Wednesday, December 10, 2008

marginal messages

there are three types of messages. the first coperate messages. These are messages, such as money makes you happy, that are mainstream and are being yelled at you from every tv show and ad. the second type are prohibited messages, such as things wil not get better, that will never be shared by corperations. the third is marginal. these messages you dont always see. While they arent as broadcasted as coperate messages, they can sometimes be seen in movies and tv shows. This can include such messages as challenge athority.

A strong example of marginal messages can be seen in the 1999 movie Fight Club. The movie tells the story of a man who starts off with an unhappy life. he is a slave to the ikea catolog and is more focoused on his materail possesions then anything else. but after having his apartment explode he meets a man named Tyler Durdan who shows him a life with out depenency on material goods. Tyler's view on life is that life should not be perfect "let the chips fall where they may". He thinks that the dependency of material goods is a women thing and that if you care to much about what you own you are a bitch. This is shown with the constant connection to material goods and having your balls cut off. He claims that martha stuert is "polishing the brass on the titanic its all going down." The message is that we are so focoused on things that we think will make our lives better but we are just letting our self be owned.

This is the total opposite of coperate messages which usually say material things will make you happy. The whole idea that the pursuite of "shit we dont need" is preventing our self from being happy is very revolutionary. unfortunetly this movie could be an attempt to control us even more. Since this idea is new, revolutionary, and logical people want to identify with it. To do that they buy the movie on dvd, get fight club posters and buy fight club t-shirts. Coperations are selling you everything, even anti-corperation ideas.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Walmart worker trampled

I am speechless at the death of the walmart worker. I personally am not materalistic and i find it hard to see how people can be. This being said i find it outragous that people would go so crazy over some sales. I find it hard to believe that not only did people kill a man, but after he was dead they kept shopping. When the store said they were closing because some one died people got angry because they were still shopping. These people had put money saving deals over a human life.
We truelly are the ultimet consumer.

I am struggling to understand the reason for such madness. The world is full of exploitation, greed, corrupt and dirty governments, and lack of understand for what is really important. "Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"