Manufacturing Consent

Blog 2 Week 2

Manufacturing Consent

The visual technique that I was most impressed by (and really the only one that I noticed while watching the movie) was the use of television(s) in the mall to broadcast the documentary. I was particularly impressed by the scene towards the end of the movie, where Chomsky discusses the difficulty of filtering through the multitude of other media in order to find the message that you're looking for, and as Chomsky talks the camera pans out to reveal that the image of Chomsky is just one of many on a wall of televisions. We then see that others in the mall are looking at this wall, but due to the vast amount of other video, the others are almost certainly not getting the same message as us. I also liked how in the beginning of the documentary (and throughout the doc) the video is shown on the world's largest television set up in a mall (Which looks hilariously dated by todays standards) The towering television set up reminds me of something out of 1984 where television sets, controlled by the government monitor the citizens' daily lives. But unlike the propagandistic control-system of Orwell's novel, the mega-television used in this documentary fulfills an opposite role of providing information (and perhaps consequently power) to the people. As Chomsky says:

“The point is you have to work. That's why the propaganda system is so successful. Very few people have the time, or the energy, or the commitment to carry out the constant battle that's required to get outside of the familiar, or Dan Rather, or somebody like that. The easy thing to do, you know you come home from work, you're tired, you had a busy day, you're not going to spend the evening trying a research project, so you turn on the television, you read the headlines in the paper, the you watch the sports or something. That's basically how the system of indoctrination works. Sure the other stuff is there, but you've gotta work to find it.”

This quote relevantly contrasts the two uses of the televisions I mentioned earlier. In the one example towards the end of the film, where Chomsky is one of about 40 other videos playing at once, it is very difficult to find meaning. So while Chomsky's message is out there, the difficulty of filtering through the multitude of other media is likely to discourage any understanding of Chomsky's meaning. This is the propaganda model that Chomsky is referencing, that allows for indoctrination through discrepancies in ease of access to information. However, in contrast, the single giant television used to show interviews throughout the documentary is similar to the indoctrinating media. It is easy to understand, there is no effort required to find the message, and therefore more people are likely to see/hear it, and be indoctrinated by it, because it's easy.