The Allegory of the Cave

The allegory of the cave by Plato is where humans are depicted as being imprisoned by their bodies and what they perceive by sight only. In the Allegory of the Cave Plato plays with the notion of what would occur if people suddenly encountered the divine light of the sun, and perceived “true” reality.

The main point of the Allegory of the Cave is to give an example of the way that we all live our lives. Let us apply this allegory to modern life, for a better illustration, and say that the prisoner leaves the cave. Instead of a wall with shadows we have television, instead of echoes we have radio. In the light the freed man realizes that the broadcast media does not report the news but merely cast shadows to entertain, deceive, or manipulate the shackled prisoners still in the cave....

The prisoners are those who perceive reality as being truthfully reflected on television. And those who find the truth, those outside the cave, know that they will be labeled fools, liars and agitators by those still casting the shadows within the darkness of the cave.

Globalization and Media: a shared responsability?

• How do we create a common vision and a unified subject for the entire world?

• One image can travel through out the whole world but can they be an agreement?

The great development that the media and mass communication have known with all its types help in accentuating all aspects of globalization, positive or negative. the images of war and summary executions could spread across the globe in seconds and could actually serve to
an efficient spread out of hatred and extremism as it is the case today.

However, it is the shared responsibility of media professionals in different parts of the
world to use their strong and powerful tools to spread out the values of tolerance and empathy instead of all these negative and bad frequencies that they are emitting through the whole world and thus help to get us live on a world where we can have agreements and a common vision as a unit with no contradictions.

Ad Busters

According to Wikipedia, Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The main objective of the ad-buster or the anti consumerism movement was to slow down the rapid expansion of the consumption. As a strategy to reach their objective, the anti-consumerism movement under estimate the value of the service that offered or the product sold during the consumption.

The culture jammers association often use different theories and processes such as, commoditi fetishism, Appellation, Self reflection and of course these are all used based on the Marxsist Theory which was the foundation of this movement.

Even if that consumerism has ensured a great quality of life and better opportunities for all, it seems that for anti consumerists , capitalism and consumerism are the worst thing that happened to human kind, and because of which we are not really living out lives.

Anti consumerists are against all brands and all the mega trends that the capitalistic era has offered us. the question is could we really live without consuming? could we really live our lives like if we are not part of the consumer society?

Image analysis

As we look at these pictures (on the right, a little Thai soldier, and on the left two brothers from Angola) we start immediatly thinking, associationg and interpreting meanings and thoughts to these pictures.

we start thinking what were the circumstances that made this photographer take this picture, from that specific angel and of that specific children. According to Lester, there are six perspectives that we base ourselves on to analyse a certain message. these perspectives are:

• Personal perspective


• Historical perspective


• Technical perspective


• Ethical perspective


• Cultural perspective


• Critical perspective

Postmodernism

Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism, it is the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge It is used and shown and has been the point of departure fora lot of works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as in marketing and business and the interpretation of history, law and culture in the late 20th century. Postmodernism can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress,and so on. Hyperreality can be defined as a mean to characterise the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where all kinds of media can radically shape and filter the original event or experience being depicted.

Postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, and instead it focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be relative to that specific person, rather than certain and universal.

Anti-consumerism

Anti-consumerism begun to appear with the saturation of the market and the big pressure that consumers have on their shoulders to constantly keep shopping. Consumers -no matter what is their social class- start to be irritated and uncomfortable about all the different and constantly changing packaging. Therefore, and mainly and in North America, this notion of anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces across every social and demographic class. For that purpose, several books were published to criticize consumerism, and once again we must say that the market responded effectively to the consumer when it came to anti-consumerism product, which is contradictory of the concept means. But still if we all hate consumerism, why can’t we stop shopping?

Media and the Public Sphere

Mass media plays a crucial role in forming and reflecting public opinion, it actually connects the world to individuals and reproduce the self-image of society. Therefore the media performs the most critical function in contributing in the make up of the public sphere or society. the media are not a neutral participant, instead they are either a legitimiser of the status quo or an innovator of the existing social equilibrium. The mutual relationship between the state and the media, either as oppositional or as complementary is influenced by the nature of intervention of the state in the public sphere.