Superficial Approaches to Topics

Chapter 1 -- The Internet: Big Pictures and Interactors by David D. Perlmutter, Image Ethics in the Digital Age

"Moreover, it is clear that celebrity involves a class distinction as well. Students of visual culture tend to have such images imprinted in their memories through repeated exposure and personal interest. ... It is not clear how famous such images are among the general public, or, to be more exact, whether the celebrity of the images goes beyond superficial familiarity. ... Research on collective memory suggests that recollections of news events "tend to be a function of having experienced an event during adolescence or early adulthood"." (9)

Reading Perlmutter's essay, or at least this specific portion of "Celebrity," makes me ponder upon the truth of what we see in the mass media. Perlmutter mentions in the previous paragraph that "elites, thus, largely set the agenda of greatness and establish the criteria for which images are judged great" (9). If elites determine which images, capturing news and events, then what we see in the media -- what we learn through textbooks, the examples given to us even in classes, even what we hear in the news -- is greatly biased towards this elite's preference/interpretation of accuracy.

Yes, we can learn of events that shook the world, but, as Perlmutter indicates that students experience events through mass media, our knowledge can only stretch as far as media will sponsor our knowledge. Unless we ourselves are present at the event, what we receive as news will remain as just second-hand information that contains heavy bias. And this bias is what creates superficial familiarity. One can be an expert on a subject, but he/she will never be able to understand or present a different view from what he/she has been fed by the mass media unless he/she experiences (and not through mass media) the subject/event first-hand.

Whatever we learn, or "experience," through mass media will inevitably be what is celebritized by the media at that particular time. What mass media presents as celebrity -- topic or person -- turns into familiarity for the general public. Once another topic comes along that supersedes the previous one, all familiarity with the previous topic is rendered useless and will soon be forgotten. The ease with which we forget issues and topics, regardless of whether we experience them or not, proves our superficial familiarity as consumers with most current events. The only experience that truly sticks is that which directly involved us.