What is the western cultures relationship to images, vision and human understanding? Western cultures rely on modern media technologies daily but what are its effects and is it diminishing our abilities to see, smell, touch and hear? We have devolved ourselves into the eye and our visions have shifted from exploration to consumption, from watching to a fixed gaze. We have developed an insecurity of absorbing the world by experience, to accepting the media’s reflection from the comfort of our own homes. It’s not that our senses disappear when we view the media, however the parallels of spectator and spectacle emphasises that once in a while we should validate the truth of the images that we come in to contact with, ‘ As much as we try to design the future with our own perceptions and to instrumentalize the effects of the tools we use, with whom lies the control of what we see’(1).
We should learn to embrace other forms of communications and integrate with our own experiences of the world to enhance or negate what has been presented to us. We all too easily presume we know societies and cultures around us without validation from our own experiences and knowledge of truth. However even in this instance, it is still a matter of interpretation of how we as individuals link between our memories, thought processes, creative minds and visions to interpret. Yet instead of allowing ourselves to personally process we danger ourselves by infecting our minds with a minority of individuals views who control the media, willingly subjecting ourselves to the hypodermic needle of media control.
We rely on the delivery of facts from our western media’s and base our opinions on the world from media displays. I believe that western societies and the rise of technological advancements with media and communications is forming a western culture that is forgetting the basic human structure of needs, to experience both ourselves and our neighbours, to understand our cultural and personal categories and in essence define who we are.
As our culture develops into this new medium we will see a development from the traditional notion of friendship that involves trust, support and similar values, to friendships based on a media platform, such as social networks sites. It is a worrying prospect for the younger communities who are growing up in age where the meaning of ‘friend’ is becoming devalued and computerised.
The inevitability is that technological advancements are rapidly expanding and becoming increasingly complex. Just within the short span of my lifetime, technology has revolutionized the convenience of communication, greatly expanded the capabilities of science and produced both visual and physical entertainment to degrees of engaging that could never before have been imagined. However it must be remembered that technology and physical beings are, although parallel, not integrated and this understanding will help us keep a grip on the fresh air we smell to the photographs we see, and the neighbors’ we have and the soap operas in which we fantasize. We have to explore the boundaries to truly understand the meaning of life.
(1) Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision, Images, Media & The Imaginary, 1995, America
http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Mass%20Media/Hypodermic_Needle_Theory.doc/
The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences
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