#mrspruden

[rickodyssey]

Shell

This was most fun and creative P2P. For my cultural jamming assignment, I made a parody of the Shell Corporation Logo. Shell is a gas station company. America is known to gets its oil from around the globe wherever it can get its hands on. That’s why I remade the Shell logo from an ordinary seashell into a seashell that is made up of artillery bombshells. If oil companies were honest in their advertising they would all look like this. I intended to drop a bombshell myself.

[rickodyssey]

Manufacturing Consent

This is the best chapter in the whole book. It was even fun to read. My favorite part was the description of the “The Yes Men Are Revolting” movie. I love situational comedy like that. 

The topic of propaganda in mass media and mass culture is the most interesting one of the whole book. It’s actually coincidental timing since I just finished the famous Noam Chomsky “Manufacturing Consent” documentary. Brainwashing, or what propaganda tries to do, is to persuade or change someone using subversive tactics. In other words, brainwashing is a way to change your views without your conscious awareness that it’s happening. It’s more relevant in some forms of government than others. The ones where media are either state-owned or owned by a very small handful of people have the most effective propaganda. It’s more effective in those countries because the messages are more consistent and therefore more powerful. Conflicting messages are less powerful than uniform messages because the absence of conflict that makes the ideas seem as though they are have no rebuttal or counterpoint, and therefore true. Uniformed media depicts the opposing side as a strawman. The representation the other side gets is unfair.     

The Red Scare is a famous example of propaganda its effects and I argue the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. There is a conservative scare especially for the media people in my generation consume on the internet. The myth of public sphere helps me demonstrate that. The public sphere was decided to be fictitious on the basis that there has always been exclusion of who is able or allowed to participate in it. I don’t think you need to go into history to find examples of this. You only have to go on twitter or Instagram or Facebook. Public discourse existed briefly on these sites. If you disagree with the politics of the people who hold power at these companies your right to being represented in the public sphere will disappear.

NYU Local. (2016, November 16). Twitter's new censorship policy is actually an improvement. Medium. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://nyulocal.com/twitters-new-censorship-policy-is-actually-an-improvement-7c0b70ad4996