Appadurai

When we initially read Appadurai, I was really confused and a little scared.. I didn't really know what to think about what he was saying, let alone what he actually WAS saying. But after rereading him, everything made a lot more sense. He basically ties in all the theorists and theories that we've read this semester and created a bridge between them.

I remember in the beginning of the term we discussed his fives "scapes": ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideascapes. He asserts that these are the five categories that heavily impact the world and hold systems that make our cultures exactly what they are. When Appadurai gets to the part about mediascapes, you can see him tying in Bourdieu and how the media plays a major role in how the media desensitizes us from things that are crucial in our world. He also agrees with Zizek by asserting that reality and fakeness has reached a point where it is indecipherable. "The lines between realistic and fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other imagined world." (515). This also relates to Eco because it implies that we, as humans, go about believing passively. We don't question the things around us. Therefore, the fakeness that we are being exposed to is perceived as real, which creates a very dangerous environment.

Another quote that stuck out to me was in relation to Baudrillard's theory of simulacra and how everything has become processed and artificially reproduced. "...The consumer has been transformed through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in Baudrillard's sense of simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent, and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production." (519) Appadurai goes along with Baudrillard's theory and adds to it by saying how simulacrum in conjunction with our passivity and uncritical willingness as consumers is what drives the success of 'consumerism'.

Although I was able to make some connections that I hadn't previously been able to in the beginning of the semester, there are still some things I'm unsure on, but I know we'll cover it in class tomorrow.