Bordieu

On Tuesday we talked about Bordieu, and how television rules our society: "Our news anchors, our talk show hosts, and our sports announcers have turned into two-bit spiritual guides, representatives of middle class morality. They are always telling us what we 'should think' about what they call social problems"(329). For example, Bordieu's quote about how cultural icons are “treated with a respect quite out of proportion with their intellectual merits.” This reminds me of many movies including Bruce Almighty when he created crazy spectacle for ratings and also to be well-liked and respected as a journalist. When we have these types of stories in real life that are crazy and over the top, it becomes normalized and people go to even further measures in order to top the news stories. Therefore, "making everything ordinary" is what ends up happening when the news stories are always trying to top eachother to get viewers attention. This relates to other theorists in the fact that spectacle is what gets people's attention and when people see the same thing all the time they need to be hit over the head with a bat to get thier attention. This relates back to Zizek because of the fact that our society needs out of this world stimulation in order to be heard, (because we have caused the increase of spectacle over the years.) This is why movies like 2012 are put out there because our culture needs the crazy spectacle because we have become desensitized from all of the shocking things that have happened with the media since the 1950's. For example, when "All in the Family" aired, people didn't expect such controversey on television and therefore they had to warn people not to watch it and put a message out to the public that they shouldn't watch if they get easily offended. I really like taking The History of Radio and Televsion the same semester as this class because the history really helps understand media better and how our culture became the way that it is today.