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What stood out to me most in this chapter was Postmodernism. I can think of no better word to describe it than disgusting. It’s inconsistent, contradictory, and childish. I wish I could live long enough to see Hegel’s pendulum swing back, away from the direction of subjectivism/relativism. I wish I were born in another philosophical era. This is the worst era in philosophy and intellectual history since the medieval times. That is probably the direction this philosophy ends. 

“Nothing is true” is another contradiction. It’s a contradiction because it claims that it’s true that nothing is true. In other words, it’s nonsense in its most basic and literal meaning. It’s like Justin Bieber’s song “Never say never.” I truly detest these philosophies that stem from a deep-rooted belief of relativism or subjectivism. They come from a place of a well-meaning heart and lazy brain. Despite the best intentions, the consequences are hell. If nothing is true then nothing is wrong with anything and there is no progress and no good to aspire to. Schizophrenia, a living nightmare, becomes attributed to being merely a personality trait, nothing different from any other subjective experience such as listening to music. Suffering is dismissed as simply being a different way of living, rather than worse. Hitler was an alright guy who was no better than Jesus Christ. There is evidently be no reason to be a feminist or any kind of activist, since nothing is wrong.

I have to point out that this is not an extreme interpretation. This is only a literal interpretation. I’m merely interpreting definitions. Furthermore, If nothing is wrong then then I should get a 100% for this rumination.

Most of the people that make these statements are very tolerant and open-minded. While those are virtuous traits, they, like any other virtues, become harmful in excess, outside the Golden Mean. Karl Popper addressed the problem with tolerance succinctly in what is now known as the “Tolerance Paradox”. It is as follows: a truly tolerant society is not feasible, since even intolerance would be tolerated. If intolerance is never confronted or dealt with, but is tolerated, the society eventually will be overtaken by the intolerant.

This is the most relatable chapter of the whole book. Studying advertising techniques is interesting because it reveals how manipulative, and consequently, knowledgeable about human nature, massive companies are. I can remember the first time learning about subliminal messages in advertising as a middle-school padawan. It changed how I thought about advertising and logos. For instance, I learned that most fast food logos are red because every color is an archetype and has its own meaning and connotations. Red and Yellow make you hungry and passionate. I don’t know why passion is necessary but that’s a creepy addition. I began to realize that ads were not what I thought. They weren’t random creative logos like I assumed. They were strategic forms of manipulation.

Logos are the most widespread but not the most effective way for companies to treat you like an idiot. Commercials are just ways to get you to give them money. Marketers can be the most creative people on the planet when it comes to brainstorming ideas for advertisements. Before I go any further I have to recommend a bit that my favorite comedian and one of my favorite humans did, regarding that very assertion. The video is named “Bill Hicks on Marketing”. South Park also commentated with an episode called “Truth and Advertising”. Evidently there is either a lot of comedic material about advertising and marketing or comedians just really hate advertising and marketing. The episode is part of a three-part storyline where ads become conscious and their whole purpose is to distract and control.

This is the best chapter in the whole book. It was even fun to read. My favorite part was the description of the “The Yes Men Are Revolting” movie. I love situational comedy like that. 

The topic of propaganda in mass media and mass culture is the most interesting one of the whole book. It’s actually coincidental timing since I just finished the famous Noam Chomsky “Manufacturing Consent” documentary. Brainwashing, or what propaganda tries to do, is to persuade or change someone using subversive tactics. In other words, brainwashing is a way to change your views without your conscious awareness that it’s happening. It’s more relevant in some forms of government than others. The ones where media are either state-owned or owned by a very small handful of people have the most effective propaganda. It’s more effective in those countries because the messages are more consistent and therefore more powerful. Conflicting messages are less powerful than uniform messages because the absence of conflict that makes the ideas seem as though they are have no rebuttal or counterpoint, and therefore true. Uniformed media depicts the opposing side as a strawman. The representation the other side gets is unfair.     

The Red Scare is a famous example of propaganda its effects and I argue the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. There is a conservative scare especially for the media people in my generation consume on the internet. The myth of public sphere helps me demonstrate that. The public sphere was decided to be fictitious on the basis that there has always been exclusion of who is able or allowed to participate in it. I don’t think you need to go into history to find examples of this. You only have to go on twitter or Instagram or Facebook. Public discourse existed briefly on these sites. If you disagree with the politics of the people who hold power at these companies your right to being represented in the public sphere will disappear.

Volkswagen used a commercial depicting three old women debating if a diesel could have such low emissions and be clean. One of them was arguing that diesel is Latin for dirty. The idea they’re trying to get through is that only old people don’t know about this new car and think diesel cars are not eco-friendly, even though they’re actually right. They’re trying to convey how revolutionary they are. They’re quite wrong.

I chose this picture of Kanye west and Candace Owens for my P2P #8. It touches every single one of the concepts on the list of concepts to choose from. Appropriation, remix, countercultural elements and every other other concept is related to this picture. The Black Lives Matter slogan is extremely prevalent on the news and social media. It presupposes that there is currently a problem in our society that Americans are not aware that black people matter. Many top-level influential black artists such as Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Future, and others are tired of this slogan and being treated as though they are victims. Kanye wearing this shirt is proof that black people are just like anyone else and can do anything anyone else can. Many people will usually have a problem with this. Coincidentally, the white women who say “if you don’t have a uterus you don’t have the right to an opinion on abortion” are the same ones who have #BLM in their social media bio, and will literally tell back people how they experience life, and will literally tell black people they are wrong if they don’t support the BLM movement. I wonder if they have considered how racist that is.

