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.