Ok, in this minute paper I’m going to avoid going into a tirade like I did last week and instead focus on clearly explaining why I feel the GNN films we watched during the last two classes are contradictory to the ideas Ashley has been trying to get across. In today’s class we talked about ideology and how it can polarize people and ideas, creating a “us vs. them” scenario where we are right and those against us are wrong. Now I don’t disagree with this idea, my problem is that this was presented to us through a film that was in every possible way intended to force its own ideology on us. Throughout today’s movie we where given two distinct sides to choose from, with the first side portrayed as the smart/hip/anti-conformist revolutionaries who made the film, while side two was presented as the stupid, sometimes comical, red necks who are saying either you're with us or against us. I don’t know about you, but personally this is as hypocritical as me bringing a Nike commercial to bust while wearing a pair of Nike shoes today. Another major problem with using GNN films to critique the watering down and lack of real news within our media is that GNN is in no way news. In fact if you think about how this type of film making is done, we can see that it is nothing more than film clips taken from news reports chopped up into meaningless sound bytes which further censure the original message. These bits of information are rearranged in a way that not only get across the opinion of the film maker (which is the only opinion we really got to hear) it also makes it seem like these ideas are coming straight out of the mouth of politicians, reporters, and the guy from Star Treck. Now this obviously makes for great entertainment, and we may get some truth from it, but it also can be no different than some Hollywood studio finding a mediocre review their newest film has received and then taking a positive sounding part of it to market their movie, thus abusing and perverting another persons words through editing.
Mark Alexander
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Minute Paper 3/11
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2 comments:
well said.
at the same time though, she said outright, "do not think that this presentation is removed from how specific ideologies effect the way we see things." i didn't think it contradicted the message as much as it did to prove the point of todays class.
nobody is asking us to just bend over and receive information passively. i dunno...
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