Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

Thinking piece on Understanding of Modern Political Challenges

 © Marta Podniece
The Earth is round? Right? That is the universal truth we all tend to believe, because there has never been any discussion about it in the past few centuries or possibly no political campaign has found it an attractive reason to make people believe it will change something for them. Let’s face it - we are egoists. Many things have been happening on this round ball called Earth, especially in political matters. It’s easy to see the point of one individual by just hearing him commenting on the news, while reading an analytic piece on the second page of the daily newspaper every morning. This is a habit. And politics is a habit as well. Politics of a particular newspaper, which include choices on exactly which activities will be commented on on the second page of the paper. Sensations? Surprises? Money laundry? Politicians involved in the international scandals? Yes, please! We want it! We want a theme to talk about during the lunch break! We want a theme that we can be smart about! And here we go...

Friday, 16 March 2012

The World On a Day Before Yesterday: A Global Image of 14th March 2012

Guardian, India; Parivartan Sharma/REUTERS
Once I prepared a workshop for young people on the theme of stereotypes and I used visual data of online media [to be precise - I used photo galleries posted on different news sites under the name "Photos of the Day" as a data set], as a source that represents different countries and influences different reading audiences on their opinions about the world here and now. It's undoubtedly a free space for stereotyping and identifying global players in the global politics, but from other perspectives such a gallery of the day reveals a lot more information about what is important for different nations - individualism versus collective consciousness, traditions, culture, the life quality and life priorities, the importance of time and status, money and wealth, and if you're just a reader of a particular media, such visual interpretations even unconsciously influence your view about the world, as according to S.Sontag or any non-expert in photography - "we tend to trust that the image is showing the truth as  in the reality we don't have enough time to travel and check it "... so therefore I wanted to check: How the world looks like on 14th March 2012?