The media, one might argue, plays a key role in stopping us living ‘real’ lives. We are all consumed with vicarious living through soap characters, reality television, ’second life’ etc. Furthermore, the digital age means that no one can simply ‘enjoy the moment’ because they’re busy recording it, capturing it on their mobile phone and camera.
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4 Responses to “Karl Marx commented that ‘religion is the opium of the masses’. Discuss the idea that it is the media that now keeps us all drugged.”
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the media doesn’t keep us drugged, only if we let it. We gain information from others (newspaper srticles, news stories) and so we are privvy to their interpretation of it but if we wsaw it ourselves it would not be more ‘true’ merely more relevant to ourselves as ‘people’ due to it being our interpretation of the matter not the newscasters.
The failure of people to live ‘real’ lives and have actual experiences is what is troubling. People seem to be busy living lives through avatars, soap characters and celebrities. The digital age means we can record and share things instantly, but we never enjoy things at the time, in real time!
being able to enjoy a moment at a different time to when the moment actually happened does not necessarily lessen the enjoyment that you experience and the use of avatars and the like in virtual worlds can simply be seen as a more ‘real’ way of exploring the imagination than creating a fictitious character in a novel.
besides what is real, we can only give meaning to what we sense through our definitions of sounds and sights which are interpreted due to our life experiences and social backgrounds. Nothing can be said to be truly real only truly relative and so why is hearing the truth, relative to someone else, in this case the media any worse or better than our own.