Hebdige Post Class

Mass culture gives tragedy permanent employment as routine. (62)

One quote that I found particularly interesting from the Hebdige reading (on page 62) was: "mass culture gives tragedy permanent employment as routine". I liked this quote a lot and before CMC I wouldn't have understood it but now we can see after critically analyzing different forms of media that there will always be a place for tragedy in our culture. Instantly this makes me think of the news and how we can't go 30 minutes without hearing something depressing (death, natural disaster, accidents, fights, controversy, scandals, etc.). 

I think this is why Hebdige then went on to state "the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, & horror" (485). It's very interesting to see how much violent and negative stuff we're being subjected to today, and especially how popular some of these things have become in our individual communities. The other day I was at a fellow CMC student's house and when I walked in a couple of kids were huddled around a computer watching a video of someone getting beat up by like 4 or 5 other guys in a gang...they were all laughing and screaming which was bad enough but then I noticed that the video had something like 130 'LIKES' on facebook. I don't know how people can 'like' that stuff or use it as fodder for their social networking profiles but that really shocked me, what we watched was real - not staged like in most media productions. I guarantee you that this particular video probably had thousands of hits on youtube too, i guess people in the U.S. really do thrive off of/get their entertainment from blood and violence like he said. I also think it's interesting how certain theorists go about handling these images/clips that we're seeing in the media, some say that they make us more surprised when these events happen in real life or become more personal (which shouldn't be the case when looking at the movies/tv shows/video games we use to entertain us)...Hebdige says that we're becoming desensitized and the media is having a 'waning effect on us', as for me I'm not 100% but Hebdige's logic seems pretty easy and clear cut to follow...unlike most of the other theorists we've read with tons of ideas/concepts being thrown out everywhere.

on my honor, i have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this post.