Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Brooke Bumgarner --- Bourdieu (Again)

Last week I wrote about Bourdieu because I accidentally mixed up the readings on the schedule when I was sick/absent from class. However, after our discussion in class on Tuesday, I'm going to briefly talk about him again, especially because I'm unsure if we are supposed to be doing blog posts this week.

Bourdieu has many very interesting arguments, however the one that seems most important is in line with Horkheimer and Adorno and the idea of perpetuated sameness. In Bourdieu's theory, he argues that media representation, specifically television and news, has this connotation of being "basic" in part. This is due to the mentality that television hosts and news anchors are just "giving the audience what they want to see/hear".

A very important quote from Bourdieu's essay states how television news "suits everybody because it confirms what they already know, and above all, leaves their mental structures intact" (254). This not only perpetuates the idea of sameness, when we receive the same framing of news stories no matter the specifics in each event. This makes it so that we are desensitized to what is really going on out in the world, as we maintain the mentality that the terror is over "there" not here. Essentially, what we cannot see or hear we do not perceive as "real"- we are detached and this enables us to only approach cultural problems and events of horror elsewhere on a superficial level- we do not perceive these problems as our own. There is no authentic attention because in a society where news has been tailored to keep citizens in their comfort zone, we do not encompass an attentive and critical approach to the issues of the world for fear of having to emerge from our safety nets which could cause potential fear and further controversy in our society.

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