Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

The October 30, 1944 cover of TIME magazine depicts a photograph of a stern faced man against a background that includes a closed fist punching an image of Emperor Hirohito of Japan; the caption reads “I Shall Return.” The man is General Douglas MacArthur, who embodies the pure, rugged masculinity that America holds in such high esteem. He’s often quoted for saying, “Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.” The United States has elevated that value of…

To begin with, representation is all about understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying something or someone in media. The representation of media to an extent shapes one’s perspective of views. Representation is often explained as (or theorised as) a performance of resemblance (as an act of image-making) or even imitation. (Summers, 1996:3). The same representation could mean different things to different people based on how it is decoded by their own life experiences,…

Streaming your life via Facebook or other social media has become a new trend. People consider it as a brand new approach to share your significant moment with others. However, it could have brought the shortcomings along with using this new convention. Haydn Watters proposes a tough question to the individuals who are currently obsessed with live stream technology. Indeed, he asks what is the bottom line of utilizing such new convention. In the article, Hayden Watters mentions the places that…

texting or social media. When we utilize texting or instant messaging to communicate with others, this often includes informal language or jargon that can easily translate into our professional lives, while also taking away the dynamics of nonverbal communication or the intimacy that comes along with face-to-face discussions. In this paper, I intend to examine Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric and how he employs it to address various emotional states, as well as Walter Ong’s media ecology to…

that determine egalitarian attitudes. Those raised in a traditional household will often go onto display the same characteristics (Gere, 2012). Through the process of socialisation, our behaviour is moulded to fit the gender roles of our society. Media plays a large role in building these gender roles and expectations in our lives (Das, 2011). I was born in India – where my mum was a homemaker for the first six years of my life. As a child, I would continuously be exposed to advertisements of…

USSR was rapidly developing their own nuclear weapon, modelled after Oppenheimer's work, to use against America. There was “mutually assured destruction” guaranteed between the two global superpowers with the hypothetical use of this weapon. “Understanding clearly what he had wrought and terrified by the future this augured, he later struggled for international control of nuclear weapons and fought to prevent development of the hydrogen bomb” (Kuznick). He was an advocate for no further use of…

However, until such a time where we possess the ability to efficiently, and cheaply replicate all necessary human organs, the highly-profitable, and often black-market organ trade facilitates the extension of human life. Delving into a dystopian future, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake reveals a reality where artificial organs are easily produced. Although the artificially-made organ trade depicted in Oryx and Crake differs from our world’s black-market…

human beings will be an extension of existing techniques for assisting reproduction and determining the genetic makeup of children.” Kass implies, that each of us must find the meaning in why we should not interfere with the divine order that governed creation, by imposing or trying to create something or someone in the likeness of yourself or someone else. For example, “Dolly [the sheep] was, quite literally, made. She is the work not of nature or nature’s God, but of man … What is more, Dolly…

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, is one of the most enigmatic and influential leaders in the 20th-century struggle for civil rights in the US. His ideological development, marked by a profound dialectical evolution and deepening of thought on human affairs, was a response to his lived experiences and the antecedents that marked his intellectual formation. This research paper will outline the origins and theological antecedents of Malcolm X’s development, including Elijah Muhammad, Wallace Fard,…

Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs discusses how labor changes in the world of social media. In combination with the works of Marx and Hochschild, this book provides an entirely different perspective on labor. This book is particularly interesting because currently social media and the digital world play a vital role in the lives of many. Just like factory workers and flight attendants, digital media comes at a cost to human emotion and human value. Digital labor is defined as “a part of a…