I’m wondering how powerful satire (in this case, political) is in changing the minds of those being satirised. I’m aware of the power to reinforce a pre-established idea or ideology, but is it effective in altering someone’s stance.
I spend alot of time watching comedy news shows, such as Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and HBO’s Last Week Tonight, which spend a great deal of their time attempting to rally support against idiocy and injustice amongst government and corporate systems. With Jon Stewart comes a very explicit anti-republican motif, easily and honestly quite marvelously pointing out huge flaws and hypocrisy within right wing groups in the USA, and while being a great source of information for left wing audiences, it’s entirely possible that the rationality is far too easily disregarded by those opposed to it.
There’s a great bit from Last Week Tonight about the imbalance of the climate change debate (link below) which highlights as clear as day the problem with the media representation about the debate, and I’m insanely curious on the effects of this bit on those who see it who are deniers.
I see cars not just as a vehicles, but as personal statements and sources of pleasure for their owners.
With the portrait/staged photographic style I attempt to convey that I’m also interested in cars as art, and artistic representation of cars (photography, videography).
Pitching the Tent
This photograph shows two of my friends pitching a tent
camping is something I grew up doing with my family, and is something that I really enjoy doing now with my friends.
with the presence of my friends in this shot I’m attempting to show that they are an important part of my life.
Pocket Contents
This is what I keep in my pockets at all times.
It represents what’s important to me; communication, my car, music.
It also represents one of my demons; my smoking habit
The arrangement also shows another thing about me, which is my meticulous nature in regards to organising my things. Nothing is out of place.
My Youtube Search
This simply shows what most of my online viewing consists of at the moment
Famous scientist’s (all with very strong atheistic views) lectures, media appearances, and programmes occupy a large amount of my free time.
Whilst not very active in the subject, I have a great interest in science. Figures like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence Krauss make regular appearances in much of my online viewing and reading. Today I was watching a speech that Neil Degrasse Tyson made at The Story Telling of Science 2013 where he makes an interesting point.
“I submit that [newspapers publishing scientific discoveries] opened up a new era in the public awareness of cosmic discovery. The popularity of Einstein in 1905, right up through 1916, that continued to rise because [the] media took charge…”
It should come as no surprise to me considering that I get nearly all my scientific discovery nourishment via online videos or e-books, but this quote in particular really cemented to me how important mediated content is in actually progressing our civilisation. Here, Tyson talks explicitly about art – using the example of Van Gough’s Starry Night – bringing cosmic discovery into the mainstream, thus helping the scientific community to gather members and support in moving forward and making further discoveries.
The quote I’m referring to is at 11:40 in the below video.
The State Library and the surrounding area is, as is most of the Melbourne CBD, bursting with mediated content. Every direction I looked I could see it in one form or another, whether advertisements or signs, safety warnings or t-shirts, graffiti or litter. All forms of media, shaping the space in which we inhabit.
On the ground we saw an empty Red Bull can, a ‘Free Tram Zone’ notice, and graffiti. Up higher we noticed flags advertising the book festival at the library, statues accompanied by plaques and engravings, the name of a building written across it’s top, and a full size advertising billboard on the side of the Melbourne Central building. Every printed info sheet at the tram stop, timetables, safety warnings, Yarra Trams logos, along with poster ads plastered all over the trams. Every shop-front boasting its business name with a backlit sign above the door, the pedestrians crossing have signs warning for moving trams. Every food wrapper, shopping bag or pair of shoes on someone’s feet brandishes a logo. The staff at the library all wear ID tags, as do many business men and women on the street. Inside the library, there were brochures and booklets, directory signs everywhere, as are books. We also noticed a few screens showing information about various different services that the library offers, we were even asked to be part of a survey. I rarely checked my phone but did use it to check the time and to take photos and video of some media forms. Even listing the responses with an ‘Artline’ pen on paper counted.
Perhaps most blatantly, we were confronted with a “Free Tibet” protest on the steps at the front of the library. Protesters wore laminated paper signs around their necks and held flags, both Australian and Tibetan. They also held up two wide banners with messages on them, and had protesters singing with a microphone and amplifier.
This can’t possibly be everything I encountered in this exercise, it would take more than a few hundred words to list all of those. Consciously noticing mediated communications and attempting to list them all, particularly in the CBD, made me realise just how much communications material there is, and how easily we filter it from our consciousness.
Lecotrial one had us look at sections of an article by N. Katherine Hayles (‘Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes’, Profession, 2007. pp 187-199) which proved rather interesting. I had never really thought consciously much about the difference generationally with attention to media as learning resources. It’s hard to get away from my phone, Facebook, or even music while trying to do something like study, which can really affect the time it takes to get things done. It’s not as if I’m attempting to multi-task in order to be more efficient, I’m simply getting distracted by the constant influx and availability of the media content around me. I can say that the time I’ve spent actually writing this is far longer than it needs to be as I lose my thought pattern every time my phone flashes it’s little blue LED, seducing me into engaging in another session of useless scrolling.
So I completely understand the concept of hyper attention and deep attention, and I can really feel the difference between them. I remember while studying in year 12, 2013, being able to push out a 1500 word essay in around two hours, read long chapters and excerpts and sit for more than an hour or two solving maths problems. After a gap year where the only concentration I ever had to do what making Big-Macs for 8 hours a day, I’ve lost (temporarily, I hope) the ability to focus on one stimulus for an extended period of time. This lack of engagement in deep-attention over the last 16 months has really shown me how much hyper-attention can be a disadvantage to me in regards to my learning.