1. How can we clearly evaluate Sontag's view on media censorship?
2. How does this article reiterate her views on American public awareness of politics?
3. In this article Sontag packages knowledge in a way that allows us to focus on a certain aspect of American culture. How could this argument be refuted?
Response to Question 2:
Sontag returns (not sure if this article came before or after the last one we read) to bring Americans into the light of awareness. We can still see that she sees something wrong with the way we handle major situations like politics and war. Part of her argument is that she feels we don't know how to mourn situations that involve public distress. I'm inclined to agree, based on her last article. This perspective, in my opinion, is so thought-provoking.
When you really think about it, Sontag isn't really providing us with any new information. Her article isn't "news," at least in the terminological way. What she does is a simple "re-packaging" of facts and information from which she highlights certain details that correlate with each other in order to parallel an idea or pattern that these details evoke, which subsequently reflect and reveal her attitude. What I find especially interesting in this article, is how it complements the other that we read for class. Her previous argument was that the nation keeps certain pieces of information from the public with the alleged agenda of nationally "mourning" the terrorist attack of 9/11. This article, however, shows how the nation becomes selective in what it chooses to disclose to the public. Kinda makes you think that news isn't really news anymore. News isn't simply the disclosure of events that occur worldwide anymore (assuming that it was before). The news now seems to propagate through a sort of filter by which a desired goal is formulated to elicit a particular response or feeling once it's viewed. I can't help but analogize this concept with foundational conventions.
To be more specific, when we choose to tell stories, anecdotes, or a series of events and incidents to friends, family, etc., the train of thought mandatorily passes through our brains' filter from which we can decide what exactly we want to say about what we're saying. Without going to deep into thought, we take into account certain factors: how will this story affect my friend/teacher/other? Does it make me look bad? Does it make someone else look bad? Will it make them think differently of me? Will I look smarter after? Whether we agree or not, these factors help to determine which pieces and details of our stories are revealed and which are concealed. Sound familiar? Sontag seems to think this is what the news does, in relation to war photography.
So on a larger scale, is this how everything is heard and learned? Is all information just the longest game of telephone ever recorded? What of what we know is 100% accurate when we learn it from a secondary source? This makes me wonder just what from our reality is what really happens. Or is reality just that precisely? I've heard many times before (work, court, law) that perception is reality. So unless we see everything for ourselves, will there always be a principle of doubt?
My opinion is yes. I think we show and tell what we want in order to attempt to control, modify, and adjust our surroundings. On a side note, I think Sontag makes a good point in using the idea of photographs to push her idea that we really don't know how to mourn on a collective level. When was the last time this country really formally mourned for a loss in a collaborative manner? I can think of the last most serious one and it wasn't 9/11. I wasn't alive at the time, but when John Lennon was murdered, the nation joined and wept. The streets of New York were completely saturated with a collective emotion of mourning. This, at least to me, seems like a conventional way of mourning when a nation is faced with tragedy. A worldwide funeral, if you will.
Altogether, I side with Sontag a lot. I'm a psych major and I look at and reflect on a lot of experiences through the lens of that discipline. I think Sontag does too... She has some good ideas.
I really enjoyed this post, especially your spot-on account of Sontag's rhetorical approach (a "re-packaging of facts...").
ReplyDeleteAs far as the question of perception being reality is concerned, you might be interested by Sontag's comments from another chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others:
"According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a 'society of spectacle'. Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real - that is, interesting - to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.
Fancy rhetoric, this. And very persuasive to many, because one of the characteristics of modernity is that people like to feel they can anticipate their own experience. (This view is associated in particular with the writings of the late Guy Debord, who thought he was describing an illusion, a hoax, and of Baudrillard, who claims to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exist now; it seems to be something of a French specialty.) It is common to say that war, like everything else that appears to be real is médiatique [...]
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment."