Big Paper 1- Rough Draft

INTRO:
If you go to times square and look around, soon enough you are bound to find someone similar to you. Someone who has a similar personality, similar style etc. Most people are the same. The way we talk, the way we dress, the way we act, and generally, the way we live. We are all being brainwashed by the media. The media presented through digital representation devices manipulate the way we live and distract us from the deception of the world.

ARG#1:
The media presented through advertisements on the internet or on telvision manipulate the way we present ourselves, this distracts us from current events. Advertisements tell us how we should look which distracts us from political issues. In Feed by M. T. Anderson, an allegory about modern day teenage life, the main character Titus is always distracted by his feed that fills his mind with lots of advertisements, "Feeling blue?, Then dress blue! It's the Blue-Jean Warehouse's Final Sales Event! Stock is just flying off the shelves at prices so low you won't believe your feed!"(299). Titus is constantly being told what to wear, this prevents him from noticing what is going on in the world. Because his friend Violet is not distracted, she knows about current events and tells Titus, "Do you know the earth is dead? Almost nothing lives here anymore, except where we plant it?"(273). Violet basically tells Titus that there is nothing is natural anymore, everything is produced by man.

Also seen in the movie Wall-e, an animated film about a robot trying to bring life back to planet earth. All the people on earch traveled to a _________ to live on a machine that allows them to have the ability to do everything straight from their chair, they never have to get up for anything. Similar to feed, the citizens have a tv right in front of them at all times which gives them advertisements and several forms of digital entertainment. One of the advertisements says, "Blue is the new red!" and instantly, everyone changes what they are wearing to blue without having to move an inch. Eventually, because of Wall-e's interupption to the stimulated world off of planet earth, one of the citizens' portable TV turned off and their eyes were opened up to how the world is really, they saw how everyone was in their own world on their digital devices and everyone looked almost exactly the same. The digital advertisements make consumers believe that they should look like everyone else and it distracts them from the fallacies in society.

ARG#2:
The media is also spread through digital, casual, conversations, this distracts us from the reality of our world. When one person is manipulated by advertisements, it is then spread in every day conversations when people talk about what to buy, this distracts us from human thoughts. I personally, know of several times where I ask for a friend's opinion about something before I make a purchase. During one of Andy's lectures, he pointed out that everyone mostly thinks about what to buy. That is ultimately how we are brainwashed. There is always something we want to buy whether it is absolutely necessary or not. This distracts us from the ability to think significant thoughts about things that might be more important to us. Our minds are so filled up with advertisements without physically owning a feed it deprives us from thinking for ourselves.

ARG#3:
Advertisements also manipulate us to have these ideas of what is important and was is necessary to purchase distracting us from control advertiseres have over us. Media makes us believe we always need the next best digital representation device to be socially acceptable in society, this distracts us from the fact that we are being manipulated. I feel sort of taken over by technology. I allowed this addiction to digital life and technologies to hold true in my life because it was the norm of society, everyone else had it and you have to keep up with the progress in civilization. (Will 9/9/09). In Feed, Violet's father had to buy a feed to be taken seriously in the work force. "'I was at a job interview...I realized that they had chatted me, and that I had not responded. They found this funny. Risible. That a man would not have a feed. So they were chatting about me in my presence. Teasing me when I could not hear. Free to assess me as they would, right in front of me'...'It was this that I realized that my daughter would need the feed. She had to live in the world.'"(288). The media brainwashes us to think we need the latest digital technology to survive in society distracting us from the fact that we are being brainwashed.

ARG#4:
The media portrayed through movies also influences consumers about their own lives distracting them from reality. Movies make viewers believe their lives have to be just like a movie, distracting us from a real way of life decided upon ourselves. In Mr. Tsui's lecture, he made a point that most of our ideas of love and romance come from the movies and what they make us believe. For example, the disney story how the girl always finds the perfect guy and they live happily ever after. We seem to base our lives a lot on this and several other aspects that are shown in movies multiple times. Also shown in Feed, after Violet faces many problems with her feed, she begins to dream about what she wants to do before he inevitable death and she realizes that most of her dreams are based on what she's seen in movies. "Everything I think of when I think of really living living to the full--all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. See what I mean? My idea of life, it's what happens when they're rolling the credits."(217). Similar to Violet's ideas about life, our own ideas come from what we see on the movie or television screen manipulating us about the way we should live or want to live, distracting us from living our lives to the fullest the way we want to.

ARG#5:
Media, advertising the next best thing makes our lives much easier and more convenient and it brainwashes us to think that easy and convenient is good, distracting us from physical activity. Emails make it easier to send letters, phones make it easier to talk to someone, ipods make it easier to listen to music on the go. Technology simply makes things easier for us. It is not necessarily something we need, but something that makes our lives mor convenient. This allows us to become lazy. The physical experience of working technology and knowing how to use it is preventing us from using our bodies to its full extent. Technology allows us to do the bare minimum with our bodies, whereas in a sport we need to work our muscles to adapt to that type of physical activity. Also shown in the movie Wall-e, when a citizen fell off of the hovering chair, they would fall to the ground helplessly and a machine would have to pick them up because they were physically unable to get back up. Advertisements tell us that digital technologies that make our lives easier are good and it distracts us from the negative aspect, that it limits our phyisical ability.

ARG#6:
The media also makes us believe that we want to find happiness, distracting us from actually living our lives to the fullest. Norms make us believe that conforming will make us happy but fitting in distracts us from doing what we want. Connecting to a movie we saw in english class, I <3 Huckabees, the movie is a comedy and comes from an angle that does not take the existentialist topic seriously and I noticed, often times we don't take our lives seriously. We waste lots of time doing meaningless things on our digital devices and they don't really allow us to live our lives to the fullest. We become lazy and we may think we are living our lives to the fullest because it is what we see people in the movies doing and they look happy but just be meeting the standards of how to live our lives. In addition, connecting back to Feed, Titus feels the same way, like he is always trying to be cool because he thinks it will make it feel better but it never does, "It turned out that my upcar was not the kind of upcar my friends rode in. I don't know why. I had enough room, but for some reason people didn't think of it that way. Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I'd been running toward it for a long time."(279). We are always listening to the advertisement tell us how to be happy or how to be cool or how to fit in but in the end we are never satisfied.

CONNECTIONS:
I believe that in the past there have always been expectations for how to be normal. Infact I think they were more strict. Women all had to cook and clean and dress the same way because that is what they were told would make them attractive to men. In contrast with how it is today, there are still ideas of being "normal" and accepted in society but now I feel like they have become more open. Not all girls dress the same and not all men dress the same, they dress similarly, but in the past the dressed more similar to each other. To continue the pattern, I think in the future there will still be ideas about what is normal, I think there always will be but there will be many people who do not follow that, they create their own idea of normal for other people to conform to.

OPV:
Banach argues that essentially, everyone has absolute freedom, we decieve ourselves by giving into the influences around us and we choose to fit the norms and be manipulated by the media. "We attempt to decieve ourselves and act as if we weren't free, as if we were really determined by our nature, our body, or the expectations of other people."(Part II of Banach's lecture). He argues that essentially we all think for ourselves. But we are really being decieved by marketers and the media to believe so but in the proccess, we fit the expectations of socitey because it is what we have been told and it is what is easy. We are manipulated to chose the life that is laid our for us algorithmically. We think we decide for ourselves but ultimately we take the easy path rather than thinking for ourselves.

SIGNIFICANCE:
It is important to be aware of this manipulation. Instead of simply falling for all of it, we look at it from the perspective of the advertisers and see what is it that they are really doing to us. It is important to see what lies behind the amusing and shiny digital devices and ultimately do something about it.

CONCLUSION:
Overall, the media makes us think that being happy is fitting into the norms, buying the latest clothing, buying the next best digital device to make our lives more convenient, and it all leaks into our minds highly affecting our lives. All of this distracts us from the truth and reality of our society.