Democracy's Price

Today we all watched Electric Signs, a documentary by Alice Arnold. The film had an underlying theme of losing public space to private information targeted at particular demographics. I struggled finding this focus in the film because of the contradictions between the signs that were portrayed as problematic because of light and energy consumption; while in the same film, opinions of the same technology portraying not advertisements but rather artistic expressions weren't so negatively viewed upon by the public.

Billboards certainly aren't new. Neither are intrusive advertisements in a public sphere? What kind of fit will people have once we are all wearing contacts that have advertisements in them? It will happen in our lifetime...

Last week, we spoke about Readerly and Writerly texts. You know, the two types of literature that we face. One being the kind where you read between the lines, use your imagination to create the experience, like the Harry Potter example. The other, simply something like a list of items - requiring no necessary imagination to comprehend. These two types of text relate directly to a problem with the giant billboards, TVs on our walls, and screens in our hands.

What we have inundated our own selves with for capital purposes has largely inhibited the loss of some of the most pleasurable human experiences: mysticism, fantasy, and imagination.

Doctor Cummings asks what novels we have read recently. The entire class, a 300 level course filled with students that attend a 'prestigious liberal arts college' had nothing to say!?

We are in the information age. Information is now a commodity and every medium we can create to communicate that information is valuable real estate. This 'information' we all consume so much comes at a cost though. For if we aren't reading novels and the only writerly texts we fill in the blanks to are pictures of models in underwear that we imagine ourselves wearing, where did the fantasy, the mysticism, the magic go?

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”
- Walter Benjamin