Blog Response #20

With new technologies, the daily routine is becoming faster and faster. New technology is constructed to solve problems, but change always comes with some negative effects. The current speed of everyday life has delivered us information overload. From the moment we wake up until we crash on the pillow again, we see thousands of advertisements, news stories, images, promotions, etc. Hell, they're probably even with us in our dreams. For pure survival's sake, it is a natural function to block out irrelevant media: if we gave every source even a nod of our attention, we wouldn't ever have a chance to work, sleep, or even eat. Kohler's correlation of this to photography remains the same. Photographs easily become bland to us, especially once we see them over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. People are good at recognizing patterns, and patterns often get shoved into the back closet of the mind. To really grab anyone's attention a photograph must really break our pre-conceptive barriers. Whether it shocks us with something real, or simply suspends reality (that is probably the worst placement of simply I have ever used) photographs must first seduce us with shock & awe, followed by relevance. Maybe that opinion is a little too harsh, but I'm sticking to it.

Whether you like it or not, 'infotainment' is here to stay. Every message in the media has to be brief and offer some kind of reward to get people to listen to us. It's like a drug, once the population gets a taste of simple and fun, they need more! MORE! IN EVERYTHING! I hate to use the constructed realities article as an example, but it's hard to get through. It's has a lot of intellectual merit, and is extremely well thought out. The problem is the format now. Our generation is trained to only accept the most minimal, raw information, and sometimes rarely that unless it entertains. For better or for worse (probably for worse) books have become powerpoint slides. Sorry for the tangent, I haven't even brought up the idea of reality yet. If there's at all a moral question of whether manipulated images are true or false, they're true. Period. We live in an era where digital manipulation is common knowledge. It's an information/entertainment, would it be too much to argue that the imagination makes up just as much of our daily lives as reality? I don't thinks have to exist in the physical world to be real, they can simply be in our minds. Our entire society is built upon the human imagination and mind anyway. I'm going to cut it off here before the talk turns to perception and more philosophical ideas.