when we are immersed within an ideal for long enough, our society will eventually attempt to mimic it. A rather scary prospect indeed.

Work Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1990. Print.

McLuhan Loves You

"The medium is the message" (McLuhan, 25)

Marshall McLuhan was a famous Canadian professor and media theorist, among other things. One of his often quoted lines is "The medium is the message". At first I was befuddled by this. I knew what they meant on their own but together it didn't connect. I knew that a medium was a method of transmitting a message, a "vehicle" for the message. However how the vehicle itself could be what was important and not what it was transporting didn't really make sense. Now it does because of something I heard in class one day.

We were talking about semiotics and moreover the arbitrariness of language. Eventually we stumbled onto the profound idea that the phrase "I love you" doesn't really mean anything at all.

Now obviously this is a rather shocking and inflammatory statement but the argument for it is actually quite interesting.

The conversation was really all about how most words in languages are just assigned seemingly randomly, with no real relation to the object they portray. The idea that they words don't "mean" anything is the idea that an individual's definition of a word is based on their knowledge of it. Which is to say, if a person doesn't speak English they may not know what the word synecdoche means, to them it means nothing.

Our basis for meaning is really just our understanding of what words represent. So then it's really not the words that matter at all is it? The medium is in fact the message.

You see the phrase isn't the important part, if you didn't speak that language you wouldn't know what it meant. What's important is not so much what is said but more how it is said. The inflection and intonation are really more important then what is said. Furthermore, one could say that "the medium is the message" in this case, means that it's not the message "I love you" that is important, it's only yourself, the medium, that really matters.

Mass Media

The way one understands the term "Mass Media" is defined by the way one understands the words themselves; whether we understand the words based on their connotation or their denotation.
The denotation, of the “mass” portion is interesting. Does mass refer to the innumerable quantities of media and therefore information transmission? Exemplified by cellphones emergence everywhere. Or does mass refer to the vast scope and reach of said transmission? Such as TV's ability to reach so many. In both cases the final approximation is really the same. The main idea is that the “mass” portion of the phrase refers to the ability to be able to reach as many people as possible.
From this we can take that for a medium to be categorized in the “Mass Media” bracket, it has to be a medium that is designed to reach the largest possible amount of potential viewers.
That is, as I see it, the denotation of the term. The connotation is a bit different. Our cultural views, as a society, seem to put a very negative light on things with “media” attached to it. Mass media has become something painfully inseparable from definition of “the media”. That quaint little term people use for defining anything news (and thus “media”) related.
That’s because people don’t see media as technology, the cellphone they use, or the TV they watch. Instead they understand media and by extension mass media only as the organization that brings news to the masses. Mostly people of that opinion are those that don't know (or perhaps even care)about the denotation of a term that is defining us as a society today.

Immersion

When in class one day an interesting topic came up. We were discussing the book John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" which is a wonderful series of essays based around how cultural and societal views are shaped by art of the time. While discussing this book, we arrived at the topic of oil paintings. Oil paintings were a huge leap forward at the time because of their realism.
Oil paintings were not only realistic because of the skill of the artist in drawing lifelike images. They were realistic because they added another sense to the equation, the sense of touch, as well as further exemplifying the sense of sight. With oil paintings, texture became noticeable. The viewer could feel really connected to that image more so then with any other art form at the time.
With such realism, the viewer is able to feel as if they are part of the image, they become lost in it. This is the same type of escape our own culture looks for through video games. One could argue movies or books for the same purpose, but I have to disagree. With video games the action is focused solely on you the player. You often see through the eyes of your character, and people speak directly to you. This is often far more immersive then other media.
Video games are a form of media that was probably first introduced purely for entertainment purposes, video games at that time were far too primitive to be really immersive. Since then advances in technology, and writing in video games have given rise to an immersive medium unique to our culture. Video games are a medium which now allows people to escape to a perfected reality.
I believe that our society will never stop searching for some type of immersion, some escape from the real world. I don’t believe it’s because people necessarily dislike their current lives, but instead that people become bored with being complacent.They strive for excitement and a break from the normal.
In the future technology will no doubt further itself to the point where people can use virtual reality for their form of escape. However, as fascinatingly close as that may put us to the level of once science fiction-like utopias, the more control we give our technology over our lives, the closer we come to a science fiction dystopia as well.