Post Class 11/2

Today in class we discussed Adorno and Horkheimer a bit and covered the quote "Mass culture gives tragedy permanent employment as routine" (62). This notion was very interesting and tied into a variety of other theorists we have read most notably in my mind Zizek. Mass culture through participatory culture, the emergence of digital prominence and mobile devices has seen an enormous rise in videos posted on the web that perpetuate this cultural fascination with tragedy. I remember specifically, tying to Zizek, when the clip of the US soldier shot on a hand camera in Afghanistan came out that depicted the soldiers beheading at the hands of the terrorists. I remember my friends being like "have you seen this video yet you need to see it, it is sick" and to this day I have never looked at it. To me, that tragedy, a man beheaded in a foreign land to instill mass fear in our culture is not something I want to see but things like this, although not to this extent are routine. On the news every single night of the week the top headlines are violence, tragedy, death, murder and it is perpetuated by the media on a day-to-day basis relentlessly. This perpetuation serves two functions: to instill fear in the public to obey and to increase viewers in the broadcasters. The permanent employment of tragedy as routine strives to create a docile public that is fearful of the dangers of teh world. The news broadcasts relevantly events happening around where one lives, a crime in the town next door or in your town, a killer on the loose, a school bus from a local public school that crashed due to inept driving - they circulate fear in the audience which is primarily adults. The adults then pass this on and the whole circuit seems to be created to make the public not only docile but dependent on authority to act as savior and instill the notion that they will be there so this doesnt happen to you or your children. The bias in American news is that they do not show the tragedies happening abroad, the genocides in third world countries, the starvation or inequality and this acts to personify the symptoms of depicted tragedy as intrinsically American as us not them, as something that no "Other" deals with. The truth is that these tragedies happen all over the world and in most places outside the US they happen a lot more frequently abroad than domestically. The fear makes the public reliant on the RSA's and ISA's prevalent in America and subdues the masses in a state of docility and reliance on those Apparati that they will be there in ones time in need when in reality they most likely will not be which is what is being depicted in teh first place, instances where the apparati failed.