you know those Juarez femicide murders - relates maybe to recent cyclone massacre

[Lufnoops]

ive been thinking - and im a dumb idiot so maybe this is half-baked - the only coverage and representation that those juarez women get, if at all, is as dead bodies. now ive been reading critical theory for a while and that sort of sharpens the propensity to see all mediums as "texts," as they are often referred to. the news media is sort of a text, anyone would agree, basically. well these juarez girls represented in this medium are depicted as kind of women of death. we never see them in life; our only window to them is a window focused on their death. this has the strange effect of rendering their deaths something of an inevitability because it reproduces the dominant construction of these women as bodies available for appopriation.

now im just thinking about these 100s of thousands of people that just died in this cyclone and im thinking something similar: people in third world countries who die of atrocities, illness, disease, and etcetera are conceived of as inevitabilies, and we look on in voyeuristic stupor with momentary flashes of empathy that last merely as long as "save darfur" ads take to run. as good-intentioned as these ads may be, im going theorize right here that what they are doing is propounding a conception of third world spaces as spaces of death, spaces where people die and decay, and that this conception so overwhelms us that we resign it to inevitability when it most certainly is not.

i mean idk maybe im wrong but wtf is going on here what are your thoughts on these media representations. people have no voice! i think they might be robbed of their subjectivity in the name of first world political discourse.

[Lufnoops]

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC30820/represent.html

[jaredong]

i agree. sometimes, the media does have control over how people view events in the world. All the big fusses over this issue are only as big or small as the media portrays it. All the fuss about pandemics (mad cow, sars, bird flu) or lead from china's products or those big kidnap/murders of children. They dont just "go away" yet we kind of forget about em for the next big thing.

I always wonder what the follow up about these issues are. It seems lots of talk happens before and during an issue, but whats being done to prevent it from happening? Say the 9/11 for example. People rallied together against the disaster. But iirc, not much has been done to rebuild the site and nobody knows. Or like the causes of the wildfires in america couple months ago... talks about it being caused by arsonist... but who?

i betcha all this fuss about tibet (as worthy as the cause might or might no be) would blow over and everyone would forget it sooner than later.

[Lufnoops]

im wondering more at the psychological impact that the rendering of reality in the media has on us