From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Sat 08 Mar 2003 - 20:01:03 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence DeBivort" <debivort@umd5.umd.edu>
> The issue, I think, will come down to whether 'attention' to something is
> equivalent to a decision to act on the thing. That is, the grotesque
levels
> of attention paid to non-factors, such as weather, sports and pop
> celebrities, may have little bearing on how people behave and be of little
> predictive help. (I was in Europe and Asia during the beginning of the
world
> cricket competition, and was stunned to see the level of attention that it
> commanded everywhere. It makes the US Super Bowl look trivial.)
Lawrence,
I am not sure if the following is cataloged as the same thing, but I think
is
has some relevance.
The terminology used to get the war on Irak ' sold ' is partly due to the
use of specific words.
" War is in effect a battle of one people against another, and the US
will represent this as the battle between itself and a de- humanised
adversary. Not a country full of people will be bombed but ' objectives,
targets ' will be eliminated.
In the US targets become eveything from barracks to infantschools or
do become facilities ( bridges/ roads etc.)
In the abstract rhetoric of Bush' his War on Terror he never calls
things by name. Saddam Hoessein is no longer a head of state,
but simply Saddam, the Bad, the eminence of Evil.
Such messages escape us ( in Europe) ,because Iraq is still for us
a country full of people.
In the coverage by example on CNN you never will see,
death of injured people, always pictures taken from a great
hight. Those images support the use of the words, the ' clean '
contents of the war doesn't show how people are blown to pieces.
War has become a virtual, technological part of a playstation-
game.
Because of the fact that the image of one death American soldier
can traumatize a whole county, the US opts for airraids. "
( Taken from an article I read)
Kenneth
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat 08 Mar 2003 - 19:37:00 GMT