Image Based Culture Analysis

Great Essays
Questions: Image Based Culture/Numbing of the American Mind

Image Based Culture

1. What have been some of the major stages in our culture 's development toward an ever more image-centered culture?

In the development of the culture of modern civilization from a more agrarian culture, to an industrial one, and then to the one we have today, the economy expanded, a greater variety of goods were being produced and concepts like branding and advertising became more widespread. With this came technological developments that allowed for the cheap reproduction of images, which came to dominate as a category of medium for people’s quicker reading of and greater receptiveness to them when compared to written mediums.
2. What would Jhally say is
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With this brazen (if theoretical) argument, Jhally suggests that unbridled economic growth will lead to the demise of society in the way of extinguishing the environment’s ability to support a civilization.
6. What is the impact of each of the 4 areas of image culture: gender, politics, children 's lives, and music?

Gender: Jhally argues that ‘image-culture’ is impacting the way that gender is viewed in its construction of how a gender is, and that the dominating conceptualization in image-culture is a highly sexualized one.
Politics: Jhally argues that ‘image-culture’ has influenced politics by being a medium less immediately focused on issues, thus driving public opinion through seemingly less politically important arguments, an important change in particular in democratic societies.
Children’s lives: Jhally argues that advertising, by communicating and thus helping to define societal roles, children’s imaginations are being limited. Further, that their imaginations are being limited in a very segmented fashion such that boys are less able to play with girls and parents less able to play with their
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What does Zengotita mean by the numbing of the American mind?

By numbing of the American mind Zengotita refers to a decline in the sensitivity of people new information. To illustrate the exact usage of the words, Zengotita offers the image of a numbed hand unable to feel the textures of a block of wood. As an example, Zengotita suggests that the American public’s ability to almost completely get over the events of 9/11 after 6 months is suggestive of a lack of sensitivity to the enormity that he feels about the event.
2. What does he mean by fabrication, flood, finitude, and fast. Can you think of current examples?

Zengotita uses the term fabrication to describe the decrease in the sensitivity of people to the difference between reality and not that has come as a result of the increase in the volume of information which reduces opportunity for people to try to discern between real and not. As a very contemporary though oft-heard, example, the mild incongruity between Donald Trump’s previous reputation as a very successful leader of business and his multiple

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