Late Blog post, Horkheimer and Adorno

Like i said before some of my post were not shown up on the website so i have taken upon myself to repost them.

Horkheimer and Adorno talk about mass media within American society. Mostly in television, film and radio. All these means of media are all related through the same idea that they create certain images as the norm. According to Adorno and Horkheimer this is called "sameness", which is the belief that even though America is made up of people with many backgrounds, they all have an identical idea of how something should be or what something should look like. The the means of media production, it is an easy way to spread ideologies.

I can relate a lot of this reading to our past theorists, Walter Benjamin and his theories regarding images and reality. " the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production." (45) People are unable to differentiate the real from the fake even though the movie is an imitation because of how realistic it is perceived. Because movies have such an influential impact on people , the audience filtering their ideas are creating hegemony.

Andrew Wells, Make up; Poster

Looking over my blogs i found some of my blogs were missing, but luckly I was smart enough to save my notes on my lap top.
This was my understanding of Mark Poster:
It is obvious that technology is advancing faster and faster and faster every year. Our technology is increasing at a faster speed because of the type of information we're receiving through the new technology; Televisions, computers, telephones (cell phones), consumer electronics, and publishing. Since the era of technology is currently active by Americans, its basic structure is based in the United States. A great quote to grab from Posters reading: " the dominant use of the english on the internet suggest the extension of American power as does the fact that email adresses in the United States alone do not require a country code." To go off of this quote i think that its important to say that its not the code that should be require for the U.S, its more of a favorable operation that the Americans hold toward smaller people. The only reason why the United States is capable of sustaining the no-country code is because it is considered to be a prosperous nation when compared to otehr countries. This thought of the country code is thought to create dominance amongst the other less fortunate countries.

One theorist that references Poster's notion is Baudrillard. He support these ideas through two terms: simulation and dissimulation. These words represent the idea of absence and presence in the same function. Virtual reality is an image that masks the absence of reality because one performs as if these creations of reality are taking place for real when they are not.

Appadurai - Mediascapes, 4-26-10

Appadurai touches on a notion known as "mediascapes," which "tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality" (35). This relates to any magazine, advertisement, television-radio-internet or book containing an ideology (which would be all of them). I found this reading to be somewhat similar to Marx and Althusser; they wrote that we experience life through the eyes of ideology and there is no possible way to escape all forms of ideology. Just like Marx and Althusser, Appadurai believes we experience different sectors of life through other mediums. Those media he refers to are mediascapes. He writes that we trust our media enough to string together half-realistic, half-fictional media texts into absolute reality. For example, if I happen to watch the mediascape television show "Cops," and predominantly view minorities getting arrested on the show, I may assume, through that one little mediascape, that minorities tend to get arrested more than caucasians. I may even go a step further in assuming that minorities commit more crimes than whites.

Of course, that is just a hypothetical example of the power and scope of a mediascape. Usually, I hope our culture takes mediascapes with a large grain of salt and I can only pray that people do not believe everything they observe through mediascapes.

Appadurai

It was interesting how in this reading many theorists we have studied before were mentioned such as Marx, Barthes, Benjamin, and Baudrillard. I liked the part when he talked about the "fetishism of the consumer" ( 42). The reading explains how a consumer has been transformed to the commodities. I found it interesting how the reading compared this concept to Baudrillards idea of the similacra. It is true how consumers are influenced by global markets to buy certain products. Consumers believe a fake reality because of how companies portray there products. They want to believe that what they show really makes you feel a certain way and believe that product will effect you in this ideal way. This makes consumers fall to the idea of the simulacra. We are influenced extremely easily to buy products because of how they are marketed. If you make your product desirable it will attract consumers because they will want your product to believe it will allow them the escape.

Pre-class Appadurai

I have to agree with Clem in saying that Appadurai does a great job in identifying all the theorists and linking them together.

This is what i got out of Modernity at large: cultural Dimensions of Globalization

Appadurai argues that the most constructive feature of using the concept of the cultural is the concept of difference. He defines difference as a contrastive rather than substantive property of certain things. Appadurai sees its main virtue in being a useful set of rules that are capable of highlighting points of similarity and contrast between an array categories such as classes, genders, roles, groups, and heritage. Describing the cultural dimension of something infancies the idea of situated difference (difference in relation to something local, embodied, and significant). I really liked how Devon put it in her blog post. "I think, often times, especially as students that are, for the most part, well-off and from upper-middle class backgrounds, we are ignorant of the fact that people exist outside of our own circumstances and that the experience we take part in as American citizens is by no means the norm around the world." I strongly feel the same way and i don't think theres a better way to put it. We are so inclosed in our own world that most of us are oblivious to what life is outside ours. We must search for a difference to better understand how we are inside.

Pre-class Appadurai

In this text, what is most interesting is that Appadurai uses a lot of the theorist we have studied this semester and makes everything come together. It all finally makes sense may I say? All the notions and theories we have learned have given rise to our consciousness and we can now understand such a text which we would not have grasped at the beginning of the year.

I would like to focus on the first part of this text. Looking back on history, the theorist makes a strong point on the evolution of interactions in the past centuries. In the past exchanges between social and cultural groups were almost impossible due to distances and technologies. But with the print technology, and transportation advancements new transactions were now possible. As Appadurai puts it, there has been a "technological explosion" in the past century (trains, airplanes, telephone, computers and internet) making exchanges possible on a whole new level. One would think that this has created an ability to share and understand culture in a global manner but not at all. It has only promoted a sort Americanization of the East. Appadurai gives us the example of the Philippines singing songs of our past and celebrating them more than we do, with a certain nostalgia but the problem is this was never part of the Philippine culture meaning they sense a nostalgia with out a memory, for something "never lost". This is the irony of what global culture is bringing to the table.

Appadurai Pre Class

Throughout this piece, it becomes clear that Appadurai is able to do one thing that no previous theorist has attempted to do, that being, crossing the national border and seeing how this postmodern culture has had grand affects globally. I think, often times, especially as students that are, for the most part, well-off and from upper-middle class backgrounds, we are ignorant of the fact that people exist outside of our own circumstances and that the experience we take part in as American citizens is by no means the norm around the world. Especially if we are to call ourselves critical readers, we must recognize our own perspective as one of privilege that must constantly keep in mind the fact that, whether we want it to or not, our privilege serves to oppress others. I think Appadurai makes that clear in his articulation of America and its overbearing power on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world’s consequent imitation of American culture, which he describes as a “rich testimony to the global culture of the hyperreal”.

On the other hand, I think we are also, in a more positive light, going to witness, more and more, the transnational spread of ideas, philosophy, and language as a result of the postmodern era for no longer are we a community based in simply face-to-face communication but we now have the potential to create “imagined” communities based in virtual realities that are fluid and unstable. Appadurai recognizes the diverse flows of cultural material moving across national boundaries, and although he may criticize this new global system within an intellectual, critical framework, I think it is just as significant to recognize the great potential these flows have in expanding connections with one another and broadening our own perspective, so it is not limited to the one-dimensional perspective of simply being an American.