Life From Behind Blue Eyes: Week Eleven

"The mass media creates images of events in our minds" - Walter Lippman.

That quote stuck out to me in this week's lecture, and I'll talk about it more further on, but for now I'll speak a little about Agenda Setting.

Agenda Setting is a little frightening to me. We, the public, value something because mass media gives it coverage, and because it's important to us from that coverage, we continue to seek out information similar to that. We care about things like Kim Kardashian, dancing dogs, fashion models falling off runways, Miss America, and a BILLION other trivial things because someone somewhere set the agenda to that topic and made it important to us. Sadly, things like AIDS, poverty in Africa, the mental health crisis facing Australia and the GFC are not shown in mass media because compared to a red-faced celebrity who wants to see some starved child being stalked by a vulture?

And people wonder what the world is coming to?

Back to the quote from the lecture. Can you remember when this happened? I mean exactly where you were, what you were doing and wearing, what kind of day it was?

I can. I came out of my bedroom, because the sound of my mum crying woke me up, wearing my Miss Moo pjs (they had these little black and white cows on them). The light hit mum from the window as she stood looking outside to the clear morning with tears running down her face, while scenes like above flashed across the TV.

I'm a big believer in photos being more relatable than words. Words can be translated for different cultures, but photos speak to everyone just as they are. Below I have put what I view as iconic photographs, I haven't captioned them because to me, they don't need words. Just look. Be blown away by what transpired before the camera. Wonder at how perfect the person's timing had to be to capture some of these images.