NS 10/13 Post Class Post

This week's reading selections from Baudrillard was quite impactful for me. It is truly eye-opening to have a new understanding of media and how information is transmitted and it gets me thinking about the slippery path that information might hold down the road. We are living in a world where information is meticulously selected by whoever can control it. In the U.S. it is very politically-based where everything is connected through back door deals the public is not aware of. The corruption is unfathomable. From Baudrillard, he mentions the massive disparity that goes on in other third world countries that are quite hidden from media in other nations. He poses the ideas of reality and knowing vs. not knowing. The collapse of the World Trade Center was an example he chose to prove the idea that we know the information that is given to us through the media, but we fail to see specific images that are graphic because it is our nation and we are not the one's who control or depict the story. We would not be able to imagine a specific event or recreate it without it happening in reality. This is a very interesting concept that I need to further dive into, understand, and reflect upon. Below I have attached to passages from the Baudrillard reading selections. 

"The image consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it an offer is it for consumption. Admittedly, it gives it unprecedented impact, but impact as image-event. How do things stand with the real event, then, if reality is everywhere infiltrated by images, virtuality, and fiction? In the present case, we thought we had seen (perhaps with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, in an allegedly virtual universe. ‘There’s an end to all your talk about the virtual this is something real!’ Similarly, it was possible to see this as a resurrection of history beyond proclaimed end. But does reality actually outstrip fiction? If it seems to do so, this is because it has absorbed fictions energy, and has itself become fiction" (Baudrillard 2002, p. 228). 

"And the same the ‘derealization’ of the horror of went on after the WTC collapse: while the number of victims - 3000 - is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see - no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people... in clear contrast to reporting on Third World catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: Somali‘s dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women, men with their throat cut. The shots are always accompanied by an advance warning that ‘some of the images you will see are extremely graphic and may upset children’" (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 232).