Peace! I am KhnumAnkhTemu, to make it easy Khnum works fine, pronounced Ku-noom. No this is not the name that I was given at birth. It is my attribute. I have a few other attributes but this is the one that I have been evolving to over the past few years. What it means I will challenge you all to find that out.Mass Media
Mass Media: Opposing Viewpoints
Opposing View Point Series
Pg 12
Asking North Americans about the pervasive influence of media in this culture is a bit like… asking fish about water. “Water. What water?” We live and breath media – but we are largely unaware of how they shape our lives. (Tom Montgomery – Fate, The other Side, March/April 1997)
Pg 36
Yet it is real, very real, and much, much more than “Just Television”. For those in their early teens, it is seeing 15,000 sexual acts or innuendoes and a total of 33,000 murders and 200,000 acts of random violence in a single year, according to the American Family Association.
Pg 62
By creating a maximum consumption society, advertising fosters attitudes that will ruin the planet. The Third world must exist solely to meet the needs of the first (us). In America, there is now one car for every person. To achieve the same ratio in the Third World, the auto/advertising industry must sell millions of gas guzzlers to, for example, China, where that many cars will ruin their environment. I have seen this in Bangkok, now a “prosperous”, polluted, clogged snarl of highways and gridlock. The films prime example of the attitude is the Gulf War. Where, to maintain “our way of life” (cheap oil), George Bush didn’t care how many Iraqis he had to kill and the Pentagon censored the News so we could not see the consequences of our policy.
Pg 63
One of my Fordham students, Courtney Shannon, had it right in her reflection paper on Henry David Thoreau: “Consumers have too many choices. There are hundreds of different brands of clothes, yet each brand does the same function of keeping a person covered. A Lexus and a Toyota are both modes of transportation, yet there is a price difference of over $40,000 between the two cars. The simplicity of life has been lost. Crime is the consumer’s partner. It is becoming nearly impossible to separate the two. The rich flaunt what they own. The poor demoralize themselves to get the material goods that will make them appear richer than they are.
Pg 89
Benjamin I. Page writes that, “Even if the public is capable of a high level of rationality and good sense, public opinion is bound to depend, in good art, upon the political information and ideas that are conveyed to it.”