Class Post-Jenkins, Marx, Althusser

Thinking back to our class discussion last Tuesday when we were talking about grass-roots, another example would be Wikipedia. Anyone can write whatever he or she wants on Wikipedia, without even being an expert in the field. The problem with that is people actually use that website as a source, so if anyone can write what they want it is guaranteed that a majority of the information isn’t even true. This relates to Mark Poster when he talked about freedom of speech. We not only have freedom of speech in our dialogue but we other have it with the media (to an extent, because of what the government regulates), but we definitely have it on websites such as Wikipedia and also with blogging. Because of people having the freedom of speech on Wikipedia, they are technically allowed to write whatever they want, even if the facts they are writing aren’t true.

I also found it interesting when we were talking about binary oppositions of the American ruling class and what we considered to be better (either the fast, new, upward, etc or the slow, old, downward, etc). We came to the conclusion that ideology and we, as the active agents, are the factors that determine what is better. If we were looking at what we consider to be the ‘American Dream’, then we would probably say that ideology determines that the fast, new and upward is better because the ‘American Dream’ says that we desire what’s bigger, better, and faster. We are always striving for whatever is out of reach for us-we want what we can’t have. This also ties into when we were talking about media and how it sends us mixed messages when it comes to the economy and whether we should buy products or save our money. Some media tells us to spend money because essentially it will help the economy, but others tell us that we need to save our money and eventually the economy will be better, but it’s better to save it and be safe than sorry. With some people, when they hear the media telling them to save money it makes them feel like they can’t have the products they want and that makes he or she want it more, just like with the ‘American Dream’ and how we strive for what we can’t have.

“On my honor I have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this work”