I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t understand some of the chapter. I can’t tell If that’s my fault or the authors. I reread some sections of the chapter and still didn’t understand the point. The Politics of Reproducibility is the main concept that confused me. I think the point they were making is that it is easier to make propaganda with a copy machine. I think that is the most obvious sentence I’ve ever read which might be why I feel as though I don’t understand it. Is that really the point that they took a page or few to make? The main lesson this book has taught me, which will be with more for the rest of my life, is that you aren’t a real or respected intellectual unless you talk in a way only few people can understand. “photography came about through particular nineteenth-century epistemic interests, around which a set of technologies and practices that came to be called ‘photography’ coalesced.” is a textbook example of obfuscation.

The part that said there are ways to use technology beyond its intended use reminded me of a time from high-school when my friends and I couldn’t find a bowl so we smoked out of a water bottle. The authors must have never heard of the word resourcefulness. They were describing a concept there is already a word for. I have been this high too. The drone example called Albert Einstein to my memory. His breakthroughs in scientific understanding were what enabled the conception of the most destructive weapon ever created and it’s not even close. That same knowledge is also what discovered the most efficient energy resource ever discovered.

I feel bad for Rothstein! He was only doing his job and got caught up in a widely known controversy. He saw an interesting opportunity and did what any normal person, including me, would have done. People like cow skulls for some reason. They are symbolic of the gritty west. When Locke said he couldn’t see how the photo could be fake simply due to the object in it being moved ten feet, I agreed. 

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw "Afghan Girl" was a photo I saw that depicts shell shock. It shows a picture of a man named Evgeny Stepanovich Kobytev (I will just refer to him as “the man”) before and after war. It’s on display at a museum and the caption reads: “The first picture looks at you. The second looks through you.” It reminded me of Afghan girl because they have the same expression. If Reception means the way in which something is received then these pictures have everything to do with it. These people have received too much. This is what happens when you receive something you can’t process. They aren’t present in the moment. They are in their head, reliving a moment that they can’t understand or process. If you don’t think this is the saddest thing ever then you don’t understand sadness or pain. What’s even sadder is that the home he went back to was the U.S.S.R.

Ideology is the second most prominent theme that comes to my mind, particularly bad ideology. I read that the girl was interviewed when she was much older and said that she didn’t like the picture because where she’s from she is not allowed to show her hair. She was also upset because females there, at that time, (perhaps still) could not even be seen in public with any man unless they were related or married to them. I do not blame Steve McCurry. I blame Islam. I think anyone who is a true feminist should too, and even if you aren’t. I will never understand the American Liberals hatred of Christianity and support of Islam. Perhaps it is not my misunderstanding but theirs. I wonder too if they are exempt from criticism under the protection from the fear of being charged with Orientalism, or some kind other kind of prejudice. 

I am not quite sure how ideology is represented in the picture of the shell-shocked veteran. I have thought about it for some time and could say that it is ideology that forced the boy into the situation. I feel like that is a cop-out though -the easy answer. Why must it always be the young males, who don’t even have a fully developed brain, who must be sacrificed? This word makes it sound noble when in reality he might have died for something as vain as an oil company, which is not nearly as noble sounding as “defending your country”, which is a lie. I have always thought that it was extremely funny/ironic for Americans to say this. What about going to a foreign country and killing people is defensive exactly?

There are many situations where people modify their behavior because they believe they are being watched. The most prominent example is China. Half of all the CCTV cameras in the world are in China. The prisoners in this example are literally the citizens. The guards are the Chinese Communist Party. If you do something to criticize the Chinese government you will be sent to “Re-Education Camp.” That’s a fancy way of saying Concentration Camp. It’s a shock to me that this is public knowledge, and we are more concerned with the Kardashians. The effected behavior is obedience and neuroticism. When you are recorded every time you’re in public, which, unless you are a real loner, is more often than not, you slowly become the public version of you. Your mind wants to choose one mindset over the other so it isn’t fragmented. You naturally become more like either the public version of yourself, or the private. This divide is what can cause neuroticism. Self-regulation is the long-term effected behavior. In the Panopticon, you know it is impossible for the guard to watch everyone at once. In China, you actually are. Chinese people laugh when they hear about the Panopticon. The AI can recognize faces and flag behaviors that it was programmed to. The real effected behavior is an unhappy, oppressed society.

            Other places where behavior is modified for perception is social media. Social media is all about editing. You can choose any picture or caption you want on Instagram. You can say anything you want on Twitter (joking, this is actually why I was banned and won’t go back) You control how you are perceived to a bigger degree than real life. Nobody is happy all the time and only has good moments in life. We would like other people to think that though, in order become more popular.

Personally, I enjoy the abstract and thoughtful tone in this book. It is extremely difficult to review or ruminate a 30~ paged chapter in 300 words so I will only discuss what stood out to me. I dislike and am annoyed at some of the opinions, such as the “myth of the author” and the “myth of authorial intent.” Roland Barthes was wrong.

The Irony of an author claiming that there is no such thing as an author is funny. He wrote a book about how there is no such thing as authorial intent. Maybe he also thought he didn’t exist. These are ridiculous things to say. I understand trying to say that a person is impacted by a variety of factors, such as culture and class, but to say that there is no independent credit or thoughts is absurd. It doesn’t surprise me though, coming from book, which later in the same chapter, expounds Marxism. If I were to take that myth literally, then I would say that this textbook was written by Sturken, Cartwright, and Marx. The myth of authorial intent is the same story. I understand saying that the meaning of an art piece may be different from viewer to viewer, but that doesn’t mean that there is no intent behind the artwork. When Christopher Nolan made the movie Inception, he wasn’t just recording Leonardo DiCaprio saying random lines that Chris Nolan pulled out of his ass. He had a vision to convey. He chose certain lines and themes and actors above all others. He didn’t roll a dice on the what each scene would convey.